Click Marketing

You must have visited Google and seen those sponsored advertisements on the upper portion of the page or at the right side. These are your PPC or Pay Per Click advertisements. The non-sponsored websites that are listed at the search result page for a keyword are the organic search engine positions and there is a basic difference between the two. An organic listing at the search engine whether it is in Google, Yahoo or MSN (Bing) is free, but to get listed in the PPC section, you will have to pay money. However, do keep in mind that there is no cost for just the display of your advertisement - you have to pay only when a visitor clicks on your advertisement.

Advantages Of Pay Per Click Advertising

The fact is, the competition is huge to achieve a page 1 rank for popular keywords in the organic listing. The website needs to employ search engine optimization strategies to have any chance of achieving these ranks. However even with SEO, sometimes a website will never get up there, and sometimes it can take a lot of time. Often web businesses cannot spend so much time waiting for the ranks and the subsequent traffic. So they turn to PPC advertising.

Pay per click advertising or PPC is a great way to generate Internet traffic almost immediately. All you have to do is sign up to open an account, decide on the keywords for which you want to advertise, decide the bid value for each keyword, create the advertisement groups, write the advertisement texts and activate the campaign, and your website can begin to receive traffic almost immediately. So this gives quick results.

All major search engines have a PPC program and the most famous ones are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. Of course like the organic results, usually the most PPC traffic too comes from the program of Google.

Problems Of Pay Per Click Advertising

However not everything is extremely rosy about PPC advertising and most of the problems arise out of the cost factor. Unlike the organic results, in PPC, you have to pay for each visitor who arrives at your website, and if you are not monitoring your campaign closely, then you could be leaking money. Of course while you are setting up the campaign, you have to decide on a daily budget that you want to spend. So decide on a daily budget that you are comfortable with.

For example if your daily budget is 50.00, then you would be spending 1500,00 in a month. And if you are buying clicks at .50 cents, then you would receive 3000 visitors in a month. If you want to receive more than 3000 visitors in a month, you have to spend more than this.

Of course it is never this simple because some keywords will cost more than .50 cents and some less. So your advertisement will be displayed as long as your daily budget of 50 is not extinguished, and once you have received 50 worth of clicks on a day, the advertisement will stop being displayed.

The problem can arise if your landing page is not converting. If it isn't converting that well, then you could be wasting money in PPC. It might be a good idea to work on your landing page and try different things to see whether the conversions go up or not. Often some advertisement copies will not work and often some keywords will get you the traffic, but they will not convert. So when you are running a pay per click advertising, you must always monitor the campaign closely and take corrective action quickly.