Are you interested in understanding how pay per click (PPC) advertising works? Perhaps you're exploring how it can fit into your marketing plan? Or, maybe you're just wondering how companies get to be listed as "sponsored" in the search engine results.

Well, the good news is that any site can be included there. With the right pay per click advertising management, PPC advertising offers some of the most targeted and economical advertising on the Web. Using sensible bidding strategies, your website will receive highly targeted web traffic and hit ROI goals. Partnering with Digital Road Consulting to manage your pay per click adverting will allow you to get these benefits while you stay focused on running your business.

Pay per click advertising (also known as sponsored listings, paid placement and pay for performance) works through a bidding process which allows those who bid higher for keywords to be listed higher in the results in the search engines. Generally, these results are found at the top, bottom and to the side of the regular results. The major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, all carry PPC advertising. Depending on the engine, the top three to ten bidders are listed on the first page of search results. Each time a searcher clicks on one of these ads they are sent to your website and you will be charged the amount you have bid.

PPC advertising is particularly attractive as it allows you to easily track the success of your advertising. Finally allowing businesses to throw out the old saying that "half of advertising dollars work, you just don't know which half". With PPC, you'll be able to track exactly which keywords, ad copy and landing pages are performing. You get this tracking in close to real time.

PPC advertising also allows you a great deal of control. With other advertising, there's often a large lead time. Heck, magazine or Yellow Pages can be months. With PPC you can start a campaign one hour, and stop it the next.

You don't have to commit to spending a large amount of money to start a PPC advertising campaign. In fact, it's a great idea to start with smaller amounts of money to test your keywords, ad copy and landing page conversions. If you find that you're making more than you're spending and hitting your target ROI, it only makes sense to increase your spend.

With the growth of PPC advertising you can't afford not to use it. Businesses are spending over 2.5 billions dollars a year on PPC advertising with forecasts of up to 8 billion by 2008. As more businesses move into this medium the price for keywords will rise. By getting in now, you'll enjoy lower prices to achieve similar rankings. And that will give you a leg up on your competitors.

Pay per click advertising allows you to determine exactly where you'll appear in the search results. Not ranking high enough? Simply increase your bid. With SEO, you can't ever guarantee a certain ranking. In fact, you can't pay for a position at all in the natural results. Additionally, it's much faster to get your website listed when using PPC. In fact, you can get into the rankings in minutes. With SEO, it can take months.

Depending on the engine, searchers click on the natural listings, which SEO targets, from 70-85% of the time. That means searchers click PPC ads between 15-30% of the time. If you don't implement PPC advertising you're missing out on up to 30% of web searchers. That's a lot of potential customers! That's why I always suggest SEO and PPC be done in together.


Contact Digital Road Consulting today to get your pay per click advertising campaign going and begin getting targeted search engine traffic to your website.