The desire of every business and Internet marketer is to achieve a high position for a chosen keyword in the search engines. This means that when potential customers search on a phrase which you have targeted, they will find your website on the first page of the results returned by any search engine.
In previous blogs I have explained the basics of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This article looks at the advantages and disadvantages of using PPC.
Pay per click advertising does offer some advantages over more conventional advertising techniques. Because you have control over your web site, you have control over who visits it. That is the nature of the Internet and effectively how it operates. Because of this, it is possible to target your ads quite precisely, so that your adverts fit specific searches that people make. However, as outlined below there are disadvantages as well.
Advantages
PPC can work instantly - After you undertake PPC companies, your website can start to receive visitors in a matter of hours.
Increased traffic - The money being made in the PPC industry can be high and website owners as well as bloggers are monetizing their sites by publishing these text ads in addition to their other affiliate programs. This means that your ad can be placed onscreen and in front of a million eyes the first week or month, depending on your daily budget.
Reliability - When you apply search engine optimization (SEO) to your websites, you are not guaranteed of a great placement in the search results. You can have the world's greatest website, filled with lots of useful information, this will not help you if your SEO is done badly, other companies are paying lots of PPC dollars for your top keywords, or a search turns up ten million websites with the same or similar information.
Stability - There are billions of websites on the internet that are vying for a good position in the first few pages of a search result. To get around this, many webmasters attempt to cheat and put plans in place to get around search engine rules. When caught, the websites are penalized to the point that some of them are removed completely and are no longer indexed. With pay per click advertising, as long as you keep paying, you will stay in the search results.
Disadvantages
Expensive - Pay per click is an advertising system that works by having visitors click on ads that they see on a website or search engine result page. These clicks can quickly add up to a lot of money in a short amount of time. New users are the most susceptible to large charges. After they setup an account, they can come back in a few hours or even the next day, and find that their maximum daily limit has already been met. In some instances, errors or glitches have kept their accounts going long after the daily limit and their accounts are charged hundreds of dollars in a very short amount of time.
Click Fraud - This type of fraud has been a huge concern for those involved in text ads and PPC. Some publishers will attempt to get more money by clicking on the ads on their own websites. This can quickly lead to them being banned from the companies but in some cases, other publishers have family and friends do the clicking for them.
Accidental Clicks - You can also lose money from false clicks when a publisher places their text ads in places that can make visitors assume that the links are part of the actual website. Visitors can also click accidentally by not paying attention to what they are looking at. These clicks mean that the visitor hits the back button or closes the page without paying much attention to where the ad has lead them to. You lose money, and you have not gained a new reader or customer.
No Guarantees - Paying for PPC does not mean that you will make money from the clicks accrued. Millions of users click on these links and then they leave the page. The only guarantee is that you will receive a few clicks, but that does not always translate into sales.
Heavy Competition - When using text advertising, it is wise to find keywords and phrases that are not popular. Large companies are using PPC and with their high budgets, they have made it hard for the average small or medium business owner to afford widely known keywords. You can do research on specific keywords only to find that the one you would like to use has a rate of £75. This is no exaggeration and this means that just five clicks would cost you £260 with no guarantee that you will receive even a single sale.
The bottom line
PPC can be a great advertising tool, but you have to do your homework and figure out how best to use it and firstly check whether it's the right tool for you to use.
My advice is to never undertake a PPC campaign without first doing a thorough traffic analysis not only of hits and visitors to your site but also of the search volume and other key indicators. The information gathered from the analysis will tell you whether a PPC campaign is a good option for your business.
This analytical and staged way of working, offered by my company, has certainly benefited the clients I work with.
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