Over the past decade, the Internet has dramatically changed the way that people conduct business. Although big corporations have a significant presence on the Web, the nature of the Internet permits small businesses to compete as equals. Amazon may have a famous Website, but there is nothing to prevent Bob Smith from opening a competing business called BobSmithsBooks.com. With the Internet, there is room for everyone to conduct business.
Having a presence on the Internet hardly guarantees business success, however. In order to make sales, you have to have customers come to your site. Drawing visitors, or "traffic", is possibly the greatest problem that most Website owners encounter when moving their business online. One can promote a business using common offline methods, such as magazines or television, but most Website owners would prefer to try to attract visitors that are already on the Internet. For attracting customers who are already on the Internet, there might not be a faster method of obtaining traffic than pay per click advertising.
Pay per click, or PPC advertising, is a mechanism where companies can purchase advertising space with the major search engines. When a Web surfer does a search using Google, for instance, paid advertisements appear right alongside the search results that Google provides. Businesses bid for prominent ad placement on these search results pages by bidding on the search keywords themselves. They pay the search engines every time a visitor clicks on the hyperlink in one of the ads. Depending on the search topic, the bids may range from just a few cents to as much as $100 per click.
There are several benefits to using pay per click advertising instead other media:
The advertiser can choose the price. Companies bid on the amount they are willing to pay for each search term or keyword. This allows advertisers with small budgets to still have their advertisements shown alongside the ads of companies with deeper pockets. The results are fast. No other advertising medium offers the chance to have ads shown to the public as quickly as PPC. With Google's Adwords system, businesses can create their ad and have it displayed to customers in as little as five minutes.
Businesses can create daily, weekly, or monthly budgets. If you can only afford one hundred dollars per month on ads, you can decide if the ads are to be shown all at once or spread out over the day, week or month. You can limit your spending to the amount in your budget.
The benefits of PPC advertising are obvious. You can frequently have visitors at your Website in a few minutes and you can spend as little or as much money as you like.
There are a couple possible difficulties with pay per click ads, though:
Not all search terms produce good results. You may find yourself placing bids on terms that bring visitors to your Web site but do not produce sales. Pay per click advertisers need to carefully monitor the performance of their advertisements to make sure that the keywords they are bidding on generate both traffic and sales. The market is competitive. If you are bidding on terms that are especially competitive, you may discover that you will have to pay many dollars per click when your budget may only allow a few cents. Prices fluctuate widely among different keywords. If twenty advertisers all outbid you, your ads may be displayed on a page where few people will encounter them.
While the PPC advertising method is quite successful, it can also provide the chance to spend a lot of money without a lot to show for it. Anyone who is considering trying their hand at pay per click advertising should probably start with a modest daily budget and be prepared to engage in a lot of experimentation in order to find the ads and search terms that work best.
Copyright 2008 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier owns DoublingStocks-Review.net, a site that reviews the
Doubling Stocks newsletter, and WorkingFromHome-Review.com, a site that reviews Ewen Chia's product called
Working From Home.
