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| Is Pay Per Click Advertising
For You? |
| Posted: 24-04-2006 | |
< | Author: |
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising,
which is also known as pay per performance or paid search,
remains one of the quickest and direct ways of promoting
your business, and driving targeted traffic to your website.
While it would be nice to achieve high natural (free)
search engine rankings; organic rankings do take some
time to take effect. And, with tens of thousands of website
owners all competing for the same keyword search term,
it's a challenging prospect (and quite a rare one) to
achieve high rankings for a popular search term, based
solely on organic SEO.
How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?
PPC is simple really. Search engines like Google make
their money by selling advertising space to website owners,
and is generally the space you see running down the right
hand side of the search results page, and across the top
of the page; highlighted in blue. To get your website
listed here, you have to pay, or bid against competitors
for keywords; however you only actually pay the search
engine each time a visitor clicks through to your website
from the search engine. This is basically what Pay Per
Click advertising is.
It is worth noting that you will only ever pay up to the
maximum bid you place for each search term; generally
speaking the higher you bid for a keyword, the more likely
you are to appear highly in the search results. In addition,
within Google, the position of your Ad will depend on
its “Quality Score” (calculated from many factors), this
reflects how relevant the Ad is to the search term. So
in other words, by establishing a good quality score,
you can move up the search listings paying a fraction
of the price you would have otherwise. This is one of
the reasons good management of keywords is essential.
The main benefit of Pay Per Click advertising, compared
to relying solely on organic SEO, is that PPC ads can
be live in a matter of minutes. With your website up and
running, and armed with a credit card, you're on your
way to advertising on the web's top search engines in
no time. The key perk is that you control the budget.
PPC Advertising Programs: Google AdWords & Overture
There are two major pay-per-click advertising programs;
Google AdWords and Overture (owned by Yahoo). Both services
aim to deliver targeted, quality traffic from its own
search engines and quality partner sites, and have recently
introduced a number of beneficial features such as profit
tracking and 'return on ad-spend' statistical features-
very beneficial for those of you who don't have your own
e-commerce team.
Google Adwords is possibly the most popular service, one
of the main reasons being that Overture has confused many
of its advertisers and prospective customers by renaming
its products numerous times.
Self Managed PPC Campaigns or SEO Consultants?
Many advertisers have problems converting click-through's
into sales, and others have no difficulties at all. A
major factor contributing to the amount of profit your
PPC campaign makes, is how well it is managed.
To produce profitable click-through's you must be able
to select and bid on the right, and relevant keywords
that target your potential customer. Some keywords have
extremely high bidding prices, so you need to be able
to recognize if it is really going to be profitable to
compete at such a high price. Will it not be just as profitable
to bid a lot less and achieve a lower position?, say fourth
place? Experienced PPC professionals are very talented
in this field, and can ensure you get the most out of
your advertising spend. So, if you're not confident; a
custom managed PPC campaign by an SEO professional is
probably the best approach to take. Pay Per Click professionals
also have mathematical modeling tools that can manage,
and filter out keywords that are not performing.
The key to profitable Pay Per Click campaigns is targeting
the right searcher, with the right keywords. Professionals
in the field of SEO can invest the time and experience
required to effectively manage PPC campaigns, in this
now highly competitive, and forever changing arena.
With PPC advertising becoming eminently popular, and thus
harder to manage, Tracey Simpson (tracey.simpson@yoonoo.co.uk)
has wrote this article to help readers, and owners of
e-retailer websites to understand the benefits of having
their PPC campaign manged for them. Please visit http://www.sayu.co.uk
to read more about how a qualified PPC advertising professional
can help.
This article is free for republishing
Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/ |
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