Currently, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a part of almost everyone’s online marketing strategy. For SMEs, PPC offer the attraction of quick visibility with the promise of driving traffic to their websites. While PPC can be effective, it also has shortcomings that pose significant challenges for smaller businesses trying to use it to feed their lead pipeline. Let’s look at some of the drawbacks of PPC advertising for SME businesses.
- High Costs
One of the most significant challenges with PPC advertising most certainly is the cost. Keywords that attract the attention of consumers, especially in competitive industries, can be exorbitantly priced driven by the deep pockets of larger companies. For instance, keywords in sectors like legal services, insurance, and finance often cost several if not tens of dollars per click. For an SME with a limited marketing budget, these costs can quickly add up, leading to a situation where the cost of customer acquisition may exceed what is logical to spend given the income achieved from a customer. Remember, only a small percentage of clicks actually result in sales. It is imperative to understand the ratio of clicks, to enquires to actual sales.
- Intense Competition
Another facet of cost is the highly competitive nature of PPC, especially of popular search terms. Larger companies with substantial budgets can afford to outbid SMEs for top ad placements. This intense competition means that smaller businesses might struggle to achieve positioning that will ever result in actual clicks.
- Click Fraud and Invalid Clicks
Click fraud is another significant issue in PPC advertising. Competitors or malicious actors may click on ads repeatedly, depleting an SME’s advertising budget without generating genuine leads or sales. While Google have measures to detect and filter invalid clicks, the system is not fool proof, and some fraudulent clicks still slip through. For SMEs, every wasted click represents a loss of precious budget.
- Ad Fatigue and Banner Blindness
Over time, consumers become accustomed to seeing ads and start to ignore them, a phenomenon known as banner blindness. Ad fatigue can also set in, where the same ads are shown repeatedly to the same audience, lead to diminished effectiveness. SMEs might find it challenging to continuously create fresh and engaging content to combat these issues, especially with limited resources.
- Complexity and Learning Curve
Setting up a successful PPC campaign has become really complicated. Google does offer assistance if a company looks like they will be spending regularly on campaigns but this is not always available. If you are trying to set up a campaign yourself you need to set aside a chunk of time to decide on keywords, write the ads and figure out your bid management strategy. The complexity of PPC advertising can be overwhelming and mistakes in campaign setup or management can be expensive.
- Short-Term Focus
What happens after your budget for a given time period is exhausted? Ad delivery ceases and leads stop. If your entire customer acquisition budget gets spent at the beginning of the month, you could end up sitting on your hands for the rest of the month.
- Is Lead Quality What You Expect?
Idle clicking on ads out of mild curiosity is even more likely than finding motivated buyers. How many times have you done that yourself? Had a quick look at a dozen different things of modest interest, all in a row, without giving a second thought to the fact that someone is paying for those clicks?
- Measurement and Attribution Challenges
Accurately measuring the effectiveness of PPC campaigns and attributing conversions to the correct channels can be a challenge. If you don’t set up proper tracking and take the time to analyse data you won’t know how to allocate budget in subsequent months to maintain or improve performance.
Creativeguru is the Obvious alternative to PPC
The Creativeguru service identifies those people most likely to buy and then carefully nurtures them over the long term to develop them as a prospective client for your business. After the initial consultation needed to train the model to be expert in your business, your industry and the needs of your customers the models do all the heavy lifting to build rapport with a growing number of prospects.
Creativeguru captures every engagement metric. At the end of the month we will be able to tell you exactly how many Engaged Visitors the Creativeguru service has delivered to your business website.
To learn more about how Creativeguru can help your business set up a no-obligation meeting with one of our sales consultants.
