Pay Per Click Campaigns

If I want to guarantee a top ranking on a search engine, and I have optimized it, is there anything else that I can do to improve the ranking if I’m not at the top? This question is asked everyday by marketing and sales managers with extensive online product or service commitment. The immediate answer is to become involved in a Pay Per Click campaign (PPC).

A PPC campaign is an advertising campaign that runs on a search engine’s results page. Payment is based on the number of times the ad is ‘clicked’ from the results list from users hitting the link. These campaigns are also known as search engine advertising operations.

Here is how it works. If you are interested in a particular keyword, then you bid for the privilege of using that keyword, and the Pay-per-click search engines use that keyword that relates to their site to structure the search. Companies submit their site’s descriptions and titles, along with a list of keywords to the engine. They also specify the amount of money that they’re willing to spend on each keyword. When a pay-per-click search engine processes the request, their results appear when someone searches for a keyword that the company paid for. This is where your payment determines the result. Your results ranking may depend on what others paid for that keyword. The result may be a high ranking or a low one. If you pay 22 cents for the keyword “stained glass,” while others pay only 17 cents, your site would move up in the rankings. If, on the other hand, you pay 5 cents, your rankings would rate low.

One company that does this is Paid Placements. It gives you the ranking on the results page depending upon your bidding amount. Now here is the kick. You don’t pay to list your site; you only pay for clicks or click thru’s. PPC is another mode of online advertising where the media is sold only on clicks not on impressions or actions taken. In other words, if the link is clicked this counts as a visit, even if the end user does nothing more than view the web site that he’s been taken to. So for many pay-per-click engines, companies will only pay when a visitor clicks on their web site from the search results.

The web site appears based on the search results generated from selected keywords that refer to your product or service. For each keyword you determine how much you are willing to spend on a per-click basis.

PPC campaigns are typically positioned at the right hand side of the search engines results page. This makes them visually easy to locate. They are often two to three lines of keyword text advertising campaigns that are linked to the page where advertiser wants visitors to land.

Many major search engines run PPC campaigns in addition to providing the search results. Some of the players are Google, Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista. Google’s program is called AdWords. It primarily delivers targeted pay per click ads via its own search engine and a host of partner sites as well.

Overture which is owned by Yahoo has a selection of specialized PPC advertising campaigns. These campaigns provide their customers with very good quality traffic addressing the needs of most website marketing opportunities.

But other small search engines like FindWhat and Sprinks offer direct paid placements. This makes the link position in a search engine appear directly proportional to your bidding amount. The higher the bid the better position you will get on the page and it will effectively determine the maximum click through rate from your customers.

Google AdWords is different because they use a mathematical formula to determine the rank of the results. This is done by counting the CTR (Click through Rate) as a percentage and multiplying that by your CPC (Cost-Per-Click) to determine the rank of the results. This allows a user to provide an opinion on how relevant and well-targeted ads for each keyword are. The user can change the keywords, and effectively determine the marketing campaign.

Share This