Which Bidding Option Is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused On Direct Response Marketing Goals?

Unlike ‘Indirect marketing’, Direct response marketing is the type of marketing strategy which intrigues potential customers to directly interact with the brand.

For instance, if a company runs a paid ad about its product or services, you will either take the offer or decline it. Regardless of the action taken on your part, you are partaking in a direct response which either affects the brand positively or negatively.

Other examples of direct response marketing would be:

• Cold Sales Calls
• Postal Mail with Adverts
• Door-To-Door Salesmen Visits
• Online Ads

On the latter note, online ads are where ‘Which Bidding Option is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused on Direct Response Marketing Goals’ comes in. In this case, the advertise, which is you, is focused on setting up direct response bidding campaigns to target multiple people across different channels.

Marketers target their audience through Google Adwords – at least most of them do it that way. Of course, if you are using some other advertising network, the platform’s name would be different for you. However, most of the basics related to ‘Which Bidding Option is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused on Direct Response Marketing Goals’ will be the same.

The short and simple answer is CPC, which interprets as ‘Cost Per Click’.

Before we double down on cost per click, we need to understand the PPC terminology. Also known as Pay Per Click rate, PPC is the cost of ‘One’ click in exchange for earning a visitor to your website, product, or online platform for that matter.

Similarly, different keywords have different PPC rates. High-difficulty keywords, such as; ‘Lose weight fast, ‘Weight Loss’, ‘Online marketing success’, ‘Make money online’ etc. have a higher PPC because of the competition factor. Low-difficulty keywords, especially the ones that are longtail keywords, have a lower PPC rate.

Meanwhile, CPC or cost per click is the other side of the same coin. CPC is more of a performance metric-oriented term where you measure the overall ‘cost per click’ value of your PPC campaigns. Does that make sense? If it doesn’t, bear with us for a moment, and read on…

If you paid Google Adwords $500 for PPC ads and got exactly 500 visitors in return, it means that you are spending one dollar against a keyword through PPC to get 1 visit per click. Or in other words, it’s a $1 per ad rate.

Divide Total Money Spent by Total Measured Clicks to get Cost Per Click.

A successful indicator of a CPC scenario is when the CPC lowers as you get more visits. If you are getting more clicks than the original deposited amount of the PPC ad budget, then it would mean that you have a healthy and low CPC.

In other words:

• PPC = Your Overall Approach to the Ad Campaign
• CPC (*Cost Per Click) = The Performance Metric

Having said that, each and every advertiser out there not only desires a low CPC but also wants people to click on his/her ad. A higher click rate means a higher CTR, which is that abbreviation of ‘Click Through Rate.’

Alternatively, PPC and CPC aren’t the only means of figuring your way around the ‘Which Bidding Option is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused on Direct Response Marketing Goals’ dilemma. There are other ways to solve the same problem with more or less the same type of promising results. You can bid on ‘Click Through Rate’, by choosing to set up a paid ads campaign that way.

However, CTR is variable and doesn’t remain the same for a long duration. Therefore, don’t be surprised if Google or any other paid ads network ends up charging your credit card a humongous amount overnight.

So, in terms of answering the ‘Which Bidding Option is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused on Direct Response Marketing Goals’ question, we recommend chartering a CPC strategy. It’s doable on your own, but if all of it sounds like Greek to you, consult Top Digital Marketers to get started.

Anyhow, CPC/ PPC can be run against three types of different ad categories

• Search Ads – The paid ads you in the form of URLs in Google SERPs after typing down a keyword.
• Display Ads – Different ads displayed through banners or square-shaped boxes on websites.
• Video Ads – The most common example would be embedded YouTube video ads. Also, advertisers have dedicated videos that work as standalone video ads on YouTube and on other networks.

What Are The Benefits of CPC (*Cost Per Click) Bidding Campaigns?

Search engine advertising is the most popular form of all sorts of ad campaigns. Fortunately, Google has got its own one-of-a-kind platform for advertisers to run the show. On Google AdWords, you can create, optimize and monitor your CPC campaigns all day long.

Going forward, the general benefits of CPC vs PPC are appended below

• Increase your sales numbers over time through CPC campaigns
• Track results in real-time through integrated Google AdWords tools
• Drive insane amount of traffic to your online platform

The general rule of thumb is that the more you pay, the higher the amount of traffic will be. On the contrary, your target is to play is smart.

A lot of advertisers have burned through millions of dollars of marketing budget without getting proper results. Therefore, start small, monitor the CPC campaigns, and then go for the big-league keywords, etc.

• Both CPC and PPC are interconnected to an overall positive return on investment

At the end of the day, if running paid ads is not your forte, don’t risk it. “Wasting” money on Google AdWords campaigns is a lot easier when you are going up the learning curve.

At the same time, there’s always a risk of getting your Google AdWords account banned. To avoid such things from happening, you can always go the safe route – i.e. getting a professional marketing agency onboard.

Of course, there are a lot of expensive companies out there with little to no results to show. We recommend consulting different agencies and then comparing their packages to get started.

By the way, if you didn’t find the answer to ‘Which Bidding Option is Best Suited For An Advertiser Focused on Direct Response Marketing Goals’, let us know what you were looking for. We would love to help you scale your business in the long run.

Good luck!