If you have been looking into what is required to drive more visitors to your website, you will probably be asking yourself what is Pay Per Click Marketing and can it help you? The answer is maybe - it depends how well you use it.1 Mar
Can Pay Per Click Marketing Help Me?
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Pay Per Click Marketing, or PPC Marketing or even just PPC for short, is the name given to promotional systems that allow you to buy targeted traffic for your website. You might buy PPC services from a search engine or directly from a content site. But with PPC, instead of paying every time that the advert is displayed you pay every time someone clicks on the advert and visits your site. So it is in the interest of the advertiser to make sure that your advert is noticed and is not hidden away in the corner where it will not be seen.
Just by having a website alone will not get you lots of new visitors or even sales usually. You have to work to market the site so that people are arriving there, hopefully people who are already interested in your product. You might like to promote the site through social network marketing such as Twitter and Facebook, or through more traditional forums and bulletin boards. Also, search engine optimisation goes a long way to getting your site listed higher on the search engines and hopefully a steady stream of visitors arriving.
So how does Pay Per Click Marketing work? Well you pay sites which already have high volumes of traffic , or which are part of networks with high volumes of traffic, to display your adverts. These adverts can either be text or picture adverts, depending on the network. By picking carefully search terms, or keywords, you can target what sites you adverts are displayed on. There is little point placing an advert for financial services on a website aimed at children, for example.
And this is where pay per click marketing excels. You can carefully choose your target keywords and from there what sites your advert will be displayed on. This is because the search engines will match your keywords that you have selected to the search terms that the visitor has typed in. If they are searching on home insurance and that is what you provide, there is a chance that they might click your advert instead of one of the natural search engine results.
The same happens to content sites. The search engine or whoever is running the PPC marketing system will trawl the individual pages of the website and work out what adverts are most suited to these pages.
In addition to this, Google have increased the cleverness of their PPC scheme, called Adsense. You might have noticed the effects if you ever borrow a machine off someone else and browse that for a while. Google is also tracking interests on that machine and trying to provide adverts that the person is most likely to be interested in overall. Whilst this goes against the grain for targeting closely to the webpage being browsed, it means that the advert is very closely tailored to the person doing the browsing.
All of these systems are very clever and constantly evolving. They are aimed at getting the best adverts onto the best websites to ensure the maximum exposure and the maximum clicks on the adverts. They are also brilliant for new websites that have not had time to get exposure on the search engines and for which search engine results are a thing of the future. With PPC, your advert can be displaying in ten minutes from now.
Keith Lunt
