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Exercise Equipment

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Part 1 (click here to go straight to Part 2)

This article covers:

  • What PPC advertising is

  • The basic features of PPC advertising

  • Tips to running a campaign

  • The best resource to learn how to use PPC like an expert and

  • A list of the most popular PPC networks.

If you are not sure what a PPC ad looks like go to this Google search page where you will see results for the term "home gym review". The listings on the left of the page are free listings, that is, they did not pay to be there but were ranked by Google's search engine according to relevancy (the first position is one of my sites).

On the right of the page you will see a vertical row of small boxes (up to 8 on one page), each with a heading, 2 lines of text and a web address. They are Google Adwords: Google's form of PPC advertising.

The same search results page on Yahoo! looks different because here the PPC ads, called "Sponsor Results", appear at the top of the results list, above the free listings. If you visit other search engines you will see this is the more common arrangement.

The following points are the basic features of PPC:

  • You start by deciding which PPC network you will use

  • When you creating your PPC ad you also decide for which keywords it will appear and how much you want to pay per click.

  • Every time someone does a search using one of your keywords, your ad will be displayed but it may not be on the first page; ranking mostly depends on what you are paying per click.

  • When a surfer clicks on your PPC ad, you will be charged anywhere from 5-10 cents to over $15 for a top spot amongst the most competitive keywords.

  • The surfer who clicked will arrive at the destination page you chose.

As you can see the concept is quite straight forward.

Yahoo Search has historically been the leader in this market. They manage PPC campaigns that are run on several of the Internet's largest search engines, including Yahoo!. The advantage of Yahoo Search is your ad will be seen by a wider audience because it will be listed in the sponsored results of msn.com, AltaVista, Yahoo!, CNN.com and InfoSpace. The disadvantages are that the minimum price per click is 10 cents (its 5 cents elsewhere), ads can take a few days to be approved and come online and any changes you make are also slow to be approved which makes real time testing of their performance difficult.

Google, as I mentioned earlier have also developed their own from of PPC advertising. They are becoming an increasingly preferred alternative to Yahoo Search for a number of reasons:

  • Your ads go online instantly.

  • You can run more than one ad at a time and they are rotated to receive equal exposure, the perfect conditions for testing the effectiveness of your ad copy.

  • Results of your ad's performance are almost in real time.

  • Changes to your ads also go online instantly.

  • The interface for managing your PPC ad campaigns is well organize and easy to use.

  • Price per click (bid) starts at 5 cents.

  • Your PPC ad may also be shown on the page of a relevant web site and therefore be in front of a more targeted audience.

There is are 2 additional features that really set Google apart from the competition:

Continue on to Part 2 - part 2 includes a tips section.