Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising Comes First
by Dan Grossman dan@awio.com
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.
----------------------
Dan Grossman of Awio Web Services LLC http://www.awio.com
reviews pay-per-click search engine services at http://www.searchenginereviews.com
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