PPC ads popular for small business

The format of pay-per-click advertising is proving popular for small businesses who want to get the most out of their advertising budget.

Research into small business advertising by the Kelsey Group indicates that PPC advertising is likely to play an increasingly important role in the total publicity costs for smaller operators.

The study found that small business advertisers in the US currently allocate an average 23% of their total advertising budget to PPC activities. Of these, 54% expect to increase their PPC spending next year.

PPC advertising has become an attractive option for this market for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, as the name indicates the advertiser only pays for the number of clicks their ad receives - which means they improve branding from an unlimited number of free impressions and only pay when interested users are actually redirected to their site.

Secondly, PPC ads offer a huge amount of feedback through tracking the conversions of each click. This means that not only can the most effective ads be re-displayed to increase click-through-rate, but also full conversions of a successful sale resulting from an ad can be measured. This feature is especially useful to businesses that don’t have the budget for experimenting with traditional media ads which can’t be measured so exactly.