PPC Search Engines And PPC Advertising

Pay per click advertising, better known as PPC advertising in Internet parlance, is an advertising and marketing tool offered by search engines and some niche sites.

However, PPC advertising is mostly referred to in context with advertising on search engines, with the top PPC search engines being Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves. To fully understand the PPC function of a search engine, you have to first understand how PPC advertising works.

How PPC advertising works

In a PPC advertising campaign, advertisers bid on keywords or key phrases. Keywords and key phrases are the queries that surfers search for on the search engines. These keywords and key phrases are raked by their popularity and accordingly a bid amount is set per keyword or key phrase. The bid amount can be anything - ranging from a few cents to even hundred Dollars and above in some cases.

Before an advertiser bids on the keywords, he has to deposit a certain amount with the search engine; after he has finished the bidding, his PPC advertisement will appear on the search engine.

It is important to note that the advertiser does not have to pay anything for having his advertisement displayed on a search engine - however, he is charged once any surfer clicks on his ad. So, once the clicking happens, the bid amount is deducted from the advertiser's deposit and the advertisement is displayed as long as there is balance in the advertiser's deposit account.

Let us make PPC advertising more clear with an example: Assume you are running an online florist business and you want to market your flowers to the millions of Internet users with a PPC advertisement. You will then pay a deposit of, say, $100, to a search engine of your choice, say, Google. Then you will bid on the keyword "flowers" at, say, $3 per click.

Your advertisement will then be displayed on Google and every time a surfer clicks on it, $3 will be debited to your account and your advertisement will keep showing up until your deposit dries up. Depending on the response, you can then choose to refill your deposit.

Pros and cons of PPC search engines

First the pros:

· Leading PPC search engines are accessed by millions of Internet users daily - this guarantees phenomenal exposure to any advertiser.

· PPC search engines such as Google and Yahoo help an advertiser in selecting the right keywords for his PPC advertisement campaign.

· These PPC search engines have a very robust and sophisticated software model that displays PPC advertisements only to the targeted users in the geographical location of the advertiser's choice. An advertiser can be rest assured that his advertisement will be displayed only to the surfers who are interested in his kind of product/content.

· An advertiser can start running his campaign on a PPC search engine with a very nominal amount. For example, you can advertise on Google by paying a deposit of just $5! You can keep adding to this deposit if you feel your campaign is a success - else, you can just ditch it without burning any more of your hard-earned cash!

· Leading PPC search engines also track and analyze the visitors that head for the advertiser's site and report the same to the advertiser, thereby giving him valuable sales leads.

Now the cons:

· The bid rates for keywords on PPC search engines keep varying and the position of a PPC advertisement keeps changing depending on how other advertisers have bid. For example, if an advertiser has bid 50 cents on a keyword and the next advertiser comes in after two days and bids 51 cents, then the first advertiser's advertisement will show below the second advertiser's. This kind of bidding encourages a rate war, which may prove harmful for an advertiser's finances.

· Some keywords carry a very fancy price and the advertiser stands to lose a lot of cash if his advertisements don't work.

· PPC search engines display advertisements on their affiliate sites, who in their desperation to make money may resort to click fraud. This will dent a hole in the advertiser's pocket.

· Finally, the actual visitor-to-customer conversion ratio could be rather poor.

This was a primer about PPC search engines and how they go about their PPC advertisement campaigns. We trust this helped you understand more about the PPC search engines and their methodology.

Pay Per Click Advertising