A Buyers Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising
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Over the past decade there has been an unprecedented growth in the online market place. You can now find anything and everything online, from home appliances, cars or medicine right through to pets. It therefore goes without saying that competition amongst businesses for clientele has increased significantly, and therefore new and creative ways have had to be thought out in order to successfully market a product online. It is one thing to have an effective website, but if nobody knows about or clicks on to your site, how effective is it really? As the old adage goes: If a tree falls in the middle of the jungle, where there is nobody for miles around, does it really make a sound.
Online advertising has evolved into numerous creative ways in which a company can make its presence known on the web. One of the most popular methods used today is called Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. It is most commonly used on websites, advertising networks and search engines. The way in which PPC ads usually work is by placing a text ad near to a search result. The reasoning goes that advertisers do not actually pay for placement. Technically, the positions or listings are free. You pay only for each click (i.e. visitor) that you receive from that search engine listing. When the site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a set fee. This fee can range from anything between £0.01 and £15 per click or more, depending on the popularity of the search term and the search engine being used.
The advantage that PPC holds over other online advertising methods is that you only pay for the actual click-through to you site. In general, there are no guarantees to how much one might end up paying per visitor acquired through most other forms of advertising. TV, radio, print, and others normally force you, the advertiser, to bear all the cost, regardless of the effectiveness of the campaign. Even though PPC does not guarantee making a profit, it does significantly decrease the risk involved compared to many other forms of advertising. It is a common fact that visitors clicking on to your site through search engines are much more likely to purchase products or services, as these visitors, in theory, are actively looking for what you have to offer.
There are three main categories of PPC advertising engines, namely keyword, product and service engines, but more models are constantly being developed.
Keyword PPC’s:
Advertisers using these engines bid on keywords or phrases. When a user does a search on a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appear in order of the highest bidder. Keywords and phrases are considered to be at the very heart of PPC advertising, and these terms are guarded as highly valuable trade secrets. An industry of professionals that can assist advertisers in marketing their products and services on search engines has also developed and many firms offer software or services to help advertisers develop these invaluable words.
Product PPC’s:
Product engines let advertisers provide feeds of their product databases. When users search for a product, the links to the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy. These engines are also called Product comparison engines or Price comparison engines.
Service PPC’s:
Very similar to Product PPC’s, service engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases. When users search for a service links to advertisers for that particular service appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their results by price or other methods. Some Product PPC’s have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in more specific fields.
A Buyers Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising >>
