.... PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING

Pay per click advertising (PPC) is a search engine marketing technique that requires you to pay a fee every time someone clicks to your website from an ad you've placed in a search engine's results. Simply stated, you will "bid" a price per click to be in a specific position of the search rankings for a particular search keyword or keyword phrase. The more you agree to pay per click (or bid) for a specific keyword, the higher your site will rank in the paid search results. The paid search results are usually marked as advertisements or “Sponsored Links” and appear above or beside the search engine’s organic listings. The #1 position on a search phrase requires a bid higher per click cost, whereas the lower positions require only a bid of a few cents. Your available budget and willingness to bid will dramatically impact your website's search engine ranking position when the search engine displays search keyword or keyword phrase results. Although your website name or URL will be displayed in the search results at your bid for position, you are not charged the pay-per-click "bid" until a searcher actually clicks on your website URL.

As a short term strategy, pay per click marketing offers one tremendous advantage. It enables you to achieve a top or high ranking position almost instantaneously. If you want to draw traffic to your website fast for any reason, pay-per-click marketing can make that happen! The primary benefit of pay per click is the immediate results and complete control it offers the advertiser. You may target one set of keywords today, and if they don’t work out you may target an entirely different set of keywords tomorrow. What position you strive for and what you are willing to bid to achieve the position is totally under your control! 

The Downside of PPC:

However Pay per click can get very expensive. A top position for some search terms can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each day depending on the campaign. A modest budget can get exhausted early in the day and leave your website without any ads for the remainder of the day that means no exposure on the search engines for the rest of the day.

Another downside of PPC is that your ads will only appear on the Search Engines you are paying directly. Example: If we create a PPC program for your company on Google, your ads will not appear on any of the Overture Search Engine sites, like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. To have a presence on these sites, you must pay a setup fee and set a budget for these search engines too.

Also, If you decide to just advertise on one of the search giants like Google, then you will only be on about 50% of the search engine market. In addition, if your daily budget of clicks has been exhausted, then your ads will all come down from the search engines for the remainder of the day. So you’ve gone from 50% market exposure to no market exposure at all.

The other major concern with PPC is called Click Fraud, simply put; this is the malicious clicking of your ads to exhaust your daily budget. In the past your competitors could hire people to click your ads all day long to spend your budget and get your ads dropped for the day. Both Google and Overture have improved their programs to partially stop this malicious behavior, but it can still account for up to 30% of your budget being wasted to fraud.

Over the long term, organic search engine optimization (SEO) is much more cost effective. Each click on an SEO program has no impact on your budget or credit card. Your ads will appear on 100% of the search engines 100% of the time!