You’ve probably heard of PPC by now. If you haven’t, it stands for Pay Per Click. The name really sums it up. It’s a form of internet advertising where the advertiser pays somebody for the action of a click. There are other variations of this such as Pay Per Call, or Pay Per Lead. Again, the name really describes them best, so I think you can figure out what the other two are.
Why do people use PPC?
Well, why do you want traffic. If you can make money off your website, or have some kind of view you want to get across, you probably want traffic. It is like no other form of advertising. If you do a print ad, or a tv commercial, you have alot of expense to produce that ad, or tv spot, and then you probably have a hard time telling if it was successful or not. With PPC, you set your budget which could be a few dollars a day. You tell the search engine what kind of visitors you want to get, and then if they send someone to your website, you pay them an amount that you had agreed on earlier.
Where does the traffic come from?
When you buy PPC traffic, it can come from Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, or joeswidgets.com. You have control to say where you want it from, and how much you are willing to spend to be in the different places. With Google, if someone searches for Blue Widgets, and you have that keyword in your account, your ad will appear ranked against everyone else that has that same keyword in their account (no, you aren’t the only one). If you tell google that they can distribute their ad to their Content Network, your ad can also appear on joeswidgets.com, because Joe wants to make some money writing about widgets.
Why does it work?
Everyone can be a winner here. There is a very low cost to entry, and it’s an opportunity for everyone to be happy. You buy PPC, that get’s you traffic, which hopefully makes you some money (unless you are doing it wrong). Google makes some money (which allows them to dominate the world), and Joe, over at Joeswidgets.com, has an opportunity to write about something he loves. I’ve left out one important person. The CUSTOMER. None of this works without them. If you don’t know your customer and what they are looking for, they have no incentive to click on any of your ads. I can’t stress this enough, KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER, and make sure everything you do has them in mind.