PPC ads or Pay Per Click ads are small snippets of text advertising your website that display in various places, including in the natural search engine results and as ad blocks on websites that publish these ads. They are free to run in most cases, and you only pay when a reader clicks on your ad and winds up on your site.
Using PPC ads has a number of advantages for businesses. Compared to the upfront cost of magazine or television advertisements, you don't pay for your PPC ads until you've found an interested prospect. One of the main advantages of using PPC ads is that you can target visitors far more effectively than more traditional forms of advertising. By targeting visitors it ensures that you only spend money to reach the people who will be most interested in your products or services.
The most established advertising platform is Google Adwords. Through Google Adwords you can display ads within the Google search results pages, as well as on a large number of websites that participate in the Google Ad sense publisher program such as The Times. Another name for this is the Google Display Network; it is the largest network of its kind with thousands of websites signed up to sell ad space on their site. Other top-tier platforms include Microsoft's ad Center on Bing and Yahoos Search Marketing platform.
Working with one of these top-level PPC providers gives you the most extensive reach and a greater number of opportunities for your ads to appear. However, because these programs are so widely used, average cost-per-click (CPC) rates may be substantially higher than on second-tier PPC engines, like Ask.com, 7Search and AdBrite. Although these services may be cheaper, the traffic they provide isn't as high quality as what would get through the Big 3 PPC engines.
When first starting out, the best approach is to begin with Google Adwords. Although it's slightly more expensive, the interface is easy to understand and the help section Google provides is extensive. Once you've honed your PPC advertising skills here, you can move on and apply these lessons to other sites if required, eventually moving out onto the Google display network.
Make sure you drop by next week for step 2 of 5 in this blog series on how to run a successful PPC campaign; next time we'll be taking a look at how to identify your target keywords.
To find out how PPC Junkies can help you run a successful PPC campaign across Google Adwords call the experts now on 0118 380 0204.