Pay per Click Advertising

In the beginning geeks created search engines to allow them to find websites that interested them.

Information was collected about all the websites they knew about and stored in a database that could be searched. All the results were provided in order of relevance to the keywords the searcher was looking for.

As more and more websites were indexed some marketers realised that if your website appeared near the top of the results you got more visitors and if you were selling a product - more sales.

An industry was born with consultants trying to get their clients website to the top of the results. With the search engines trying to provide relevant results and the marketers trying to drive traffic to their websites.

www.goto.com (renamed later to overture.com now part of yahoo) was the first big search engine to introduce pay per click advertising. The website customer opened an account and was only charged whenever his listing was clicked on. The customer could control how high up the results his website appeared by bidding more for relevant keywords.

Google was quick to bring out a similar product called 'adwords' - do a search on google and note the results that appear on the right hand side of your screen.

Benefits for Website Clients

No waiting - As an advertiser you can sign up for a ppc account with most search engines, create your listing and start receiving traffic within minutes. In most cases you can start your bids for as little as cent a click. Depending on the popularity of your keywords you may have to bid a lot more.

If you choose your keywords well your visitor will be searching for the type of product that you are selling.

You can set your own budget - you can bid as low as you like, set any budget you want. The best way to start is to create an account, pay your initial deposit (can be as low as 10$), set your initial bids to the lowest allowed, and set your daily budget to say 1$ a day. If after a day or two you are not getting any traffic increase your minimum bid.

Easily calculate your return on investment - After spending say 100$ you should know how many visitors you have had from your pay per click campaign. You should also know how many sales you have made. Divide your sales by the amount that you have spent, and if this is not the most cost effective advertising you need to look at how well your website is converting visitors to sales.

How to start

Below is a list of some of the larger pay per click search engines with notes about each.

google.com the largest search engine, Create your account, create your adword, set your budget and you should start getting traffic almost instantly.

yahoo.com Start with a 10$ deposit, minimum cost per click is $0.10

7Search.com 7search is one of the larger pay per click search engine and so should give your website good targetted traffic at a reasonable cost. The minimum bid is just $0.01. Minimum to start your account is $25.00.

AdBrite.com Create your account, place your ads as an advertiser - you can choose which websites you want your ads to appear on. Did not like: the 4.95 set up charge. Did like: you can choose which websites to advertise on, choice of different advertising methods, same account for advertisers and publishers.

Search : pay per click