Launching a new website is always exciting, but that excitement quickly fades as webmasters face the challenge of generating traffic to that website. No matter how good your website is, it's not going to generate traffic in a total vacuum; you need to find a way to drive early traffic to your website, so people can discover it, spread the word about it, and ultimately support its existence in the future.

There are many different marketing and advertising strategies you can use to generate traffic for your new website. But what about Google pay per click (PPC) ads? Are these an effective strategy for generating traffic to a new website?

How Google PPC Ads Work

Let's start with the basics. When you start a Google PPC ad campaign, you'll have the option to place ads for your website above the fold of search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately generating more visibility and more traffic. Whenever a person clicks on your ad, they’ll visit a specifically designated page of your website and you'll be charged a certain amount of money, based on your predefined budget and bids. These ads will run automatically, based on your predefined parameters, until your budget is exhausted.

You can plan a campaign yourself or work with a Google Ads PPC management company to handle the work on your behalf. In most cases, it pays to work with more experienced professionals. Experienced consultants have more knowledge and practice they can use to plan more effective advertisements, reducing the amount of money you spend while increasing the value of the traffic you generate.

The Benefits of Google PPC Ads

There are several advantages of Google PPC ads for new websites:

·       Instant traffic. From the moment you turn on your PPC ad strategy, you'll begin generating traffic. Unlike search engine optimization (SEO), which can take several months to ramp up, you won't have to wait for your strategy to develop before you start seeing results. In some cases, you can start seeing new streams of traffic in as little as a few days.

·       Guaranteed traffic. As the name “pay per click” suggests, you’re only going to pay for the clicks you actually generate. You don't have to worry about spending money on a marketing strategy that doesn't work, nor are you going to feel like you've wasted your effort. No matter what, if you're willing to spend money, you can generate traffic to your site.

·       Audience controls. Once you get more familiar with the basics of planning a PPC advertising campaign, you can tinker with many different controls and variables on the back end. You can display your advertisements only to certain types of people, based on who they are, where they live, and what type of online behavior they've exhibited in the past. In other words, you can appeal to only the most valuable people in your target audience.

·       A scalable framework. If you're interested in turning this into a long-term traffic generation strategy, there's good news: PPC ads are highly scalable. The more you learn about your target audience, the more effectively optimized your ads are going to be and the more efficiently you're going to be able to spend your advertising budget.

The Drawbacks of Google PPC Ads

However, there are also some drawbacks you'll need to keep in mind:

·       Costs. While most people find PPC ads to be affordable, the cost for traffic generation in this strategy can be higher than it is in other strategies. For example, after a few months of growth, your SEO strategy might be able to generate more traffic for less money. Just keep in mind that the increased cost also comes with some more attractive advantages.

·       Dependency on optimization. The effectiveness of your PPC strategy depends on your ability to optimize ads effectively. If you don't achieve a high quality score, or if you do a poor job of appealing to your target audience, no amount of spending will be able to save you; you might be able to generate traffic, but you won't be able to retain that traffic, nor will you achieve significant conversions.

·       Competition. When you’re trying to dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your niche, competition can be a real problem. In certain industries, competition is so fierce that PPC ads become an expensive and burdensome battle. If your industry is rife with competition, or if you’re unsure how to competitively distinguish yourself, this may not be an ideal marketing strategy to use.

·       Comparative scalability. As we covered in the previous section, PPC ads are a somewhat scalable strategy. But they aren't as scalable as other strategies in the digital marketing space; a notable comparison here is SEO, which has the power to snowball tremendously after investing several months of effort. Comparing the peaks of these strategies, PPC ads can’t always compete with the cost effectiveness of SEO.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Google PPC ads can be an effective way to generate traffic for a new website. They're simple enough to be accessible, they have the potential to generate specific streams of traffic to your site, and they're relatively affordable and scalable. However, this is not a perfect traffic generation strategy, as nothing is, so it's best used as one part of your overall marketing and advertising strategy.