Pay Per Click Advertising Services

What's Pay Per Click?

All major search engines offer some pay-per-click functionality, both as a revenue grab, and as a means to allow advertisers access to a market they may not be able to reach via direct search. In short, Pay-Per-Click lets you buy your way around the normal ranking rules for a fee.

It's called Pay-Per-Click specifically since the fee depends significantly on the amount of people who actually click your listing. This is in opposition to "pay-per-impression" advertising, where you're charged for everyone who sees a copy of your message. Most advertisers prefer pay-per-click pricing models, since they only pay for results. However, pay-per-impression works well for "non-interactive" messages, like brand-awareness campaigns.

There are really two different marketplaces for Pay Per Click advertisements:

The first is "Search PPC". You might recognize them as the right column, or yellow-highlighted portions, of a Google search. Here, it's basically a seperate set of results, independent of the normal ranking factors. The top results are generally stacked by who will pay the most at a constant "auction" marketplace. In some search engines, you'll find paid listings mixed with the "natural" listings, or even not shown at all. Some very low-tier search engines ONLY show sponsored listings; however, they are not mainstream products.

The second is "Content PPC". You may recognize those cute little "Ads by Google" boxes on your favourite website. Rather than buying space on a search engine's results, you're buying space on relevant pages. While the sorting is still based keywords, the matching logic is different. Since the customer is not directly providing a keyword, ads are generally matched by a computer analysis of the page's subject matter. In general, content PPC is cheaper since it reaches users who are less actively seeking a link, and matching tends to be fuzzier.

Why Pay Per Click?

Organic rankings appear to be the gold standard. The cost is generally low, and they're retained until someone pushes you off. In contrast, the #1 spot you get with pay-per-click disappears once you stop paying. Why would you want it? The immediacy and control of PPC can give you benefits you find difficult to get in organic traffic alone.

Research. Do you need to know, quickly, how 5,000 customers will respond to your site? Let people try it by buying 5,000 visits on the keywords you expect to rank for in a few months. Similarly, different keywords can be compared in a hurry by dropping many paid visitors on at once. Does "Honolulu Tour" convert better than "Oahu Tour?" On 100 visitors per month, it's virtually impossible to tell. With a large number of paid visits, the statistical noise created by a handful of exceptional cases disappears, and the real comparison is clear.
Juicing Analytics. It's beneficial, according to recent research, to have good page analytics-- low bounce rate, high time on page and interaction. Google recognizes good analytics as a likely sign of quality, and adding motivated paid visitors, driven by the keywords you've selected, can help boost your statistics.
Short-term promotion. You may only need visitors to your "September Special" page one month per year, so a temporary traffic spike can be worth the cost.
Seeking specific markets. In some markets, you may do better sitting on a sponsored result, than trying to compete with extremely dominant players. You might not be able to beat Intel.com for "Processors", but you can grab the #1 PPC spot for your computer shop.
Targeted marketing. Even if you could rank for "Plumber", you probably only want to rank in one city. PPC advertising can be very finely grained to a specific geographic area.

A Professional Difference

Pay-Per-Click can be a risky game to do yourself. There are some important skills to getting it right:

Keyword Selection. It's not about the cheapest word alone, because who really wants to advertise for "purple monkey dishwasher?" The key factor is recognizing what words will actually convert into sales, and which bring browsers, who cost you a click but don't buy. Web-Op can do the research so you buy the 30-cent words with the high conversion rate, not the $10-per-click word with low conversion rates.

Site Design. Some PPC networks -- Google's in particular-- will offer cheaper ads for sites with higher percieved quality. Why spend more when adding the right content and layout can make a $2 click a $1 one?

Account Management. Don't spend all day watching an account profile, and making adjustments. Trust experienced experts.

Web-Op can get you more bang for your buck in the pay-per-click marketplace.
Contact Us for a Quote Today.