What are the best PPC platforms for your business?

Not all digital advertising platforms are equal. Knowing how to utilise different PPC ad platforms to fulfil your marketing objectives will help you maximise the effectiveness of your digital marketing budget. Whether your objective is lead generation, sales or brand awareness, you need to ensure you’re working with the best PPC platforms to achieve those goals.

With the right PPC platform and the right strategies, your business can reap the rewards. Take a look at how we achieved over 94% annual sales growth through a PPC conversion model for one of our clients.

In this article, we’re going to compare the top PPC platforms to help you figure out where to focus your energy. To start, we’ve put together our very own PPC Advertising Matrix to summarise which platforms are better suited towards specific business objectives:

For Brand Awareness and Remarketing

Facebook ads charge on a Cost Per Mille (CPM) basis, so maximising the click-through rate (CTR) is the best approach in lowering your average Cost Per Action (CPA).

A unique feature to Facebook ads is that your ads can also be shared throughout the feed when people react to the post, giving you additional exposure for free! With this in mind, remember that your brand awareness campaign should be as engaging as possible to increase visibility and lower your average cost per click (CPC).

It is important to remember that people are predominantly using Facebook to socialise and consume content, not to go online shopping. So, an eye-catching ad that interrupts a user endlessly scrolling through their feed is key to running a successful Facebook or Instagram campaign.

As you can imagine, Facebook feeds feature a heavy amount of media content. Due to this, Facebook is best suited for remarketing and brand awareness campaigns.

Top Tip: The Facebook pixel is a handy analytical tool that matches your web traffic with Facebook and Instagram profiles. This provides you with customer data such as demographics, interests, page likes etc., to better understand your target market.

You can also utilise this pixel to create custom/lookalike audiences. AI technology is used to find customers with similar purchasing and conversion habits, and you can collect this data on users.

LinkedIn - For Recruitment and Lead Generation

The professional social network with 690 active million users from job seekers to managers to CEOs, LinkedIn offers a unique solution to those wanting to build a professional network and engage with individuals within their industry.

LinkedIn is one of the top PPC platforms for B2B firms that primarily focus on lead generation. These firms can use LinkedIn ads to target users by job title, function and industry, allowing them to place their brand and services in front of relevant decision-makers.

Using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool can be effective in discovering high volumes of quality applicants. You can specifically target job seekers or employees with relevant skills in your chosen industry. You can learn more about LinkedIn’s recruitment ads here.

Google Ads - For Sales, Brand Awareness, Re-marketing and Lead Generation

Every minute, Google receives more than 3.8 million searches worldwide, and advertisements can appear on Google at the very moment someone is looking for specific products or services.

The Google Ads platform is the best all-rounder for digital marketers. It provides search, display and video advertisements directly to potential customers and includes powerful targeting tools.

What’s more, the Google Ad network is one of the top PPC platforms for businesses with a smaller advertising budget and several marketing objectives. If this sounds like your business, you may find it easier to manage your campaigns on the Google platform as it’s great for multiple campaign objectives and provides Google additional data to optimise for smart bidding campaigns.

Firms with larger marketing budgets can also use Google ads to bid for broader search keywords to dominate their direct competitors and establish brand dominance.

Bing - For Sales, and Lead Generation 

Currently in 2020, Bing has 2.45% of global search market share. When you compare this to Google’s 92.54%, it’s very easy to neglect the potential with this platform. Bing search engine is very similar to Google, so both platforms work and feel almost identical. You can choose to import individual Google campaigns with high Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) into Bing to increase overall Return on Investment (ROI).

Firstly, we recommend building and testing your Google Campaigns. Gathering data on keywords, ad text and bidding strategies will help you collect the necessary data to optimise and import your campaigns into Bing. In our experience, we find Bing performs just as well (if not better) alongside Google search and shopping campaigns. So, don’t underestimate Bing’s potential!

Amazon - For Sales

Businesses that use Seller/Vendor Central can utilise Amazon Ads to promote their brand and products within the Amazon site. Due to the large numbers of competition, PPC is seen as a necessity to succeed and scale on Amazon. If you manage to dominate your product category, the impressions via organic search results on the Amazon site should reward you customers with strong buying intent.

However, Amazon is renowned for its strict seller polices and have been known to terminate both small and large accounts on multiple breaches. This also includes high return rates and late shipping (if you’re delivering the product directly). We recommended that business doesn’t fully depend on Amazon for revenue. Instead, your Amazon seller/vendor account should be somewhat complementary to your main website.

In summary, it’s important to utilise several ad platforms in a digital marketing strategy whilst considering marketing objectives. You should use the best PPC platforms for your objectives in order to maximise the effectiveness of your budget and give yourself the best chance of achieving your goals. Don’t be afraid of testing new PPC ad platforms, too. Testing can provide businesses with the opportunity to scale their campaigns once fully optimised.

If your business requires a digital marketing strategy and management on multiple PPC advertising platforms, Zelst is happy to help. Contact us today and say Hello!