PPC Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising

Natural search engine rankings will increase your company's exposure exponentially, but the optimization process is ongoing and takes time. Another option for companies who need exposure immediately is to begin a pay-per-click advertising campaign.

How does pay per click work?

Using an advertising service like Google AdWords or Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing), you sign up for an account. You set a daily campaign budget for the maximum amount of money you're willing to pay in a single day (or, if you're brave, you set an unlimited budget). You populate your ad inventory with advertisements that will show when someone searches for a keyword phrase in a search engine. Your company's ad will then be displayed in the "Sponsored Results," usually located at the the very top or side margin of the search results page when users search for the keyword specified in your campaign.

PPC sounds easy. Why would I need someone to help me run a campaign?

Simply setting up and operating a PPC ad campaign is not enough to produce results. There are plenty of additional factors that will play a role in the success of your paid advertising. To effectively run a pay per click campaign, one might consider:

  • The popularity, potential conversion rate, and overall effectiveness of the keywords being bid on.
    In PPC, keywords that are more popular are more costly. More expensive, however, does not translate into "correct keyword." To the contrary, many words with high bidding rates bring highly UN-TARGETED users to sites. This can cost the advertiser a fortune while producing no sales/leads. For example, imagine a business owner sells a specific car part. In his PPC campaign, he bids on the keyword "cars," which costs him approximately $2.00 each time someone clicks the link to his site. Unfortunately, the user isn't interested in the seller's product and leaves immediately. They were looking to RENT a car, not buy a car PART. This happens all day, with hundreds of users clicking the seller's ad and leaving immediately. Depending on the seller's maximum daily budget, this could result in hundreds of dollars spent, despite zero sales for the business. What if the seller could have paid $0.10 per click for users looking for his EXACT product? Sadly, he probably could have. Finding this word, however, requires extensive research, analysis, and planning-- a huge time sink.
  • The time of day and fluctuation of bid prices.
    Bid prices for keywords fluctuate throughout the day, very similar to a stock. When prices are low, it doesn't make sense to overpay for clickthroughs to your site. In order to prevent this, however, you must be actively managing your campaign and altering prices accordingly. By setting different prices for different times of day, pay per click advertisers can save significantly and still bring targeted users to their sites.
  • Running ads locally or running ads worldwide.
    Depending on your business, you might choose one or both of these options. Running PPC advertisements geared towards users of a specific geographic location can cut bid prices, but it also limits the scope of your visibility online. Running a normal PPC campaign provides global reach for your business, but also increased competition, against every competitor WORLDWIDE.