What is PPC – Pay Per Click?

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There
are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose
from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are
targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences
is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that all search engines, Google, MSN, Bing, Yahoo and several others. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site, and someone “click’s” on your ad. Thus the pay-per-click term.

Just to futher confuse things, you can also have ad’s that are pay-per-impression. Meaning when the site shows up in the results, you pay. There are lot’s of school’s of thoughts on which type of ad is best and it really just boils down to what you are trying to achieve with your ad and what keywords or industry you are in.

It’s All About Driving Traffic

There are 2 primary ways to drive traffic to your site using search engines.

1) Paid Search: Paid search is just what it says, all of the ways you can “pay” to get traffic, from search engines, via directories (citysearch.com, yellowpages.com, etc.), PPC ad’s, banners and more. The beauty of paid search is in it’s immediacy and the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t
demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier -
and more effective – the process will be.

So if you have a sale, a special or new product line you want to promote, in minutes you can be up and running, driving traffic to your site that is looking or seeking your great new product or service. Another beauty of PPC or paid search is the tracking process. You will know in less than 1 day how effective your ad is in driving traffic. If after a few days, your ad does not get a lot of click throughs, it is time to re-write and find a message that connects with your target audience.

2) Natural Search: This is when someone types in a keyword and your website just appears “naturally” at the top (first page) of the search engine results. One thing most folks don’t understand about Natural Search is that it can be just as costly and definitely more time consuming as paid search campaigns. This is compounded by the fact that their are multiple search engines out there, they all use their own method’s to determine where you rank on their site and on it goes. However, that does not mean you should not do all you can to get your natural search rankings up, it’s just more of an ongoing process and one that needs to be managed weekly, if not daily to really achieve success in popular keyword categories.

How is this different from Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is the program that Google has built to manage Pay-Per-Click campaigns. People forget that Google is not the only search engine on the planet, and while they do dominate in most markets, there is a lot of traffic coming from MSN, Bing and Yahoo. Each search engine company has their own Pay-Per-Click (PPC) system, comparable to Google’s Adwords. The good news is that  all of the search engine ad programs run pretty much the same, you get a set amount of words for your ad space, then a spot for your url.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. The tricky part is learning the process and how to work it to your advantage.