Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing Introduction

This article serves as an introduction to PPC marketing. Getting a good ranking on a search engine is difficult, especially when the field you are in is saturated.

This is where PPC advertising comes in. Instead of waiting for a search engine to put you on the first page for a specific search term for free, you can buy a placement instead. The term pay-per-click is also called paid inclusion or paid placement.

Different search engines will place your paid for link in different areas, but to give you an example, Google and Yahoo place the ads to the right of the search results, whereas other lesser used search engines place the ads within the search results.

The price you pay for your ad will determine where on the list your ad will be placed. The higher you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will be placed. The term willing to pay is important because of two factors.

First, you don't pay until someone clicks on your ad. That means that you ad can be shown or served up many times before anyone actually clicks on your ad and visits your site. Depending on your ad copy or content and market, typical click through rates (CTR), or the number of times someone clicks on your ad is between 1% and 5%.

Secondly, the way the ad placements work is by a bidding system. Let's say you are willing to pay $1.00 for your ad. This gets you in the first ad placement spot because there is low competition. However, the next day, another company is decides that they are willing to pay $1.50 to get the first spot. Unless you are on top of things and checking your ad placements frequently, you run the risk of being bumped down the list. They call this a bidding process, and often the price you are willing to pay is called a bid.

Sometimes however, there is a large difference in price between the first and last ad placement spots. Usually what happens is that there are two or three large companies with large advertising budgets and they are all vying for the best spots. However, there may be, in Google's case, eight ad placement spots to be had on one page.

So to get on the top of the page, you might need to bid $5.00, the second spot might still cost about $4.50, and the third spot is still high at $4.25. However, after that, because there are no more large companies bidding, you might only need to pay $1.00. if you are willing to accept a lower ad spot, you can save alot of your advertising budget.

The great thing with PPC marketing is that due to all the analytics available, you are able to see if your ad campaign is making money or not.

So, overall PPC marketing or advertising costs money but can provide you with instant results as far as website visitors. However, if you keep track of your conversions, you can see if you paid advertisings are making you money if even if you are paying for your visitors.