Pay Per Click

What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a way to get your business in the public eye by paying for a great spot in the search engines. When someone types in a search in Google or Yahoo! for example, they will see contextual advertising in the right side of their search results. These are paid ads put in place by businesses and affiliates, so that they can obtain a great upfront placement fairly quickly.

 How Can Pay Per Click Help Your Business?

 PPC is great to use for new online businesses that are just getting off the ground. While you are waiting for your search engine optimization (SEO) to take effect, you can have an almost immediate result with new website visitors finding your website thanks to the PPC ads that you have placed online.

Pay Per Click is not only for new online business owners, it can also be a great tool for anyone who wants to increase their website traffic. It can be hard to get visitors, and even people who work from home making money with affiliate programs are using PPC because it can give them a leg up on their competition.

Pay Per Click Popular Companies

There are many pay per click advertising networks, but some are better known than others. Many of the most PPC programs have been created by the top search engines. As these companies came to realize the potential and the amount of money that could be made, there seems to be a new pay per click model being released a few times a year.

Popular or well known PPC networks and programs include:

• Microsoft adCenter
• Google Adwords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Miva
• Kanoodle
• Chitika
• Adbrite
• Clicksor
   

Pay Per Click Pros

Works instantly – After you sign up with one of these PPC companies, your website can start to receive visitors in a matter of hours. If you are advertising your affiliate and website, you can have new customers and commissions in the same day.

Traffic Increase – The money being made in the PPC industry can be high and website owners as well as bloggers are monetizing their sites by publishing these text ads in addition to their other affiliate programs. This means that your ad can be placed onscreen and in front of a million eyes the first week or month, depending on your daily budget.

Reliability – When you apply search engine optimization (SEO) to your websites, you are not guaranteed of a great placement in the search results. You can have the world’s greatest website, filled with lots of useful information, this will not help you if your SEO is done badly, other companies are paying lots of PPC dollars for your top keywords, or a search turns up ten million websites with the same or similar information.

Stability – There are billions of websites on the internet that are vying for a good position in the first few pages of a search result. To get around this, many webmasters attempt to cheat and put plans in place to get around search engine rules. When caught, the websites are penalized to the point that some of them are removed completely and are no longer indexed. With pay per click advertising, as long as you keep paying, you will stay in the search results.

Pay Per Click Cons

Expensive – Pay per click is an advertising system that works by having visitors click on ads that they see on a website or search engine result page. These clicks can quickly add up to a lot of money in a short amount of time. New users are the most susceptible to large charges. After they setup an account, they can come back in a few hours or even the next day, and find that their maximum daily limit has already been met. In some instances, errors or glitches have kept their accounts going long after the daily limit and their accounts are charged hundreds of dollars in a very short amount of time.

Click Fraud – This type of fraud has been a huge concern for those involved in text ads and PPC. Some publishers will attempt to get more money by clicking on the ads on their own websites. This can quickly lead to them being banned from the companies but in some cases, other publishers have family and friends do the clicking for them.

Accidental Clicks – You can also lose money from false clicks when a publisher places their text ads in places that can make visitors assume that the links are part of the actual website. Visitors can also click accidentally by not paying attention to what they are looking at. These clicks mean that the visitor hits the back button or closes the page without paying much attention to where the ad has lead them to. You lose money, and you have not gained a new reader or customer.

No Guarantees – Paying for PPC does not mean that you will make money from the clicks accrued. Millions of users click on these links and then they leave the page. The only guarantee is that you will receive a few clicks, but that does not always translate into sales.

Text Blindness – Over the years, into users have become blind to banner ads. They overlook and ignore them because they are on most websites in form or another. Recently, website owners and bloggers have gone back to banners ads because text ads can now be seen on just about every website. The banner ads are being shaped into even blocks of 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, etc; as a way to gain the attention of people who have become accustomed to both text ads and leader board type banners.

Heavy Competition – When using text advertising, it is wise to find keywords and phrases that are not popular. Large companies are using PPC and with their high budgets, they have made it hard for the average small or medium business owner to afford widely known keywords. You can do research on specific keywords only to find that the one you would like to use has a rate of $115. This is no exaggeration and this means that just five clicks would cost you $575 with no guarantee that you will receive even a single sale.

The bottom line is that PPC can be a great advertising tool, but you have to do your homework and figure out how best to use these programs. Set a daily limit and keep to it. That limit can be maxed out in as little as an hour depending on the popularity of the keywords and your placement.