Sunday, August 24, 2008

Pay Per Click! What Is It?

By Robert Gantt


The quickest way to the top of the results on a major search engine is to start a pay per click ad campaign. Pay per click ads are typically the first results presented following a search query. They are called pay per click ads because an advertiser isn't liable for any payment unless a person performing a search query actually clicks on the advertiser's link. The position of an advertiser's link on a results page is determined by what's called the quality score. It's the advertiser's bid price and the ad click-through rate also known as ctr.

Though relatively new in the market, Pay per click advertising has evolved rapidly over the last few years. From the beginning when GoTo.Com first used it as a model for their search engine it has proven to be a winner. Before GoTo.Com it was very difficult, if not impossible, for new advertisers to get to the top of the search results on major search engines. All that changed with the advent of the Pay Per Click model. Now the advertiser is free to spend his time picking the best converting keywords and sending visitors to his best landing pages.

There is lots of talk all over the Internet regarding Pay-Per-Click Advertising. Some people swear by it and some say it is waste of your time. Although Pay-Per-Click Advertising can be expensive, if you know your margins and are vigilant it has proven to be very cost effective.

Why? Because everybody wins. Customers find what they're looking for. The advertiser's business grows and thrives with new business. The search engines get paid.

Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center are the popular names when it comes to PPC marketing. Although there are some similarities between the three the submission process does vary with each engine. Unless an advertiser has plenty of time on his hands it is probably wise to outsource the submission and maintenance to a third party firm experienced in dealing with the nuances of each engine.

By paying for search engine traffic advertisers can make sure that the product or service gets listed and is made available to the market . Moreover, it is a total misconception that there won't be any marketing costs in models like SEO. The amount of money spent in optimizing your keywords, creating in-bound links, understanding and applying the correct keyword density and designing a site that still converts at a reasonable roi might just overshoot what one would have paid to the search engine in exchange for sure visibility!

Speed is one of the best features about pay-per-click campaigns. It's perfect for testing sales promotions. If companies sell seasonal products like chocolates, greeting cards and other gifts which become hot selling items during festive season of Christmas. A PPC model makes sure the advertiser's products or services will be found by consumers in time to purchase them.

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