“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half..."
This old advertising cliché, usually attributed to Lord Leverhulme, illustrates the basic problem with advertising which usually involves a large outlay of cash to determine whether the advertising medium and campaign strategy are right for the particular product.
The beauty of ‘pay-per-click’ internet advertising is that costs are only incurred on a payment-by-results basis—the result, in this case, being a click-through to your web site where a more comprehensive ‘sales pitch’ can be presented.
Adwords is one of the pay-per-click products offered by Google whose various worldwide sites process around 37 billion searches per month (Source: www.comscore.com, August 2007).
Additionally, there is a large group of websites and other products, such as email programmes and blogs, that have partnered with Google to display Adwords ads.
Advertisers have the option of running their ads on Google as well as this Google 'content' Network for no extra cost.
The idea is to create a series of small advertisements (as many as you like) of the type displayed down the right-hand side of every Google search results page—multiple advertisements are used in rotation.
You then ’bid’ on a number of keywords (as many as you like) setting the maximum amount that you are prepared to pay for a click-through.
The position of your advertisement, within the relevant search results, is determined by the ’bid’—a 10p-per-click bid will rank above a 5p-per-click bid (the actual charge is reduced to 1p above the next bidder on the list).
The precise rules on this bidding process have changed over the last couple of years but the fine detail is beyond the scope of this article.
There are a number of tools to assist with the appropriate pricing of keywords and with campaign management—costs can be controlled with a daily budget and campaigns may be paused or deleted at any time.
Several campaigns may be run simultaneously.
The advertising can also be targeted by country or by local area—payment is by direct debit from a credit card or (recently-added) a bank account.
In my experience, these campaigns can be quite cost-effective though depending very much upon the product—the point being that it costs very little to find out.
I agree with you that the beauty of ‘pay-per-click’ internet advertising is that costs are only incurred on a payment-by-results basis—the result, in this case, being a click-through to your web site where a more comprehensive ‘sales pitch’ can be presented. thanks for this post.
-faith-
Posted by: ppc advertising services | January 12, 2009 at 09:59 AM