Pay Per Click Search Marketing: An Overview

Pay Per Click, or PPC marketing (also referred to as CPC, or Cost Per Click marketing) is based on the bid-for-placement advertising model. Pay Per Click search marketing essentially allows you to "pay" to have your web site listed on the SERP's (search engine results pages) of the major search engines, in the form of text links and/or ads. These links are often called Paid Listings, Sponsored Links, Sponsored Listings, and Featured Listings. In general, the higher the bid, the closer to the top of the Paid Listings results your web site advertisement will be placed.

For the major PPC engines, the top three to five bid positions are the ones that receive the highest amount of distribution across their search partner networks. When search engine visitors click on your CPC ad, they are sent to a page on your web site - the page that you have specifically designated as the landing page for that listing. As a CPC advertiser, you are only charged when someone clicks on your advertisement and therefore visits your web site.

The major players in this space include Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN, with quite a few smaller PPC engines out there that don't drive nearly the same amount of traffic as these three.

Most search engine advertisers who employ both SEO and PPC typically report very positive results. However, it is important to understand that a well-executed SEO plan over time usually delivers more visitors at a lower overall cost than a PPC campaign, as SEO is a fixed-cost expense that can continue to generate revenue for you via good rankings long after you've finished paying for your campaign, whereas PPC is a variable-cost expense that can escalate beyond your budget at any given time and stops sending you targeted traffic the moment you stop paying for listings. Similar to search engine optimization, PPC advertising is based on keyword searches. Therefore if your website sells dog collars, you would bid on keywords such as dog collars, leather dog collars, nylon dog collars, custom dog collars, etc. Because the efficacy of PPC campaigns is very easy to track (through ROI conversion tracking), this data can be extremely helpful in augmenting the efforts of an aggressive search engine optimization campaign. Using your PPC conversion data, you can determine which keywords and phrases perform the best for your given market, and can target your longer-term SEO efforts accordingly.

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