Introduction to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

What is pay per click?

In case PPC advertising is new to you, here’s a brief explanation. Millions of searches are made on the Web every day, encompassing every conceivable kind of product and service.

The results of these searches appear in the free listing, occupying most of the search engine results page, and in smaller areas at the side, top or bottom of the page, sometimes known as “sponsored ads”. It is very difficult indeed to get a web site to the top of the free listings, which is the reason for the existence of pay per click advertising. These smaller areas are reserved for PPC advertisers.

Pay per click advertisers bid an amount of money for position among the sponsored ads. The higher your bid is, the higher your ad’s position will be. You pay only when a searcher clicks on your ad, and goes to your “landing page”. This is the page you want your visitors to see first.
The amount you pay is not necessarily the amount of your bid; it is slightly more than that of the next lower bid. It may sound simple, but you can easily lose a lot of money if all the elements of the science of pay per click management are not in place. The aim of every PPC advertiser is to achieve the best position for the lowest cost. Constant tweaking is required to maintain this balancing act.

As just a couple of examples, if you want to outdo your competitors in your local area, you can gain an edge over them very cheaply with a Google AdWords PPC campaign, simply because you won’t be competing with the entire world. Similarly, your ad would have a greater chance of success with “Cobra 427 for sale” than with “Cars for sale”. In short, the more narrow your target market is, the easier, and therefore cheaper, it is to reach them.

Is your web site good enough to make the most of pay per click advertising?
Your landing pages must be finely tuned to the search phrases people are likely to use to find your product or service. This applies to PPC advertising as well as to search engine optimisation (SEO) for a high position in the free listings, in order to keep your pay per click cost low. This fact is all too often overlooked.

Web SEO PPC is part of the Abacus pay per click service. Because our success is measured by yours, we may suggest a rewrite of the text, and even a radical redesign, if your site is very PPC-unfriendly. If you don’t have a web site at all, we can create one for you quite quickly, the style reflecting the nature of your business.