Beginners Guide To Pay-per-click-00-3987

By Author: 4Ps--Marketing
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1.1 Industry and Search Engine Marketing

A search engine is a tool utilised by millions of online users to look up popular websites based on keywords entered by the person searching.

The top three most used online Pay-Per-Click search engines include Google Adwords, Bing and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google alone accounts for about 70-80% of all online search engine usage within English speaking countries, and is therefore a hotspot for marketing investment. Bing, a search engine run by Microsoft AdCenter, makes up about 10-20% of the market share, with Yahoo also accounting for about 10-20%.

2.1 Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is concerned with the sponsored links found on search engines such as the ones mentioned above. These sponsored links can be seen along the top and on the right hand side of the results section of a search. They are essentially paid for advertisements for the websites they re-direct users to if clicked on, and companies will spend a lot of time and money to get their adverts high up on the list. Every time a user clicks on a company's advert that company pays the search ...
... engine a fee, hence the term Pay-Per-Click.

However, it is no good simply having a sponsored link which appears anytime anyone searches for anything. Adverts must be relevant to the words a user is searching for; otherwise the chances of them clicking on it are minimal. Many keywords can be chosen to trigger a sponsored link being shown, and so the company advertising must do some research into what keywords are most relevant to their products or services, and then see which of these keywords are being searched for the most. A poorly run PPC campaign on the other hand can lead to a loss of thousands of pounds.

2.2 Pay-Per-Click within SEM

PPC makes up only one half of SEM however, with the other half being search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO involves optimising a company's website so that they rank higher on the search engine results page. This can involve onsite or offsite optimisation, and because search engines such as Google rank websites on relevancy to the keywords being searched for, SEO attempts to make each page of a website as relevant as possible. Editing content, image tags and Meta data are just some of the things an SEO expert may look to do in order to improve a company's rank.

2.3 Quality Score and Ranking

PPC campaigns revolve around research into how a sponsored link can rank highly when certain keywords are searched for. Google uses a system whereby sponsored links will rank for a particular keyword based on a set of criteria. These criteria include the adverts' maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bid, and its quality score. A sponsored links quality score is calculated by how relevant the adverts text is to the keyword, as well as the quality of the landing page the user is re-directed to. The click through rate is also taken into account when calculating quality score, which itself is expressed as a percentage by dividing the number of times an advert appears on a search results page by the number of times users click on it and multiplying by a hundred.

3.1 Summary

In summary PPC refers to a marketing campaign run for a company who wishes to have their sponsored link ranked high for certain keywords typed into search engines. A well run PPC campaign can lead to increased traffic and better click through rates. PPC works alongside SEO to provide companies with complete SEM.

About the Author:

This article has been written by Robert Laver of 4Ps Marketing who is currently completing his graduate training at 4Ps Marketing which involves http://www.4psmarketing.com/seo.html and http://www.4psmarketing.com/ppc-management.html.