Although most advertisers will use PPC advertising to garner sales, submitted leads, or donations, others may benefit in ways that are more indirect.
For example, the goal of some ad campaigns is not necessarily to elicit a direct response by the person viewing the ad. Rather, the goal is simply to achieve branding— to cause the person viewing the ad to remember the name of a company or the features of a product, which will result in a visit to a bricks-and-mortar storefront. Branding is also an effective way to generate word-of-mouth marketing, whereby people viewing the ad tell others about their impression or experience.
PPC advertising excels at eliciting direct responses, but it can also be employed for the purposes of branding, and at a cost lower than traditional offline ad media such as print, TV, and radio.
One important side benefit of PPC advertising is that the advertiser discovers with certainty which words and messages are most effective at persuading customers to buy. Savvy website owners use this information to design other online and offline campaigns.
For example, frequently the best-performing PPC keywords are the ones that should be used when optimizing a website so that search engines rank the site highest in the natural search listing portions of the search results pages. This activity is called search engine optimization (often abbreviated SEO).
Likewise, savvy PPC advertisers test several advertising messages, and then use the “winning” messages in their other online and offline advertising efforts. For example, an advertiser might find that a particular message (such as “Your children will love their Wii”) results in a high return on investment (ROI) in their PPC campaign, and choose to highlight that message in an e‑mail campaign.