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Google Adwords: Are There Any Other PPC Programs Around?
Pay-per-click advertising has led the way to a new dimension of growth in inter-net marketing. The facts are that the search engines saw the opportunity to realize profits from internet marketing and they took it. Yes, but what difference does that make?
Pay-per-click advertising has led the way to a new dimension of growth in inter-net marketing. The facts are that the search engines saw the opportunity to realize profits from internet marketing and they took it. Yes, but what difference does that make?
Consider the old style of advertising. The company whose resources you were using to advertise, whether it was a television, newspaper, radio or webpage, would charge you a fee. For that fee your ad would be displayed for a set amount of time and anyone who wanted to could come see it.
Then someone started thinking that this type of system wasn’t really fair on the internet; after all, not all advertising venues are created equal. If an ad received a great deal of exposure due to the fact that the website it was posted on brought in a larger number of visitors every day, shouldn’t both parties profit from it?
But increasing the fees that they charge isn’t right either. The likelihood of traffic maintaining that rate is not good. The site might get to be known for charging too much for a small return.
Therefore, we have the beginnings of pay-per-click advertising.
Advertisers write ad copy for a product or service and use keywords they selected and analyzed with care to see if they would be profitable. Then their ads are given to the search engines to display.
Every time that a web browser does a search for that specific keyword, the advertisement will be displayed. Every time the advertisement was chosen and an internet browser made the long trip from advertisement to web page the search engine would receive a fee, generally less than a dollar, and both parties would benefit from the deal.
Search engines even carried the process so far as to allow those who were willing to pay a larger amount of money per click for their advertisement (those who “bid” the most on a specific keyword) would have their advertisement placed at the head of the pecking order so that it would be able to receive the greatest visibility and generate more traffic, thereby resulting in both parties turning a greater profit.
Now if asked to name a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tool most people will mention Google or Google Adwords; but Google is not the only search engine to offer PPC marketing.
Yahoo!, ABC Search, Search Feed, 7 Search, MIVA, Findology, Microsoft AdCenter and Ask.com, are less well known search engines that have ppc advertising services. With these alternatives to Google Adwords, marketers can test their advertising mettle and reap the profits found them.