One of the most common types of online marketing today is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. What this means is that an advert for your website is displayed on other sites, and every time somebody clicks on it, you pay a small fee for the referral. Where PPC really comes into its own though is in the form of search engine marketing, where the payee is a search engine such as Yahoo or Google.

The Pay Per Click Process

The first thing to do with this form of search engine marketing is, of course, to find a search engine. While Google is by far the most popular search engine with a 70% market share (87% in the UK), they are by no means the only one. Yahoo and MSN, because they are smaller and have less users, will have significantly less people bidding on the keywords you want to advertise with, and so you may find a much lower price by choosing one of these search engines.

Once you have chosen the search engine (or engines) you want to go with, the next step is to sign up for their online marketing package. This will be different for each search engine, but with Google for example, this would mean signing up for their AdWords PPC program. There are many different types of package available at varying cost, so make sure you look into all the options and choose the one that is right for you. You will then have to choose and buy the keywords you want, and design your adverts.

Signing up for an online marketing package and buying a keyword will then result in you having paid placement for that keyword. This means that on the search engine itself, whenever someone searches for your keyword, you will appear in a special featured area near the top of the listings. Your advert will also start to be shown in the advertising section of all the sites that use your search engines advertising program and that have content that the search engine matches to your keywords. You will be billed by the search engine for the number of clicks generated to your website.

The Benefits of Pay Per Click

The search engines have extensive networks of websites that utilise their Pay Per Click advertising to make a little extra cash. This means that instead of approaching each website individually for advertising space, your website will be advertised on a wide range of other sites, and you only have to worry about paying the search engine, who will then reimburse those websites. This not only extends your marketing efforts across the largest area but saves you from the hassle of multiple contracts over a lot of websites.