PPC

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most popular advertising strategies, and probably the most affordable for all types of business. With PPC advertising, you only pay when a customer actually clicks on your ad, as opposed to paying every time it is displayed on a website. For this reason, clicks through PPC advertising are much cheaper and usually have a very good ROI compared to impression based programs.

In many cases, PPC ads are displayed contextually, on websites whose content matches the keywords the ad is targeted to. Ads can be displayed next to the search results on search engines results listings, in what is known as paid SE positioning. Many search engines offer their own form of PPC program, with the most famous being probably Google AdWords program. However, Yahoo and Microsoft also have their own programs, YPN (beta) and AdCenter Publisher, respectively. Many people choose to go with Google because of the wide range of publishers that use Google Adsense program to display ads on their websites, and the good keyword targeting of those ads. By making it easy to both manage campaigns through Adsense and publish the ads through Adwords, Google has placed their contextual PPC ads virtually everywhere on the Internet, and by being the most used Search Engine it means they are also displayed on millions on search results listings per day.

PPC advertising usually works under a bidding system. Advertisers choose how much to spend, which keywords to target and how much are they willing to pay per each ad, and the PPC engine allocates ad slots to the ones willing to pay the most. This means that the price of a click can vary wildly, depending on how many advertisers campaigns are targeting it at a certain moment. Once the budget is spent, ads from that campaign won't be displayed until either more money is allocated. To get the best results from a PPC campaign is advisable to choose a PPC publisher with a good targeting algorithm, that makes sure your ads are displayed to visitors interested in your content and not on unrelated websites or searches. It is also very recommended to keep a permanent eye on the campaign, and fine tune it as necessary depending on how many conversions certain keywords or targets generate.

PPC ads are an affordable way of getting word out about your website because you can set the budget as low or high as your company needs, and also can decide how much to pay for every click. That can be calculated depending on the desired return of investment for a certain campaign, and how good the results are once it's running. Since the price of a click will change depending on how popular it is, keywords can be changed to look for cheaper ones that might also give good results for less money. Generally, PPC campaigns can be started with budgets as low as 5 or 10$, depending on the PPC network used.

The success of a budget PPC campaign is directly related to how the ads are designed, the keywords targeted (and how good the network is at matching ads to relevant websites and contextual searches) and lots of micro-management to stay always on top of expenses, keyword prices and individual results of each ad. Many people choose to just hire an Agency to do it, or alternatively using a web analytics software such as Google Analytics will make it easier and slightly less time consuming.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook Ping This Post Stumble This Post