Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

What it is

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising refers to the practice of "bidding" for placement, by keyword, in the search results at many leading Search Engines and Directories. PPC clients pay only for each click on their link they actually receive, providing a cost-effective way to increase awareness and drive pre-qualified traffic to their Web site.

W3PR recommends PPC advertising to clients who want additional site traffic, in-store traffic, e-mail registrants, business leads and online transactions.

Why it's important to you

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising works exactly as its name implies: you're charged a fee for your advertisement only when someone clicks on your link. If no-one clicks on the ad, then there is no cost to you. This is in contrast to other types of online advertising that have a set fee for a certain number of "impressions," which is called CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand). These "impressions," of course, do not have any direct correlation to demonstrated interest in your site on the part of the person viewing those ads, so this "untargeted" advertising is typically more expensive and less effective than PPC links for most Web sites.

PPC is just one of four paid advertising methods offered by W3PR, the other three being Paid Search Engine Placement, Site Submit and CPM. For most Web sites PPC is an extremely cost-effective addition to the online marketing mix.

What W3PR does about it

W3PR offers a comprehensive PPC service; we manage our clients' Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns from start to finish, creation through reporting. W3PR continually searches for ways to improve PPC advertising campaign performance while the Pay-Per-Click campaign is running, saving you time and money. We generally refer to this process as "PPC campaign optimization." It is W3PR's goal to "optimize" your return on every dollar spent in your PPC campaign.

Here are some of the benefits of using W3PR to manage your PPC advertising campaigns:

• Purchasing PPC advertising enables you to get top listing placement for your Web site at many of the leading Search Engines and Directories. Google and Yahoo, to name two of the largest, are amongst the many PPC Search Engines that syndicate paid listings to maximize exposure for your product or service. Syndication means that your Web site PPC listing will not only appear on Google and Yahoo, but on the many other sites that use Google and Yahoo as a basis for their search functionality, such as Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.

• Each PPC click delivers a qualified visitor to your Web site, someone who has searched for your product or service and has responded to your text ad by clicking on the listing to learn more.

• Clients no longer have to pay to display their ads all over the Internet without receiving anything in return. In a PPC program, you will on only be charged for the traffic your site actually receives. All other PPC advertising impressions not resulting in clicks to your Web site translate into free branding and exposure for your company, products and services.

• W3PR is able to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) for each search term, when unique tracking URLs are used, to determine the acquisition cost of each newsletter subscriber, business lead, or online transaction. Leveraging this information to continually optimize each campaign ensures campaign success and a strong ROI.

More Detail

With our deep understand of the Pay-Per-Click environment, our clients reap the benefits of having an "extra team member" with expertise in managing and optimizing Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns. W3PR continually searches for ways to improve PPC advertising campaign performance while the Pay-Per-Click campaign is running, saving you time and money.

W3PR researches the most popular search terms relative to your Web site and sends you a recommendation of search terms to purchase at Google and/or Yahoo. These are the search terms that online consumers use to locate what they're looking for.

Say, for example, that your site sells quilt sewing materials, including quilt patterns. In May 2004 there were 27,599 searches at Yahoo for "quilt pattern". Note that Yahoo includes Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos and InfoSpace in its search network. At the time, Yahoo listings could be shown at all of these partner sites using the "quilt pattern" keyword phrase for $0.10/click. This means that an advertiser (Web site owner) would only pay $0.10 for each now-qualified visitor delivered to their Web site. In other words, there's no fee for just showing the site listing in the search results; a fee is only incurred when a click on that ad actually happens. As a general rule, we often recommend that a client try both Google (which includes AOL and Earthlink) and Yahoo, but each network can be purchased individually as well.

Note that the basic PPC service has five components, all of which are included in our basic management fee:

• Keyword Research and Consulting
• Setup and Implementation
• Bid Management
• Performance Analysis
• Reporting

Contact W3PR today for a free PPC advertising evaluation.