HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

The cost depends on so many variables but the biggest indicator of cost is keyword competition. The more people who are bidding on a particular keyword, the more you'll have to pay to target that keyword. PPC is far more affordable than many other advertising channels and you can easily measure your ROI from your PPC campaign (unlike a newspaper or radio ad).

Chad and I have been looking at data related to this recently and PPC is a higher Cost Per Lead than SEO in most cases - according to the data. That being said, PPC is usually cheaper than other traditional outbound marketing efforts such as Print, Conferences and Radio advertising.

PPC can give you an instant boost in traffic while the SEO campaign is ramping up. Once you start getting better search rankings from your SEO campaign, you may not need PPC. Of course you're only going to get results from your SEO campaign if you know what actions you need to take to make it work and you do them every day without fail. PPC is more straightforward.

It is also ideal for clients with odd products. I had a client come to me who had a product that was an alternative to pet insurance. No one is looking for that so an SEO campaign was not an option. SEO helps to capture pre-existing demand. With PPC all we would have to do is write some snappy ad copy, use some contextual display networks and other tools we might use to target pet owners.

We had a client that wanted to run an Adwords PPC campaign to advertise a product by the product's very unknown brand name. The broad category terms for were highly competitive and very expensive. Writing snappy ads for the display network was the best choice for this campaign too.

Also, with PPC it is much easier to measure the return over traditional advertising. You know exactly what you are getting for your advertising dollars.

I'm with Dave on this. PPC gives you instant feedback on what is and is not performing for your campaign; including appeals, calls to action, landing pages, etc.