PPC is a short form for PPC advertising. PPC was introduced by Overture’s founder Bill Gross in 1998 as an idea paper at a business convention. The concept was adopted and introduced by Yahoo later that year. In 2002, after seeing the growing success Yahoo was getting from PPC, Google modified their Adwords program from a cost per thousand impressions to a PPC format. Like they say, the rest is history.

So What Is PPC Marketing?

PPC is an advertising strategy letting you run classified style adverts on the search website results page. The advertisements are served from a database server. Every time a user clicks on one of the advertisements to go to your site you are charged for that click.

There are 2 distinct kinds of PPC advertisements : keyword match and context match. Keyword match ads are shown on the results page of the search website. The server matches what it displays to the keywords the user typed into the search bar. The marketer is charged every time a user clicks on their ad. Context match adverts are shown on the websites, in newsletters and HTML emails of web-masters that become ad publishers by opening a new account with the search engine that lets them display adverts. Again the adverts are matched to acceptable keywords for the media on which they’re being displayed.

When a visitor to the publisher’s site or reader of the newsletter or e-mail clicks on the ad, the publisher is paid a tiny share of what the marketer is charged for showing the content delicate advertisements. PPC is a results based selling technique as you are only charged if somebody clicks on an advert and visits your site. All the leading search engines offer PPC advertising. The most important players are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search website Promoting , Microsoft AdCenter, Ask, LookSmart, Miva and Baidu.

So How Does PPC Work For The Online Marketer?

A seller must first create an account with the search site that permits him to bid on keywords so he will place PPC adverts. You can bid on a particular keyword or keyword phrase related to your product. If you bid the highest amount, your ad will be the 1st one listed for that keyword. All the search engines place paid advertisements above and to the right of the organic search results. The picture below shows the MSN result for a search on ski poles.

The advertisements in the yellow box and the ones along the right side are PPC adverts. If you click any of the PPC advertisements, the marketer will be charged for your click.

PPC Advantages

The first blessings of PPC Selling are :

  • PPC permits the promoter to decide how much cash they need to spend on keyword based advertising. The higher you bid on a keyword or keyword phrase, the larger the likelihood of your ad being on the 1st results page.
  • You are only charged when somebody really clicks thru to your site.
  • PPC advertisements pre-qualify your visitors because folk who click thru are curious about what you have got to offer
  • PPC can generate immediate traffic to your internet site * You can start or stop your campaign whenever you wish to which gives you much greater suppleness that most other advertising techniques

PPC Downsides

The first downsides of PPC are :

  • Keywords can cost from a few pennies to above $10 a click
  • If your ad is too general you might get thousands of curious visitors so unless you can set an expenditure limit for each ad, you can pay a good sum for meager results.
  • The main search engines distribute a little share of their traffic to the smaller search engines which can make you get copy traffic or traffic that never had any target of purchasing your product. Measuring your rate of return can be tricky even with the tools provided by the top search engines.
  • The more traffic you receive, the more it costs you which is no problem so long as your advertisements generate a fair proportion of visitors who get your product.

The Bottom Line

PPC is just like any other marketing method or paid advertizing tool. It should be one of many tools that you employ to promote anything from special campaigns, fresh new products, new web sites as well as niche markets where there maybe be tough competition. PPC is a great way to quickly and efficiently find key word phrases that convert well and therefore give you an advantage which you should capitalise on. As soon as you find converting key words you should initiate a full SEO campaign to use these keywords to gain free search engine traffic. In the long run a combination of both paid and free traffic will help grow your business and also give you a better ROI. There is an additional factor which is that free traffic tends to convert better therefore the benefits are actually twofold:

1. Once your SEO campaign is in full swing you will not have to pay for traffic to your website therefore you could stop your PPC campaigns for those converting keywords.

2. These free search engine visitors will be more likely to purchase something as well as come back more often than those arriving from your PPC sources.

SEO can be a lot of work especially in the beginning stages of its development but should certainly be part of any marketers long term plan for developing and growing any website or online business since this will be traffic that can come for years on end once it begins. Would you like super hot SEO tips and strategies? Then subscribe to me newsletter and I shall show you exactly how to automate the SEO process so that you can avoid the tedious tasks associated with SEO while gaining top rankings for your keywords faster than you may have previously considered.

Further Resources

A Longer History of PPC

Google Adwords

Filed under: PPC

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