07/01/21 // Uncategorized
The Importance of Paid Search Advertising and its Future in the Digital Sphere
Written by: smith
In the digital world, paid search (pay-per-click or PPC) advertising is becoming something of an old dog, but keeps learning new tricks. PPC is one of the most utilised and valuable forms of digital advertising in the whole digital sphere, so finding a place to begin on the topic is tricky.
We’ll start with an overview; The paid search market in 2019 was valued at $104.8 billion U.S. dollars world-wide, with a projected growth to around $137 billion U.S. dollars by 2022. Despite this phenomenal value, there is still only one search engine people think of first to advertise on, Google. They alone have a net worth of $420 billion dollars in 2021, giving them un-rivalled branding power in the advertising and search engine world.
There are other household names, like Firefox, Safari, Bing (who’s paid ads now go by the name Microsoft Ads), Yahoo! (yes, they are still going) and newcomer DuckDuckGo, but these dwarf in comparison to Google’s market size and offering. Whatever happened to Ask Jeeves!
The market share of the UK’s leading search engine’s lands heavily in Google’s corner, sweeping up a whopping 85.7% of the entire market. This leaves Bing with only 10.65%, Yahoo! with 1.96% and DuckDuckGo at 0.87%.
Regardless of search engine size, paid search is still prevalent across them all. Interestingly, paid search marketing now accounts of around 65% of all clicks, compared to 35% being generated organically, this not only shows an entire shift in how search engines are used, but also how paid media is now king in the search engine sphere. Without it, your business could be left out to dry while your competitors reap the rewards of hiring an expert to run and operate their PPC ads.
Often people turn to paid social when starting out in digital advertising, ho,wever this could be their downfall. Many brands have seen impressive growth from paid social advertising and it’s a great way to connect directly with your customers, but this does not drive the same cost ecost-effectiveffective, frequent sales as PPC can and does. Google’s 2020 UK Impact Report gives some interesting statistics. The median business in 2020 estimated that around 20% of their revenue is a result of online search results and search advertising. Much of this is global – we estimate that Google Search and Ads are supporting £6 billion in exports.
This combined with the fact that 280,000 businesses have started selling online for the first time as a result of the pandemic and 30% of businesses say that the proportion of customers that come from online search and search advertising has increased since the start of lockdown shows how important it is to reach your customers through this median. However, PPC is not easy to manage or understand, ensuring you have an expert PPC specialist is pivotal in safeguarding your rank on search so it is higher than competitors, and will lead to the all-important sale/lead.
Search engine advertising offers you the chance to find your customer at the pinnacle of their customer journey, they are seeking to find a specific product or to find out more information. Unlike other forms of advertising, focused on awareness, branding and consideration, where you have to persuade your customer or build up a strong enough frequency for them to take note of your advertising, paid search puts them right into the palm of your hands. Ensuring you are at the top of paid search, beating out competitors and creating appealing ads, is of utmost importance in ensuring your business does not drown in the sea of organic searches.
For further support on your paid search campaigns, contact Media Performance today.
Get in touch
0148 495 9610
hello@mediaperformance.co.uk