Pay Per Click
Pay per click Marketing is just as it states, you pay for each click that your web site receives. It sounds plain and seams reasonable on the surface but let’s take a deep look at Search Engine Marketing and who is the major Search Engine Marketing provider are and how this can be very costly with little return on investment (ROI). The three biggest providers of SEM are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. There are several other smaller PPC engines like miva.com (formally Findwhat.com), Kanoodle.com, Search123.com, 7search.com and Enhance.com. All have partner pages that display their paid results and the smaller SEM providers will charge considerably less than the other SEM providers. Remember SEM advertising is bid oriented so you decide how much you are willing to pay for each click. This decision could mean you are willing to be number one or number five or even lower. If you are not willing to spend for one of the top three places you will not get a lot of clicks.
Many changes have been implemented by Google AdWords and MSN adCenter. These include local advertising by picking cities or specific regions, the time of day or specific days of the week your ads may be displayed. Google will even allow you pick which sites your ads can placed and even allows graphical advertising by placing a graphical ad on specific partner web sites.
SEM / PPC Advantages are:
- Can be number one within hours of opening a SEM account if you are willing to bid for that top spot.
- Create specific landing pages for specific keywords. Pick specific keyword phrases and can customize the web site’s ads with a specific title and description for each keyword phrase.
- Test market a product or service by doing a short term online promotion without waiting for a search engine to index the new product or service.
- Many users will click on paid listings because they trust that a web site that is willing to pay for their business may be more legitimate and have more to offer.
- No web site optimization needed? Yahoo and MSN do not require landing pages or the web site to be optimized. Google began using a new spider to check the quality and content of landing pages and match the keywords with those landing pages. Web sites that are optimized for the products or services that they are bidding on will be receiving a better price per click than a web site that is not optimized. So an advertiser could be number one and pay less per click than number 3 simply because the web site is better optimized.
SEM / PPC Disadvantages are:
- PPC can be very costly. Some advertisers are willing to pay as much as $100 per click or more for some keyword phrases.
- PPC is a bid process so the company with deeper pockets can afford more phrases and can drive competition from the top spots.
- May require daily management to remain competitive and to make sure that your site is staying in the position you want.
- Possible click spamming can occur where companies hire people to click on web sites to waste competitor’s money and drive up click values. Some PPC providers are attempting to stop thispractice but in reality it is hard to stop click spamming.
- As much as 75% percent of search engines users will not click on PPC ads instead trust organic results. This is just an average figure. Some markets enjoy a higher percentage of PPC users than other markets like real estate industry.
- Almost 85% of the clicks may never spend more that 5 seconds on your landing page which means that 85% of the clicks are wasted.
Since SEM advertising is growing the value of search engines and it is one of the top areas of profitability in search engines. Since Internet users are becoming more educated and understand that SEM advertising can provide exactly what they may be looking for savvy Internet users will click on SEM results. Some research has shown that 25% of Internet users will click on a paid ad. SEM can be good or bad and the results of your campaign is based on how well it is managed and how much money you are willing to spend.
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