Pay Per Click Networks Compared

Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing is a mainstay of digital marketing, and for good reason. Offering immediate results with an excellent return on investment, it’s a powerful tool for all advertisers, but especially for Small Businesses who don’t have access to the kind of bottomless advertising budgets the megacorporations have.

So, the question is not whether you should use PPC marketing, but which PPC network you should be using. As it turns out, there are a lot of options, and they all offer something different. There’s no reason not to use multiple networks, but it’s a good idea to pick a primary network to focus most of your efforts on.



Let’s now look at which network that should be.

Google Ads

Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is the biggest and most obvious candidate to spend your advertising budget on. Everyone knows Google, it's the most used search engine in the world, processing tens of thousands of searches every second.

Advertising on Google is guaranteed to get you seen by customers, as long as you can make it through the auction process and come out on top. The major drawback to Google Ads is that it is so incredibly popular, you’re far from the only one competing to appear in search results.

This means you might not make an appearance as often as you’d like, and highly sought after keywords are going to cost a bomb to bid for. Creativity and attention to detail are key to making the most of this network.

If you can put in the necessary effort, the results are incredible.

Bing Ads

Bing is a distant second to Google in terms of the size of its user base, so why consider using it when Google is right there? The answer comes down to price.

As mentioned above, Google Ads are highly sought after, and such fierce competition drives up the prices. Bing’s smaller audience means less competitors in the ad auctions, which keeps the cost per click prices down.

Obviously cheaper advertising is a benefit, it allows you to stretch your budget further and reach more people. Even if there’s less people to reach than on Google, you can likely get your ads in front of a higher percentage of those who are available.

It may seem counterintuitive to pick the smaller of two search engines, but it’s worth considering.

Facebook Ads

Let’s now step away from search engines and look at Facebook Ads. How does Facebook’s PPC work compared to search engines? Much the same, actually. Assign a budget, pick keywords, bid in auctions, get featured.

The big difference, of course, is that your ads are going to be displayed in social media feeds rather than search engine results. And with Facebook being the largest social media platform in the world, that’s a lot of feed you can be featured in.

Even better, because Facebook and Instagram are fully integrated, you can also use the same system to advertise on Instagram. That’s two platforms for only having to set up one campaign, pretty great value for money (and time).

The downside is the same as any PPC network, people need to actually be using these platforms to see your ads. If they are though, you become hard to ignore.

AdRoll

AdRoll is an interesting option, as it doesn’t offer its own place to advertise, rather aiming at helping you use other PPC networks more effectively. AdRoll aims to provide a single interface from which to manage many dozens of different PPC networks, with a heavy focus on retargeting.

To simplify, customers visit your website, and AdRoll then uses that to retarget them across platforms wherever they go. It’s an interesting concept with a few drawbacks.

For one, retargeting requires people to have first visited your website, severely limiting its ability to attract brand new visitors. Secondly, as this is far more than just a PPC network, it’s likely going to end up more expensive, especially if you want to take full advantage of all the features on offer.

A potentially powerful service, but it remains to be seen how much it will take off.

RevContent

Lastly, let's look at RevContent, a PPC network that focuses on native ads.

Native ads are those that don’t obviously break the flow of a page. Feed ads on Facebook and Instagram are an example of native ads. RevContent serves up ads on websites that resemble news and blog posts. Think of it like guest posting on dozens of websites at once.

This can be a unique way to get fresh eyes on your brand, but it has its weaknesses.

Most of these are going to appear down the bottom or to the side of an article or similar content, meaning they’re potentially competing with the content that drew visitors to the site in the first place. If they’re down the bottom, they rely on visitors finishing reading the whole piece to even see your ad.

It’s also generally quite obvious to switched-on visitors when an ad is attempting to pass itself off as normal content. If they’re not looking to be sold to, compared to when they’re doing a Google search, you may not see much success.


There are even more PPC networks and related platforms that we haven’t covered here, these are just a few of what’s on offer. But this selection should be enough to give you a better idea of what kind of options you can pursue with your PPC marketing.

Whatever approach you choose to take, consider the pros and cons, and make sure the network you choose is one that’s well suited to your business.