Do Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns Really Work - By: www.SponsorDirectory.com
Pay per click advertising works through search engines that have an agreement with a business. This business will place a small ad on the results page for certain key terms. The listing on the search engine page usually has a title, a short heading, and a short promotional wording blurb. Depending on the search engine, the advertiser may or may not get to control the text. The advertiser pays nothing to appear on the results page itself. He or she only pays a previously agreed upon amount to the search engine when a visitor clicks on the ad itself.
Despite its popularity and its once record profit returns, pay per click advertising has lost something in returns. It is still, however, one of the best, fastest, and most effective methods of advertising on the web. According to Google's record profit posting recently, lots of people see these ads and click on them. While it is true that pay per click advertising is only worth it if the sale gets from click to close, those businesses that do manage to close the sale have an excellent deal in their hands with pay per click. This means that customers are usually directed to their site for about five cents each, depending on the price of the key word. Pay per click advertising is even better than high search engine rankings because the ads can go up in just a few minutes while changing your web page content to improve your rankings, even with the help of a search engine oriented text company, can take weeks.
There are many different current companies that offer pay per click advertising. Google's pay per click program is called AdWords. Google estimates that over eighty percent of internet users visit Google as a search engine. That results more customers seeing the ads than most businesses ever thought possible. Google allows you to create your own ads. They do, however, have a service that will design your ad for you if you choose. Yahoo is the other most popular pay per click program. Yahoo's Overture works through partner sites like MSN and Alta Vista. Through these many sites, they claim to allow you to reach over ninety percent of internet users.
Choosing a company to sign up with can be difficult, but the most difficult part of pay per click advertising will be the planning and writing stages. To make the best pay per click ad campaign, you have to bid on key word phrases that work best for you, write the most effective ads, and have a strong, quality page when they click on your ad. The price of some key word phrases is extraordinarily high, so picking the right phrases immediately is your best bet. If you know how to catch the customer's attention and offer them a perfect presentation, you will get the sale almost every time. If you don't, you will lose some serious money with pay per click advertising.
Some people recommend using a search engine oriented professional to design your pay per click advertising campaign. However, the right campaign can be self-managed, with the right skills. You need some understanding of consumer psychology, excellent writing skills, and plenty of time to research what will work for you. Before you get ready to start your pay per click campaign, be sure to do some research into what is out there with regard to your product or services. When you get ready to write, you'll want to notice that the best campaigns are legitimized by what their pages declare about them. Without that legitimacy, your ad will not only fail, it may be removed by your pay per click service. The search engine company you choose to work with may be able to help you find the right key words, but their suggestions can sometimes be ineffective. You can find the best key words by using several services and performing web research on a regular basis.
Pay per click advertising campaigns can be very effective if your ad is well written and if your target site helps to complete the sale with the customer. Without these elements, pay per click advertising is simply a waste of your valuable time and money. You would be better off with a traditional ad campaign.There are a variety of advertising options available to online business owners small and large. There's traditional banner advertising, text ads of both static and contextual varieties, popups and popunders, layer ads and pay-per- click search engine advertising.
For just about any business looking to advertise online, pay-per-click search listings should come first and be used to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They are the foundation of most online advertising plans, delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach for the lowest cost.
The concept of pay-per-click, or PPC search advertising is simple -- you have your listing placed within or alongside search results in exchange for paying some fee each time a someone clicks on your listing in those search results. Most search engines set advertisers against eachother in auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search result pages.
BENEFIT #1: TARGETING
Targeting is essential to any marketing, online or off. In order to be effective, ads have to reach the right people. If that's not happening, you're just wasting your money.
More than anything else, people turn to search engines to find things they need on the Web. Pay-per-click search engine advertising lets you capture these people while they are actively seeking out your product or service. By listing your site under specific search results, you capture your target audience and pre-qualify them with your ad at the same time. By the time the visitor is on your site, you already know they are looking for your product or service and have an interest in your particular offer.
BENEFIT #2: REACH
No matter how large the website, magazine or newspaper you advertise on, it will never reach as many individuals as the top search engines. Google and Yahoo! each reach 80% of the Internet using population and display pay-per-click ads above and alongside search results. Billions of searches are made every month which you can easily be listed within at no cost until an individual decides to click through to your website.
BENEFIT #3: COST
Banner advertising can cost $25 for 1,000 impressions of an advertisement regardless of the number of real website visits those impressions deliver. Top news portals can charge even twice that. PPC search ads cost nothing until an interested individual actually clicks through to your website. Even with the competitive bidding process that pits you against other advertisers for top spots at most PPC search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies. If you work out the average cost to acquire a new visitor from other mediums, it'll likely end up higher than the search engine ad without the benefits of precise targeting and pre-qualifying the visit with the ad text.
It becomes clear why pay-per-click advertising should be the foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider the combined benefits of the targeting, costs and reach of the medium:
* There's no guessing how many visitors will result from an advertising spend. Since you set your own click price, you know how many visitors each dollar buys in advance.
* Conversion rates and ROI are easy to calculate.
* Visitors are pre-qualified before arriving at your website by your ad text.
* Ads are placed without long-term commitments or high up-front fees.
* PPC search advertising reaches so many internet users that almost any niche audience can be targeted.
PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at the many available companies, before spending money elsewhere as almost any other medium will be less targeted, less controllable and more expensive.
