Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising Comes First
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.
There are several benefits to this advertising method that make
it useful to just about any web business, and make it so
important that it should be exploited to its fullest before
advertising in any other medium.
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.
* Ad text can be changed at any time.
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.