Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click marketing has increased significantly in popularity over the past few years, due primarily to the execution of a very successful business strategy by Yahoo and the development of a similar program by Google. Pay per click marketing is now a major component of search engine marketing, and therefore should be considered as part of a complete online marketing program.

Pay per click marketing differs from traditional online advertising in three ways. First, the advertiser pays only for click-thru's or visitors sent to his site, and does not pay for ad impressions. Second, advertising is text-based. Ads resemble typical search engine listings, although they are usually designated as "Sponsored Listings" or something similar. Third, they are bid-based with no contractual commitment instead of a fixed-fee arrangement. This provides the advertiser with the flexibility to test various phrases.

Yahoo and Google's successful business strategy has been to purchase space at the top of results pages on most major search engines. There they display "sponsored listings" at the top of the results page of the searched keyword phrase. Yahoo displays its listing on Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, InfoSpace, and many smaller search engines and ISPs. Google displays its listings on Google, AOL, and AskJeeves. MSN is a recent player to the pay per click marketing scene, and displays its ads only on the MSN search engine.

Because of the ability to bid on many keywords, the keyword selection approach differs from search engine optimization (SEO). SEO dictates that site owners narrow the list of keywords, due to the requirement to support each keyword phrase with targeted pages. Pay-per-click does not require separate pages for each keyword. Therefore, the keyword list can remain expanded, with the most economical bids frequently occurring on keywords with fewer searches.

Advance Web Promotions can develop and manage a cost-effective pay-per-click campaign in conjunction with your search engine optimization program. Our process contains several steps.

1. Establish the value of each click-thru and the maximum bid amount.
2. Explore keyword development and price all potential keywords.
3. Choose the most cost-effective keyword phrases.
4. Implement and manage the pay per click program
5. Ad testing to improve campaign performance
6. Provide monthly reports showing visitors, costs, and conversions.
7. Ongoing consultation.

Pay per click advertising is billed monthly at a 10% of media costs, plus initial setup fees and deposits. Monthly service includes twice per week bid management, plus monthly reporting and consultation. A $150 minimum monthly cost applies for management services.

Contact us to discuss development of your pay per click marketing program.