Introduction to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

On times when businesses are looking at their advertising budgets to try to get the maximum exposure for the lowest price, PPC advertising has become the marketing channel of choice for many cash strapped marketers and budget conscious business owners. The key benefit of PPC advertising versus print or even TV ad space is that with a PPC campaign you only pay each time an interested Internet user clicks on your ad. That makes a well managed PPC campaign highly cost effective.

PPC advertising usually works through a bidding process. Website owners establish the highest price they are willing to pay for a click on one of their ads, and in which context they want their ads to appear. Generally the context is defined by the keywords of the page that displays the ad or in the case of search engines sponsored results the keywords the user put on the search engine query field. Advertisers can often set other criteria, such as the demographic characteristics of the target user, geographical location or even what type of websites they visit, and their ads will only be displayed to users with those characteristics.

There are many reasons why a website owner would chose to advertise using a PPC campaign, but some of the most popular are:

• PPC campaign management interfaces such as Google AdWords have become very user friendly and easy to use, making it accessible to anybody.
• You can see results in as little as a few hours, and you can track the traffic using web analytics software. No more guessing or waiting for a report from the newspaper after the campaign is over, you can see in real time how your ads are performing.
• If a campaign is not working, you can learn to use web analytics to fine tune it, change it on the fly or even stop it dead on its tracks before spending all of your budget. You can never go over budget with a PPC campaign, unless you take action to increase the budget.

A successful strategic PPC campaign will bring pre-qualified visitors that are already interested in your products to your website, and you will not spend money paying for those who are not interested to see your ads. However, managing a successful PPC campaign (or several at the same time) requires a degree of knowledge and time to optimise it. If you are bidding for very broad keywords that only produce clicks but not sales you will be wasting your advertising budget, and if you are too specific on your criteria or bid too low you may not spend your advertising budget as nobody will see your ads. They key to optimising a PPC campaign is finding the right price to bid on a keyword that has a high chance of converting into sales and that can be difficult for campaigns that often cover hundreds of keywords at the same time.

PPC advertising can have a very high return on investment (ROI) and is virtually risk free, making it a great marketing solution for small and medium businesses that require a high degree of control over their advertising efforts. PPC can also be used as a tool for keyword research or to test a SEO campaign potential, and many marketing or web development agencies offer PPC campaign management alongside more traditional offerings such as SEO or web development.