Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the commonly used internet advertising methods. Advertisement (ads) are displayed based on contextual keywords or geographical location depending on the configuration of the advertisers. Advertising networks allow advertisers to customize their ads with specific keywords for the websites or products they want to advertise. The keywords and location setting allow an ads to appear on a page or search results depending on what customers are searching for in the search engines, what they are reading, or their location. Most PPC advertising networks let advertisers to specify their specific cost-per-click (CPC) for every ads and also their daily budget. If the daily budget has been reached, no more ads from the advertiser will appear until the next day. Since there are so many competition in the PPC advertising especially for popular keywords, a lot of advertising networks implies Click Bidding where the highest CPC bid for a keyword will have the top position on the advertising space. This is the major problem for small advertisers that have small budget where they have to compete with large corporations with unlimited amount of budget. Keywords research is very important in PPC advertising to avoid large competition that will sink low budget ads. PPC advertising is an investment therefore it is very important to convert traffic from the ads into profit. The best practice is to have a presentable website contents and layout that will lure visitors to buy products or make any profitable actions before starting to invest on the PPC ads. Listed here are some of the commonly used PPC advertising networks:
Google AdWords
Google AdWords
AdWords is Google’s advertising program that offers PPC advertising and self-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The ads are shown on all Google’s search engines including the country localized Google Homepage (eg. google.com.sg), on the Google Custom Search offered to individual user as site add-on, and Google’s partner networks such as AOL Search, Netscape and Ask.com. Integration with AdSense (Google’s service for publishers) allow the ads to be shown on any publishers’ page that have registered with AdSense such as websites, blogs, or bulletin boards. The ads are keywords based and will appear depending on users’ search terms or page keywords and the demographical target of the advertiser.
Homepage: http://adwords.google.com/
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Launched as Overture, it is the first service to offer search engine ads placement to advertisers. The service was renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing after Yahoo! acquired the service in 2003. The ads format are similar to Google AdWords with keywords based PPC advertising and self-targeted ads. The ads will appear on all Yahoo! search results and search partners such as AltaVista.com, and Alltheweb.com. Some Overture/Yahoo! ads are still appearing on Microsoft’s Live Search and MSN even though they are now have their own advertising network. Yahoo! Search Marketing is currently the main contender to Google AdWords since users are moving to Yahoo because of the high and congested competition in Google AdWords for most keywords.
Homepage: http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/
Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter is the division of the Microsoft Network (MSN) responsible for MSN’s advertising services. Microsoft adCenter provides pay per click advertisements. Formerly MSN displays Overture (then Yahoo!) ads and only collect revenue for placing the ads on the search page. Even though starting as late as the end of 2006 and still in development process, it is now a competitor to both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing due to the popularity of the MSN and Live Search websites.
Homepage: https://adcenter.microsoft.com/
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser is another keyword based PPC advertising network. The service include ads targeting to specific category and geographical target. Bidvertiser is site-targeted advertising service and is not linked to any search engines therefore the ads are shown on publishers’ sites that have registered with Bidvertiser. The ads really depends on how many publishers are displaying the ads but the advantage is Bidvertiser offers lower CPC price compared to the big players such as Google or Yahoo!. This allow beginners to start with low budget to try how the PPC advertising works for them. Other than regular websites and products advertising, Bidvertiser offers advertising solution for eBay sellers which some service might have disallowed.
Homepage: http://www.bidvertiser.com/
AdBrite
AdBrite
AdBrite is a popular PPC advertising network such as Google AdWords. The difference is it does not shows the ads on any search engines results. The ads placement depends on the large publisher network that have registered with the service. Other than PPC ads, AdBrite offers other advertising methods such as cost-per-action (CPA), or cost-per-1000 impression (CPM). This feature allow advertisers to varies their advertising methods depending on their products, target audience, and budget.
Homepage: http://www.adbrite.com/
Ask.com Sponsored Listing
Ask.com SponsoredListing
Ask.com had also launched its own sponsored listing or search engine advertising like Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. The sponsored listing will appear on the same page as the search results and the appearing ads depends on the search terms and geograpical location of the users. However, in most countries outside the US, the sponsored search results being displayed are mostly Google’s probably because there not so many advertisers are using the service to target other location. This is an advantage to new advertisers but the challenge is to persuade users in specific countries or location to use Ask.com. The latest version of Opera internet browser utilize Ask.com as built in search tool.
Homepage: http://asl.ask.com/
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I’d tried using Adwords and it’s quite effective. Btw, it’s just for a short time of period. Now I’m using SEO techniques to get traffic to my site/products.
I agree that PPC advertising is a good technique to use, but you will also want to engage in SEO, blogging, press releases and more to really help develop a Web presence for your business. The resources you provide above (especially Google Adwords) can provide some nice ROI though.
-John