Is PPC for accountants worth it?

Update for 2024

Since we first wrote this post 5 years ago, the landscape of PPC advertising for accountants has witnessed significant developments and transformations, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the surge in remote work and digital reliance, the importance of PPC advertising for accountants has grown even further as accountants strive to adapt to the evolving market. PPC strategies for accountants have become more sophisticated, leveraging advanced targeting techniques and personalised messaging to engage potential clients effectively.

Additionally, the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards online interactions, making PPC advertising for accountants an indispensable tool to maintain visibility, attract new clients, and drive growth in a highly competitive digital environment.

Introduction

Accountancy is one of the oldest professions in the world.

It’s widely accepted that an Italian bookkeeper named Luca Pacioli was considered the ‘Father of accounting’ as he was the first person to publish work on double-entry bookkeeping in 1495 AD.

However, accounting spans back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) in 3,500 BC where the ancient societies used to scribe on clay slabs to represent inventory figures for various agricultural goods including wheat, sheep, and cattle. This therefore, in turn, helped to formulate an ancient version of what we know today as a balance sheet.

Skip forward 524 years & you’ve reached 2019. You have now entered an era where everything is digitized. You can speak into your handheld device and find instant search results ranging from finding out where the nearest family butcher is, to sorting out the payroll for your small business. Gone are the days where people used to walk down a high street to find what they are looking for… 96% of all searches (that include commercial intent) now begin with a search engine, Google.

The question is, how does an accountant get themselves seen on Google in order to start driving traffic & leads though their site? Simple answer, Pay-per-click advertising, PPC for accountants.

Unlike accountancy, PPC has only been around since 2000, and in those 19 short years, it’s already one of the most popular forms of advertising. 45% of small businesses invest in PPC, and a huge 74% of businesses that have over 50 employees invest in PPC and these numbers are continuing to grow.

What is PPC?

PPC is an advertising method a company implements by placing paid text or display adverts on search engine such as Google & Bing (Microsoft) or visual ads on social networks.

A small fee is then paid to the platform every time someone clicks on your advert. Each click will typically send prospective clients to your business website, with the ultimate goal to drive the user to get in contact (call or fill out a submission form), which is referred to as a ‘call to action’, starting them on the journey of converting with your accountancy firm.

Given the abundance of online ad space, PPC for accountants emerged as a targeted and highly effective method to reach consumers looking for similar services. Leveraging a plethora of targeting factors such as demographics, location, keyword usage, and optimal ad display timing. PPC for accountants enables casting a precise net, leading to remarkable returns on investment.

Two popular searches within the accountancy realm revolve around individual accountant services like tax returns, payroll, bookkeeping, VAT, or location-specific searches such as “accountants in Clapham.

Here is an example searches below:

The first thing you will be able to see is thats the relevancy of the text advert has to match up with the original search. Google is all about providing it’s users with relevant content based on the original search term, especially when it comes to PPC, for accountants this means matching the search queries that align with your business as closely as possible and ensuring that your webpage content accurately conveys the right content.

So how do you measure the performance of PPC for accountants?

Google Ads is incredibly effective at showing what leads have been generated through PPC.

The first thing an accountant would need to work out is the Lifetime Value of a customer.

For example, if the average order from a customer is £100 p/m and the average lifetime is 3 years. This business would make approximately £3,600 revenue from 1 customer. If the profit margin of that customer is 20%, then the true value of that customer is £720.

From this you can then start to work out how much you need to spend on PPC in order to be profitable. So let’s say you start off with a budget of £500 per month to advertise on the Google Ads platform. It’s about £2 every time someone clicks and it takes 1 in 12 clicks to get a lead through the site either via a phone call or a contact form submission. This would mean this business is getting around 20 leads through per month.

This would mean that the Cost Per Acquisition (cost per lead) is £25.

Now, if this business manages closes 30% of the leads, then we’d expect them to close 6 leads through PPC every month. If we then take the lifetime value into consideration, it would suggest that this business would look to make £4,320 worth of revenue, with an initial £500 per month investment on Google Ads.

Similar in the way accountancy firms work, PPC for accountants is a very analytical & data driven procedure. With all the tracking options available in platform to help you decide how much and where to spend your budget.

Measurability is one of the key reasons as to why PPC for accountants is an imperative marketing tool to bring on new clients. The clients it draws are pre-qualified and show intent.