Pay Per Click Advertising
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Pay Per Click advertising, PPC, is the practice of paying for traffic to your website. This is accomplished by setting a bid as to the amount you are willing to pay per click. In most models the the person bidding the most per click will achieve a higher ranking. I'll explain this in depth later.
Pay Per Click advertising is a great way to start driving immediate traffic to your website but you'll need to make sure that your website is developed well and has value to the website visitor otherwise you're simply throwing your money way.
How Does Pay Per Click Advertising Work?
Pay Per Click advertising, which I'll refer to as PPC, works by biding for placement on whatever keywords that you'd like to rank well for. In most models the more you bid the better you're ranking.
The exception to this is Google Adwords, they've included a relevancy factor into their rankings. The way that this is works is that you receive a 'bonus' for relevant ads. For example, if you have a website that sells purses and you bid on keywords related to purses you receive a relevancy 'bonus'.
What Google is trying to do is provide the most relevant ads to their search results. Now say your site is about purses but you bid on keywords related to shoes. You're website related to purses is as relevant to shoes so you don't receive that relevancy 'bonus'.
With that said, you could be bidding more than the website listed above you because the website may be relevant to shoes so they perform in the search results better.
How Much Does Pay Per Click Advertising Cost?
This is going to vary based on how competitive the market is for what you're selling. If you're selling something extremely competitive like plasma TVs you can plan on paying a lot more than if you're selling dog tags.
If the market is competitive you can expect that they top ads are paying quite a bit of money per click so this is something to consider when you're choosing a market.
With that said, even if you're in a competitive market you can do keyword research on niche markets that the 'big guys' are overlooking. This will allow you to keep your PPC campaigns more affordable.
The last thing I want to say is that the rates are going to vary among PPC providers. With Google being the most popular search engine out there you can expect to pay more per click than if you were bidding for the exact same keyword on Yahoo.
What Are The Best Pay Per Click Providers?
Far and away the most popular PPC provider is Google Adwords, . As I mentioned above, Google is the most visited search engine in the world. You'll also find that you get the most targeted traffic and Google has done a pretty good job of reducing click fraud.
Another option is Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture. The ironic thing is that Overture was by far and away the leader in PPC advertising just a few short years ago but Google took PPC advertising very seriously and have since passed them.
Other than that there are a few other options in the market that provide PPC Advertising but they have taken heat on the amount of click fraud that you receive from them. Another providers is Search123.com.
If you choose an option other than Adwords or Yahoo you'll find that the cost per click, CPC, is a lot lower than those on the other two options.
What Is Click Fraud?
There are really two types of click fraud. The first is simply clicking on a competitors PPC ad so that it costs him more money. This is done with the hopes that he'll stop advertising or at least cut down on it.
The other type is to earn revenue. With the ability to place PPC advertising on your website through Google Adsense or other providers you can earn a portion of each click. The idea is to click on an ad that's placed on your own website to earn more revenue.
The good thing is that the major Pay Per Click providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have taken this practice very seriously. They have put a lot of different measures in place to reduce the amount of click fraud but just like anything. The scammers are always one step ahead.
Just be sure to keep a close on your your PPC campaigns. You'll start to develop trends and you'll start to recognize unusual trends. At that point you'll want to contact the support department to have them look into it further.
Pay Per Click Summary
I just wanted to touch on a couple of topics. Like I mentioned, PPC advertising is a great way to start getting immediate traffic to your website because you don't need to rely on search engine rankings.
The flip side to this is that you really need to make sure that your website is ready for traffic otherwise you're just throwing money away. It's important to keep a very close eye on your PPC campaigns, especially in the beginning because you may find that you're spending money on clicks and they aren't converting into sales or other sort of leads.
Once you become a bit more seasoned you'll know what to look for so be sure that you do your due diligence when dealing with any PPC provider.
Webmaster Forum
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