PAY-PER-CLICK CAMPAIGNS

The basics of pay per click advertising

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is another method of capturing well-targeted traffic to your website. You, the advertiser, specify a rate that you agree to pay for every visitor who clicks through to your website for a particular keyword phrase. It's that simple.

Pay per click programs are scalable - you set the budget for how much you're willing to spend. Once that amount is met, the ad will no longer be placed unless you specify otherwise (and agree to allocate more funds).

In essence, you're bidding on a price for a certain keyword phrase, and for the majority of pay per click engines, the highest bidder gets the top spot. Therefore, this group is also known as pay for placement search engines. (Google's AdWords Select program differs from other pay per click programs by having additional criteria affect positioning of ad placement).

Writing successful Pay Per Click advertising copy

Writing successful pay per click ads can be quite a challenge due to limited space and restrictions on wording. Direct marketing copy is not allowed. In addition, the phrases you bid on must be actual phrases that are included in the content of your website landing page (the page the visitor gets to after clicking). Often times content needs to be rewritten to qualify to use certain keyword phrases.

Our pay per click advertising programs involve the following pay for placement search engines:

Overture: Considered the pioneer of all pay per clickprograms, Overture's top three listings are also seen on a Yahoo!, offering you even greater exposure. In addition, Overture listings also appear on MSN, Lycos, AltaVista and InfoSpace. Ad titles are limited to 40 characters and descriptions cannot exceed 190 characters.

Google AdWords Select: The ever-popular Google has a pay per click advertising program, AdWords Select, that is differentiated from the other programs by not simply employing a "highest bidder wins" program. Instead, AdWords Select adds a quality element to it program. Those sites that have a higher click-through rate get a slight reduction in price. The top eight bidders are shown on Google and the top three bidders are also shown on AOL. Google AWS results are also shown on AskJeeves and EarthLink. Guidelines for ads include 25 characters for the title and two description lines at 35 characters each.

LookSmart: LookSmart used to be a directory but changed to a PPC agency. Following a $29 set-up fee, the first 5,000 clicks are at a flat cost of $0.15 per click, thereafter at the business categroy CPC. LookListings are also published in the MSN search results, which has a large volume of users.

FindWhat: This PPC program is based solely on bid-for-position results. The highest bidder, among all other advertisers bidding on that keyword, appear first within the FindWhat.com results and the other ads are listed in descending order of bid price. While they claim they do not have a "set-up" fee, they do require a $25 non-refundable deposit into your account that is used entirely towards your click-throughs. After the initial $25 any unused balance is refundable at any time, for any reason.

Program details

• Keyword Analysis: we'll team with you to select the most relevant keyword phrases related to your website.
• Competitive Analysis: studying your competition's listings will help us help you gain that competitive edge.
• Professional copywriting for your ad listings: we have experiened staff with the skills to produce effective PPC ads.