Embarking on a paid search campaign for your business is a great way of quickly generating sales and leads at an effective cost. You’re able to have (almost) complete control and visibility over what you spend, where you spend it, etc., but are there any other benefits to running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign?

What a lot of advertisers may not realize is that PPC data can give you a huge amount of insight into your business and industry in general, and the more knowledge you have into your business, the better placed you will be to make decisions that can determine whether you succeed or fail.

Below are 5 things which PPC data can tell you about your business:

1) Impact of Branding Exercises

In my last post here at Search Engine Journal, I covered some points on how to effectively run an AdWords display campaign. In this post, I mentioned that even if you had the best display campaign setup possible, this traffic is still a lot less likely to convert versus search traffic and sometimes should be considered more as a branding exercise. Search can help you measure the impact of branding exercises with a surprising degree of accuracy.

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One of the best indicators in today’s online landscape is the amount of brand searches a website receives on Google. To take advantage of this, simply create a brand-specific campaign within your AdWords account that records exactly how many brand searches are made each day. To ensure that your brand data is as accurate as possible, be sure to only use exact match, phrase match, and broad match modifier match types as these will ensure that no adverts within this campaign are triggered by generic searches.

By running a brand-specific search campaign, you’ll be able to quickly analyze daily search trends and determine whether particular brand marketing campaigns have resulted in an uplift in your brand searches on Google.

2) Website and/or Landing Page Performance

Have you done everything possible to ensure that the traffic you’re sending via PPC is highly targetted? Is your ad messaging accurate at describing your product/service? If the answer to both of these is yes and you’re still experiencing an extremely displeasing conversion rate, then the most likely cause of the poor performance is your website or landing page.

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Paid search is a great way of identifying website issues, as the traffic you’re sending to the site via PPC should primarily be people that are extremely interested in your product/service.

Because of this, if you can’t convert PPC traffic, then you’re going to have a very hard time converting traffic from other marketing channels.

3) Insight into Your USPs (“Unique Selling Propositions” or Points of Difference)

Your USP can be any feature of your business that makes you stand out from your competitors. Many online website owners will use USPs as a way of adding additional value to customers as an incentive to choose to deal with their business instead of a competitor, but the question is, what kind of USP will your audience respond to best? Well, you can use your PPC campaign to find out!

Test different advert variations against each other, highlighting different USPs in each ad. For example, you may be offering free delivery worldwide, but also have a “10% Off” sale running and be unsure what to highlight in the header of your website. To see which USP your audience likes best, highlight these points in one advert each, run these adverts against each other for a period of time (I’d recommend somewhere between a week and a month depending on volume), and then see which performs best in terms of CTR (Click-Through Rate) and conversion rate.

After this quick test has been completed, you’ll then have valuable information that can be used to dictate what content you highlight on your website, as well as other marketing campaigns. (More on optimising adwords ad text here, if you’re not familiar with the basics.)

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4) Insight into Your Audience’s Language Behavior

There is a particular report under the Keywords tab within your AdWords report called a “Search Query” report (found by clicking the “Keyword details” button and then clicking “All”). This report gives you the ability to see exactly what users are typing into Google to trigger your PPC adverts.

You can use this data to gain insight into the most commonly used language and terminology by people who are looking for information on your product and/or services. Mimicking commonly used language and terminology onto your website could increase your website’s relevancy for users, and this can only be a good thing for your conversion rate!

5) Popularity of Certain Products

If you’re running an online store, chances are you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of different products listed on your site. One of the major causes of profit loss when it comes to running either a physical or online store is spending money on products that simply do not sell.

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A great way of determining the popularly of your products is by running product-specific keywords within your PPC campaign, and then monitoring their search volume. This information can help you when determining appropriate stock volumes needed for each product.

As you can see, there are many ways in which PPC data can help you learn a lot about your business—and knowledge is power!

Are there any other ways that PPC has helped you learn more about your business? If so, feel free to leave a comment!