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Pay Per Click Advertising

Because it is so hard to achieve reliable, consistent results in the organic search engine listings, the alternative is to use sponsored listings, otherwise known as pay per click (PPC) advertising. Such adverts, which are search-related and content-related, appear all over the web, on numerous websites as well as in many search engines. Many people say that PPC does not work. However, this is because a PPC campaign needs to be run properly - it requires day-to-day management to alter daily budgets, bid amounts, advertisement text, bid-words, etc etc.

Google Adwords and Yahoo-Overture are the really important providers of sponsored listings. Recently Ask Jeeves have developed their own sponsored listings system instead of using Google AdWords. MSN are currently developing theirs so as to reduce dependence on Yahoo-Overture. There are also indpendent providers of search-related and content-related advertising such as Miva.

Fundamentally you are bidding for positions in the sponsored listings section of the search engines for certain keyphrases which you choose. You produce a small advert which appears whenever the keyphrase in question is entered by a user in the search engine. It is a kind of auction for positions. The more you are willing to "pay for a click", the higher your advert is likely to be placed above others when that keyphrase is used. Moroever, your adverts appear on many websites based on the actual content of the web pages on which they appear. For example, if you are bidding for the phrase "Scottish Herbs" this will appear not just on the search engines when that phrase is entered, but also on various web pages which host PPC ads, wherever the words "Scottish" or "herbs", or other related words, appear on those web pages. You may notice that I host Google Ads on my site - I dont make much money out of this - I do it to demonstrate how content match works - have a look at the ads appearing on this page and see how they relate to the words on this page. You may well see my competitors appearing here, but I trust that you will use me in the end! When you look at other pages on my site have a look at the Google Ads appearing there.

This seems in principle quite simple. However, it is a tricky affair to manage because:

1. You may have to keep adjusting your bids to rival the competition
2. Your adverts need to be finely tuned in relation to the keyphrases which they are related to, otherwise users will not click on them
3. If users do not click on your adverts, the PPC provider may ask you to pay more for some of your clicks, ask you to modify some of your adverts, or forbid you from bidding on certain poorly performing keyphrases.
4. You have to specify a maximum budget - usually a daily amount - and when this is depleted your adverts do not show until the next day.
5. The pages on your website to which the adverts are directed must meet certain standards.
6. The PPC management interfaces can be quite complex and there are a plethora of options which can be confusing.

It requires a lot of time and attention and experience to handle these matters, especially in the first few weeks of your campaign. This is why I offer to do it for you. The advantages over search engine optimisation are significant:

1. Costs can be kept very low - you set the budget, and minimum budget levels are usually quite reasonable.
2. You cannot cheat the system so you wont be competing against cheating as you may well be with search engine optimisation.
3. The adverts will appear and will be seen by users, so long as you set sensible bids - often quite cheap.
4. You gain a very good picture of search engine user behaviour, and you are able to gather valuable statistical data about how popular certain keyphrases are.
5. The adverts do not just appear on search engines but all over the web.
6. The adverts are context-relevant, within, of course, the inevitable limitations of an automated system.

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