Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Drawbacks Of Pay Per Click Advertising

By Brian Basch


The red-hot trend in Internet marketing, Google Adwords has made a big impression on pay per click advertising. The lure of placing an ad and sitting back while the search engine works for you is irresistible to a large number of advertisers.

It looks as if the marriage of advertiser and search engine is really made in heaven. The advertiser just has to create an ad then pay the search engine a small fee to do all the legwork. The search engine will find potential customers through keyword searches. When a searcher enters the keyword into the search engine the related ad will be seen along with the search results.

However this is not really as simple as it looks. This is because keyword research is not so easy. Tracking through the search engines is not enough. The keywords you find here are popular and will bring up too many pages of results. It is good to know that most searchers will not look beyond the first 5 pages of their search results. This makes it very important to be listed in the first five pages, if you want to make money.

Another complication is the fact that positioning in the search engines is determined by how much money the advertiser can bid per click on a particular keyword. With traditional advertising you pay a flat fee for the amount of time you want the ad to run, not on how many visitors the ad drew. Advertisers started to understand that this type of advertising was very expensive.

The next form of advertising to emerge was Pay per click marketing. The idea was straightforward; advertisers would simply pay a fee every time a visitor clicked on their ad. This meant that if the ad had a good ratio of clicks the advertiser would make more money. Next came the question of positioning your ad in the search engines. In order to gain a superior position advertisers would have to bid higher than their competitors.

Pay per click advertising is not without risks. Costs can rise dramatically and the advertiser can soon find himself seriously out of pocket. You need to be sure that an ad that is drawing a lot of traffic is in fact making sales, or you might lose a lot of money.

Pay per click advertising is full of pitfalls, especially for the new marketer. It is not the smooth ride that the ads proclaim. The good news is that there are many other resources to help you and other methods of marketing for those who want to look.

So consider your options and do not rely on one method of marketing. Remember the more methods you use the better chances you have of making a profitable business.

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