Pay Per Click advertising online
For Best Results, Pay Your Way to the Top
By Jim Mroczkowski
Nov. 2004 (all links accurate at time of Publishing)
© R-Design, Inc.

Like any business, online business involves a certain amount of (hopefully friendly) competition. Once you have designed your site and figured out how best to position yourself in the marketplace, the next step is perhaps the scariest one of all: putting yourself out there and hoping your customers can find you among all the other sites that are clamoring for good placement in the search engines. A large part of the work you do on your site will be defined by this step, but what a lot of first-timers don’t realize is that there’s more than one way to get your site seen.

A lot of companies on the internet stake their livelihoods on a well-placed listing in Google, and with good reason: top listings for a few of the right keywords can make a huge difference in your bottom line. But why limit yourself? Why put all of your eggs in one algorithmic basket and risk being #1 today and #49 tomorrow? Why wait two months to see results when you need customers now? There are lesser-known methods of search engine exposure that can bring you the eyeballs you need in no time with a minimum of expense and without making any additional changes to your site.

Pay per click advertising (PPC, also called pay-for-performance) gives you the chance to control exactly where, when, and how your site is listed in the search engines for as long as you are willing to pay for the privilege. When you sign up for an account with a PPC engine, you provide them with the site you’re advertising and the exact written description you want your listing to have when it comes up. You provide the keywords and phrases you want your site listed under. Your listings get sent out as written to the major search engines (often instantly) and you pay the engine for every click your ad receives. (Hence the name, “pay per click.”) Every major search engine, from Yahoo and Google on down, includes some PPC listings in its search results.

How much do you pay per click? Even that is largely up to you. When you do a PPC ad campaign with an engine, you are essentially bidding on placement. Let’s say you want to be well listed for the phrase “light fixtures.” You sign up with a PPC engine, write some enthralling “light fixtures” ad copy for your listing, and take a look at the other sites currently advertising for the phrase. You see that the #1 listing in the PPC engine is paying $0.10 per clickthrough to their site. You enter in a bid of $0.11 per clickthrough, and just like that you now have the #1 listing for “light fixtures.”

The upsides to this approach are obvious. Your link and description say exactly what you want them to, allowing you to present yourself to customers exactly the way you want to be seen. You can make changes to your site’s placement and see those changes implemented almost immediately, and you don’t need to change so much as a comma on your actual site to make it more “engine friendly.” You can control exactly where (and for what) you rank.

The downsides of pay per click? Well, you have to pay per click, for one thing. Natural search engine listings are harder to attain and harder to maintain, but the visitors that result from them theoretically cost you nothing. While most PPC campaigns cost a few cents per visitor, a few of the more competitive keywords can cost dollars per click simply because that is what the market is willing to pay for those visitors. Speaking of those competitors, they are the other chief downside to PPC advertising; though you may outbid everyone and become #1, that #1 will only last until someone else comes along and outbids you, forcing you to outbid them. If your keywords are popular, a certain amount of vigilance will be required.

Though each PPC program has its own nuances, getting the hang of each one is surprisingly simple. There are dozens of smaller engines out there, but your best bets are with these major players:

Overture (www.overture.com) is the oldest major PPC engine in the marketplace. Overture PPC listings are syndicated out to hundreds of other sites online and are included in Yahoo’s search results, making Overture one of the best places to advertise online.

The other major player in the PPC marketplace is Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/). Like Overture, Google syndicates its Adwords listings out to countless partner sites, ensuring you exposure beyond Google.com itself. Adwords is, however, a little faster and easier to use, making it an ideal place to begin your first foray into web marketing.