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The pandemic did e-commerce a huge favor by accelerating adoption among consumers. Just in the US, it padded total e-commerce sales by an extra $244 billion in 2020 alone. While a lot of that came from big e-tailers, a sizable chunk came from small businesses jumping online.
With most of the restrictions winding down or gone in the US, small businesses must now think more strategically about things like their digital marketing, such as SEO, and subsets like PPC, in order to sustain sales.
For example, do you know how to use a PPC calculator? If you’re wondering about things like your digital strategy or just how to use a PPC calculator, keep reading.
SEO
Most small businesses build their online marketing around a core of search engine optimization. You can think of SEO as a group of strongly-encouraged pieces of advice that search engines provide about how you set up and run your website.
SEO Strategy
Asking yourself, “What is an SEO strategy?”
An SEO strategy is a big picture game plan for how you’ll handle the diverse elements of SEO, such as:
- Content creation
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
For example, you might outsource some or all of your content creation to a content company. For on-page optimization, you might start with some DIY things like reducing image sizes to improve page load speeds.
You might think about what keywords you want to use for social media posts to deal with off-page optimization. These are all organic approaches to boosting traffic to your site.
PPC
PPC, or pay per click, is on the opposite end of the spectrum from SEO. It’s a straight-up paid advertising strategy where you quite literally pay every time someone clicks on a link to your site.
How to Use a PPC Calculator?
Your basic PPC calculator is a fairly brute force tool. It quite literally multiplies the number of clicks you want by the cost per click. You bid for that cost. The total is what you’ll end up paying for that number of clicks. This is a basic PPC budget calculator. A different approach you can use to calculate PPC is by setting a budget and dividing by cost, which will tell you how many clicks you can expect from that budget.
Some tools, such as a PPC ROI calculator, will let you figure out how much you make from a PPC campaign by plugging in variables like the total clicks, cost per click, conversion rate, and average revenue per conversion.
Picking a PPC Calculator
The PPC calculator you choose will depend on where you are in the process and, to some extent, your budget. If you’re at the outset, you’ll go with a straight budget calculator to establish how much for a specific number of clicks or how many clicks for a specific amount.
After a campaign, you use something like a PPC ROI calculator to determine if your campaign paid for itself or not. Ready for more digital marketing ideas and insights? Check out the posts in our Make Money and Ad Networks sections.