Buying your way to the top

Search engines are crucial to any business with an on-line presence, with recent statistics estimating that they now account for over 90% of all traffic referrals to websites. Not so long ago, to achieve an optimal position in search engine rankings for your business you would have to spend hours considering page optimization, meta-tag strategies, keywords and content relevancy. Today, if you are prepared to dig deep into your pockets, you can achieve a top ranking on a search engine with a lot less effort, using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). The popularity of PPC advertising on search engines has grown considerably over the course of last year with businesses increasingly turning to search engines to generate targeted website visitors. The PPC market now accounts for 36% of the UK’s online marketing spend and there are predictions that the PPC market will grow by a staggering 334% during the next 2 years to reach over 7 billion dollars by 2007.

So how does it work? Pay Per Click is an online advertising format that allows you to buy your way to the top of search results pages for search phrases relevant to your business. Businesses buy advertising on specific search keywords or phrases and are then charged each time a person clicks through to their website. The order the advertisements appear usually depends on how much the advertisers are willing to pay. Most search engines operate a bidding system, although some search engines such as Google, use a combination of highest bids and popularity of the adverts (calculated by click through rates) in order to rank the advertisements.

To bid you have to open an account with a pay per click engine such as Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing (previously Overture), select keywords or key phrases relevant to your product or service, and then place a bid on each word or phrase to secure your position on the search rankings. The higher the position, the higher the cost. If you place the highest bid for a specific keyword or phrase then you rank number one in these paid listings. PPC advertisements are usually text adverts. On Google, the PPC listings show up in the Adwords column on the right-hand side of the screen whilst on other engines such as Yahoo, they are displayed as ‘sponsored listings’ in the same column as the natural search results.

The benefits of PPC advertising are numerous. In theory, Pay Per Click advertising allows you to advertise only to people who have actually expressed an interest in the product or service you are offering. You only pay for visitors to your site and if you are savvy with your keywords PPC search engines can provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Click through rates can be as little as £0.04. PPC engines can generate immediate traffic for your website and if you’re in the top spot you are guaranteed a higher profile than your competitors. It’s also fast, whereas other search engine marketing can take weeks or even months to take effect, you can implement and just as importantly, adjust PPC campaigns, in a matter of hours to react to new market opportunities. Unlike many other forms of advertising, it is both easy to measurable and control.

But PPC advertising can have its drawbacks. As PPC advertising’s popularity increases so does the demand for popular keywords and phrases, this in turn means more competitive bidding and higher click through costs. It is easy to become embroiled in a bidding war over a particular keyword or phrase and you can end up spending far more than your potential return.

One of the biggest threats to PCC advertising is click fraud. Click fraud involves sending fraudulent clicks to Cost Per Click Advertisers. The clicks can be artificially generated via automated technology methods (such as hitbots) or via manual clicking. As with most fraud the ultimate motivation of the majority of Pay Per Click fraudsters is money. Some PPC Search Engines and networks are partially dependent on affiliate’s sites to generate traffic for their advertisers. These engines syndicate their customer’s advertisements so they will appear on the sites of their affiliates. When somebody clicks on an advert, both the affiliate site and the PCC search engine share the revenue generated, so the more clicks the affiliates site generates, the more money it makes. Of course the majority of affiliates are trustworthy sites, but there are others, less legitimate, who are seeking to line their pockets by generating fake clicks.

Cut throat business competition has also been known to motivate Pay per Click fraud. Some PPC advertisers have been exposed to artificial clicks generated by their advertising competitors. The competitor who is perpetrating the fraud hopes that the advertisers costs will increase to such a point that they lower the bids on their keywords or stop bidding on a word altogether. Either way, the cost for the word goes down, giving the fraudulent competitor an opportunity to increase their ranking on the page at a lower cost.

PPC search engines are taking active steps to reduce the amount of click fraud that takes place. Many now have systems in place to screen questionable clicks. For example, by examining the IP addresses where the clicks originated from; too many clicks coming from the same IP in a short period of time may indicate suspicious activity. A number of search engines also provide click fraud auditing and refund services.

So is Pay Per Click advertising right for your business? For small to medium sized organisations that don’t have infinite marketing budgets, PPC advertising can be particularly useful, especially when used on specific short term campaigns. If you need to generate an immediate buzz, you can start a PPC campaign within hours and can easily adjust your message in mid-campaign if required. If you operate in a niche sector or can use highly specific key words or phrases to generate traffic, PPC can be extremely cost effective particularly when compared to other forms of advertising.

To ensure that your PPC advertising is as effective as possible, take time to write a unique advert for each search phrase relevant to your business rather than creating one ad for all of your search phrases. It does mean extra work, but it will pay dividends as adverts that are aligned with the corresponding search term receive more clicks, which means more targeted traffic. Also, obvious as it may seem, make sure that your advert sends visitors to the most appropriate page of your website. For example, if you place an advert for a particular product in your online shop, don’t send your visitor to your home page and force them to find what they’ve just searched for.

When implementing a PPC advertising campaign it is important to establish quantifiable short or medium term goals and monitor, measure and evaluate the results. Hopefully sales via your website will increase as a result of the campaign but don’t sit back and relax; fine tune your campaign to make it even more successful. Find out which key words or phrases are generating the most business and drop or lower your bids on those that aren’t working. Don’t make the mistake of concentrating purely on click through rates. With PPC advertising it can be too easy to get carried away with the number of visitors to your site and cost per visit, when it’s conversions not clicks that you should be counting. Pay Per Click advertising works best when the focus is on selling to customers rather than buying visitors.