Secondary Benefits to PPC Advertising Like Linkbuilding & Social Shares?

[Samwise89]

I've read a couple bloggers and just saw someone on Reddit recommend it to another person.

Have any of you used PPC for every post to seed it out there and try to help it rank? I'm trying to think of how this could help.

The exposure could get you:

• Links
• Social Shares
• On-Page Metrics

Links - Besides the primary benefit of pushing people to your content to buy or view a ton of paginated ads, I'm wondering if the exposure would end up getting you some links. I can imagine your posts spreading to forums if they're viral posts, and maybe the occasional contextual link if it's a really good info post.

Social - Obviously if you're doing Facebook and Twitter or Pinterest PPC then you'll end up with some number of social signals for each post. There's still no definitive word on if this helps rank. "Correlation isn't causation" and Google says no, they aren't a ranking factor. I'm not sure I believe that.

Metrics - Another thing I'm thinking about is if you have Google Analytics, and since nearly everyone is cookied by one of Google's products, they can get on-page metrics for your content sooner than if you wait for them to do the honeymoon phase of SERP exposure. If they can see that your content is outperforming the rest of the top 20, then you'd rank faster. That's the theory anyways.

Is anyone doing this? I imagine it would start to get expensive, unless it worked. I'm sure you get the occasional home run that helps cover the cost of other campaigns too.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Adwords, all of the native advertising ad blocks like Taboola, Outbrain, Zergnet, BuySellAds. Anything working like this?

 

[Future State]

I can't see this being ROI positive unless you're doing viral content, and probably paginated content at this point. Your point about establishing metrics is a good one though. I'd like to see a test on busting out of the sandbox like that, but it'd be a costly one.

If you have access to big Facebook pages and Pinterest boards and things like that, it's 100% going to be a home run, especially if the content is news or drama worthy. Otherwise, I just can't see it.