There are a variety of advertising options available to online business owners small and large. Theres traditional banner advertising, text ads of both static and contextual varieties, popups and popunders, layer ads and pay-per- click search engine advertising.
For just about any business looking to advertise online, pay-per-click search listings should come first and be used to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They are the foundation of most online advertising plans, delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach for the lowest cost.
The concept of pay-per-click, or PPC search advertising is simple -- you have your listing placed within or alongside search results in exchange for paying some fee each time a someone clicks on your listing in those search results. Most search engines set advertisers against eachother in auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search result pages.
There are several benefits to this advertising method that make it useful to just about any web business, and make it so important that it should be exploited to its fullest before advertising in any other medium.
BENEFIT #1: TARGETING
Targeting is essential to any marketing, online or off. In order to be effective, ads have to reach the right people. If thats not happening, youre just wasting your money.
More than anything else, people turn to search engines to find things they need on the Web. Pay-per-click search engine advertising lets you capture these people while they are actively seeking out your product or service. By listing your site under specific search results, you capture your target audience and pre-qualify them with your ad at the same time. By the time the visitor is on your site, you already know they are looking for your product or service and have an interest in your particular offer.
BENEFIT #2: REACH
No matter how large the website, magazine or newspaper you advertise on, it will never reach as many individuals as the top search engines. Google and Yahoo! each reach 80% of the Internet using population and display pay-per-click ads above and alongside search results. Billions of searches are made every month which you can easily be listed within at no cost until an individual decides to click through to your website.
BENEFIT #3: COST
Banner advertising can cost $25 for 1,000 impressions of an advertisement regardless of the number of real website visits those impressions deliver. Top news portals can charge even twice that. PPC search ads cost nothing until an interested individual actually clicks through to your website. Even with the competitive bidding process that pits you against other advertisers for top spots at most PPC search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies. If you work out the average cost to acquire a new visitor from other mediums, itll likely end up higher than the search engine ad without the benefits of precise targeting and pre-qualifying the visit with the ad text.
It becomes clear why pay-per-click advertising should be the foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider the combined benefits of the targeting, costs and reach of the medium:
PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at the many available companies, before spending money elsewhere as almost any other medium will be less targeted, less controllable and more expensive.
About The Author
Dan Grossman of Awio Web Services LLC ( ) reviews pay-per-click search engine services at
As anyone who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in their marketing campaign knows, getting your ad copy on the front page of a search results listing is becoming more expensive by the day. Its a new phenomenon known as keyword fatigue, and its down to the overwhelming success of programs like Googles AdWords. As more and more advertisers realise the benefits of this form of traffic generation, so the number of people bidding for the same keywords increases, and the bid prices climb accordingly. Great news if you are a publisher taking a cut of the revenue, but not so welcome for those doing the bidding.
So are the days of 5 cents a click now just a distant memory Not at all, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of keyword phrases out there for minimum cost, all it takes is a little more effort to use them. To understand how this can be done, with Google AdWords in particular, it is first necessary to understand how ad positions are determined.
Googles PPC program, like their core search engine, places a great deal of emphasis on advertisment relevance. When a web surfer types keywords into the search box, Google wants the ad that most closely matches that phrase to be shown nearest the top of the list - not just the ad bidding the highest amount of money. It mutiplies bid price by keyword relevance, and that means that by careful selection of your keywords, it is possible to be placed above competitors and pay only 1 cent more than they are (Google doesnt necessarily charge the maxium amount you bid, only enough to put you ahead).
There are three simple ways you can trump your competitors with your keyword selection:
1. Longer phrases. There are huge numbers of people bidding on a loose term like mortgage broker, but fewer people bidding on a tighter phrase like mortgage broker in texas. If a searcher types mortgage broker in texas into Google, and you have that phrase in your keyword list, your ad will be deemed more relevant than anyone just using mortgage broker in their own list - which means a cheaper click for you! Of course, there are fewer searches for mortgage brokers specifically in Texas than for mortgage brokers in general, so its necessary to build a large list of similar keyphrases targetting many locations.
2. Closer matching. Just because you might type in car satellite radio into Google, doesnt mean every surfer will do the same. Somebody else searching for the same thing may well enter satellite radio in car, or radio in car satellite, and so on. If your ad contains every variation, it may trump a competing ad which lists only the first example. In other words, having just the keywords in your list isnt necessarily enough - having them in the same order a searcher enters them will give your ad a better relevance score.
3. The final (Google specific) method is to ensure that you wrap every keyword or keyphrase in both quotes and brackets. Again, this means that if someone enters an exact term you have listed, your ad will beat a competing ad that has the same term but without the brackets or quotes.
Clearly, building keyword lists in this way can be more time consuming than simply selecting a few generic words that describe your product or service, but free tools such as those at can make the process much quicker than doing it manually.
Cheap keyphrases are still there for the taking, the winners in PPC now will be those who put in the effort to catch them.
About The Author
Henry Eldridge-Doyle is an internet marketeer, and site developer at .