Affiliates : Pay-per-click

Dec 24th 08 Posted by vinson in Affiliates

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is when an advertiser pays for each qualified click that sends a visitor through search engine to the advertiser’s web page. PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words or key word phrases chosen by the advertiser. There are many PPC advertising services available to choose from.

The PPC search engine also allows you to buy a top position in the search engine results for the particular keyword or phrase you choose. The PPC search engines can deliver targeted and qualified visitors to your web page at an economical advertising cost if you can handle the program carefully with a clear objective. PPC provides the advertiser with assurance that their ad is being delivered to the targeted audience.

PPC advertising uses a bidding process where the highest bidder or highest activity value, depending on the search engine, for a particular keyword or phrase will receive the top placement on the search engine results page. The PPC search engine will place your ad text in a special location on the results page when a user searches on your PPC keyword or phrase search term. Statistics show that over 80% of search engine users prefer the natural search results as opposed to sponsored ads. Nevertheless, the search engines deliver a huge amount of visitor traffic to the sponsored advertisers especially in the competitive keyword markets.

The typical PPC advertising campaign is based on the bid per click. For example, you bid $0.10 for a particular keyword or phrase that is accepted by the search engine. Whenever a search engine user clicks on your sponsored ad then you are charged $0.10 by the search engine. This amount is deducted from your account funds. Your placement in the search engine results page depends on the search engine. For Google, the placement is determined by your bid price and the ad’s click-through activity. For Yahoo, the placement is determined by your bid relative to other bids.

The best thing to do is to experiment with different PPC search engines to find the one that works best for you. You also need to spend the necessary time and effort to select the keyword or keyword phrase that has a profitable conversion rate for your specific web page. A higher conversion rate implies more profits to you.