What we think about Pay per Click advertising

Pay per click is a system of paid advertising that appears on search engine results and other pages. You may notice the list of adds down the right side of a Google search page – these are all paid advertising that appear based on your search term. Companies pay per click for this, meaning that if you click on one of these adds they pay for it. The higher listing you want on the PPC adds the more you pay, with it basically being a bidding war between companies to get your attention. The hotter the category is the more people pay for those clicks, so some companies spend thousands of dollars a month on PPC advertising. This is one of the ways that companies like Google make money.

PPC, especially Google Adwords, has grown in popularity and is now being resold by other companies, many of them being web designers that sell the service to their clients and make a profit off it. While not only giving these companies a new source of monthly revenue they also take the pressure off for them to make a search engine friendly web site, so their job gets easier. Many companies use adwords to get a lot of traffic through their clients sites (therefore making themselves more money) yet the quality of the traffic is poor and therefore the result of an extremely over-priced PPC ad campaign.

PPC is a good way for new web sites to attract some traffic when their site is not visible to or well ranked on search engines. This point is critical! Don’t spend money on PPC if you already have a highly visible well-ranked site – it is a waste! Some companies make the mistake of actually having top ranking on a search engine phrase AND having a PPC click add right next to it! Natural search engine results (not paid for) get a better result from users. They place more credibility in them.

When is Pay-per-Click good?

If you have a product or service in a competitive and hot market that is over saturated with web sites then pay per click advertising, especially Google's Adwords, will give you an instant boost in internet traffic. It is also good if you absolutely must have a pure Flash web site and therefore cant get good indexed content for search engines. Keep in mind however that while Pay-per-Click works in these situations it will cost you money, sometimes lots of money.

When is Pay-per-Click bad?

There are many ways to exploit people with Pay-per-Click and the most prevalent method is to get them involved in a bidding war for bad leads. This means you could pay a lot of money for someone to come to your site and not buy anything from you. There is no point paying to attract unqualified leads and web high site traffic doesn't always mean more sales.

Some people get roped into pay-per-click using generic terms too. For example you might sell Honda Cars in Florida. If you paid big time for the term "New Cars" then you would pay dearly for it and get a lot of unqualified leads. If yo only paid for the term "New Hondas in Florida" and limited your target audience to Florida then you would get far less clicks but each one would be valuable.

Pay-per-Click is also bad when your are paying to be visible in ads when your web site would already rank high. For example, if your company was called "Widgits Inc" then it is already likely that the search engines would rank you high so you don't need to pay for that term unless you like throwing money away.