What Is Pay Per Click? How 130 Characters Can Energize Your Marketing

What is pay per click and how can it help you boost your sales and generate leads for your company? Pay per click campaigns can help your company buy your way into the top of the search engine results pages. Understanding how pay per click advertising works can make all the difference in how much traffic your website gets and how well that traffic converts to profits for your company.

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay per click ads are the paid ads that appear at the top and right side of every search engine results page. Search engines select the ads that appear there by associated the ads with a keyword or key phrase related to the product or service advertised. Any time a search engine visitors types that exact keyword or phrase into the search box, the search engine chooses ads that correspond to that phrase. Your PPC ads may also be shown on other advertising networks and individual websites that participate in ad programs like Google’s Adsense.

What is Pay Per Click Pricing Like?

You only pay for your advertising when a search engine visitor actually clicks on your ad and goes through to your website. The price you pay for each click – called cost per click, or CPC – is based on a combination of the popularity of the keyword associated with it, how much others are willing to pay for it, how often people click on your ad as opposed to your competitors’ ads and how well the search engine thinks the PPC ad and keyword fits your website. You could pay anywhere from a few cents to many dollars per click, depending on the keywords you choose.

What is Pay Per Click’s Biggest Advantage?

Just as offline advertising has many facets – television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards and more – online marketing encompasses multiple ways of advertising your website. The best known is search engine marketing, which has two parts – organic search engine ranking and pay per click advertising. Both raise your website’s visibility by placing your website as high on the front page of the search results as possible. It can take months to build a high organic search engine ranking. A pay per click campaign, on the other hand, can get your website onto the front page in the paid results almost immediately. Website marketing companies often combine organic SEO efforts with a PPC ad campaign to leverage the advantages of each – the PPC campaign gets quick results, which helps boost the organic search ranking. When the organic SEO starts to take effect, the PPC campaign can be scaled back and let the organic search engine ranking take over.

What Can a Website Marketing Company Do for Me?

While the PPC ad structure on each search engine is designed so that any website owner can create and manage his own PPC ad campaigns, most companies find that it’s more cost effective to hire a pay per click management company or website marketing company to do the work for them. PPC experts can help you choose the best keywords, write strong PPC ads and manage your PPC ad campaigns to get the best possible results from your advertising dollars.