PPC - Pay Per Click campaigns essentially come in two flavours; keyword (sponsored match) or content match.

Keyword campaigns involve bidding on keywords or keyword phrases and result in an ad containing a link to your site being displayed along with the natural results on search engine results pages. Search engines display your ads for any search terms that they determine as relevant to your keyword (using their sophisticated algorithms).

Content match campaigns involve the display of advertisements placed on relevant websites, newsletters and e-mails. Content match ads are provided on third-party websites that serve the ads either vertically or horizontally on the page.

Content match is determined by the words/phrases, etc. that appear on the page. For example, Google's AdSense system automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (either text or image ads) relevant to your audience and your site content. Content Match requires the identification of themes rather than specific search terms. This requires advertisers to think differently when creating a Content Campaign. Terms that would never be applied in a keyword search campaign can prove extremely effective in a Content Campaign.

Advertisers don't pay simply to appear on search result or content pages; they pay only when someone actually clicks on their ad and is taken to the landing page on their website. The amounts they pay are determined by the fee or bid agreed.

There are other styles of Pay Per Click/PPC products that target product or service searches and product comparison sites. Search engine companies may participate in more than one category. PPC programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for websites that display the ads, only when a user clicks on the advertisement itself.

Throughout the net, there are more than 500 search engines offering PPC advertising schemes (sometime referred to as CPC or Cost per Click). From meta search engines that incorporate traffic from other engines and online sources through to niche engines focusing on more specific categories or topics, PPC is proving an extremely popular and successful marketing resource.

The most well-known PPC search engine is from Google; Adwords is their PPC advertising program. Launched in 2000, Google AdWords has now firmly established itself as the world's leading Internet PPC product. AdWords offers Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. In 2007, revenues for AdWords, Google's flagship advertising product, totalled a staggering $16.4 billion.

Google AdWords has by far the widest coverage of any of the PPC providers, offering advertisers a global reach through an individual system. This breadth of coverage offered by Adwords PPC is particularly beneficial for more specialised businesses that might not receive a great deal of search traffic from the smaller PPC providers. The minimum Cost-Per-Click for a keyword on Adwords PPC can be a little as 1p, making AdWords ideal for editorial or websites that don't enjoy huge traffic and sales. Other PPC providers tend to have a 10p minimum Cost-Per-Click.

In some market sectors, bidding on Google AdWords can be very competitive, especially on the more popular keywords. In some cases it might be possible to search the market and find better value elsewhere. The system can also be a little complicated, especially to the inexperienced; ranking position for example, being determined through a combination of bid price and Click-Through-Rate of the advert.

You can bid high for a specific keyword, but because the advertisement has had a low Click-Through-Rate in the past, it may still appear less frequently than an ad placed by a lower bidder with a higher Click-Through-Rate. As with the complete PPC campaign lifecycle, certainly for a campaign that is more involved than the simplest of efforts, it's probably wise that it is managed and administered by professionals. Not only so that technical issues are handled properly, but also so that budgets are controlled and not spent ineffectively.

If you don't have a professional PPC partner, such as Click Consult, that is monitoring your account and you aren't managing the campaign closely you may start to suffer low CTR (Click-Through-Rate), which hurts your quality score and will increase CPC (Cost-Per-Click). Worse still, you may spend a lot of money on wasted clicks.

After the dominant player, Google Adwords, the next most popular PPC services internationally are Ask.com, Baidu, LookSmart, Microsoft adCenter, MIVA, Superpages.com, Yahoo Search Marketing and Yandex.

Minimum prices per click, usually referred to as Costs-Per-Click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword list. Some PPC companies (including Adwords) offer keywords from as little as US$0.01, although seriously popular search terms can command much higher rates on the more popular search engines.

The top 10 PPC companies produce over 85% of PPC traffic, resulting in increased competition that pushes bid prices higher than less popular alternative PPC engines. Whereas once competitive bids commanded rates of $0.35-$0.60, they now range from $1.00-$5.00 per click or more. In part, these rises are due to the recognition by businesses of the highly targeted nature of PPC and its ROI.

At Click Consult, we have a wealth of experience in managing Pay-Per-Click advertising for clients on programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. We provide our clients with a range of professional and highly effective services, addressing all the important aspects involved in running a successful PPC campaign.

A successful Pay Per Click/PPC campaign involves:

• Defining business objectives for the campaign.
• Keyword identification (to generate the most traffic for the lowest cost).
• Crafting well-written, relevant copy. Each ad will be associated with a particular keyword and displayed beneath a link to your site on a search results page.
• Setting up landing pages with suitable calls to action. The all-important destinations of your PPC clickthroughs.
• Running the campaign with suitable PPC partners to ensure coverage and value for money on keywords - Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing for example. Install conversion tracking systems.
• We monitor campaigns and adjust them to ensure optimum performance.

To discuss how a Pay Per Click/PPC can win business for your company, contact us today.

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