PPC?
PPC or 'pay per click' is a relatively new advertising technique seen largely on websites, search engines and ad networks.
The process of setting up a PPC campaign starts with the advertisers bidding for specific 'keywords' that they believe, their clients will type in the search boxes when they are trying to locate a certain product. Say, an advertiser sells red widgets he/she would then bid on 'red widgets' being the keyword and hope that a client will type 'red widgets' in any of the search engines, come across their ad, click on it and then eventually buy their product. Advertisers of these sponsored ads have to pay only when the client clicks on the ad link.
A lot of companies are vying for market hold in this category with Google AdWords and Yahoo!Search Marketing (formerly Overture) being the market leaders as of 2006. MSN too started testing the beta version of their in-house service MSN adCentre, in the spring of 2006. Apart from these giants, a lot of lesser known agencies too have sprung up in the past few years to help in the use of 'pay per click' ad strategies, like Get Me On Media and the two UK based firms Periscopix & the Latitude Group. Prices of the PPC campaigns depend on the search engines with the minimum being US$0.01 (up to US$0.50) per click and could go up to GBP£18+ per click for such categories like unsecured personal loans. Much in demand keywords can cost a lot on popular search engines like Google or Yahoo!. But the PPC model can be abused and rendered meaningless through 'click fraud' and slowly more and more search engines are setting up automatic systems against it.One must remember that PPC sites do not earn solely from the amount of traffic to sites, but only when an ad is clicked upon. PPC engines are often categorized into 'Keyword', 'Product' and 'Service' engines though companies do not always fall under such strict categories.
Keyword PPCs
Advertisers can also use model numbers apart from words or phrases as keywords while bidding for them. A list of links of the advertisers appear according to the amounts they have bid, when a user types a particular word or phrase, in the search box. Keywords are the most significant factor in PPC campaigns and companies are known to secretively guard their keywords, on the other hand agencies offer technical support to advertisers looking to develop keywords for themselves.
Google AdWords, Ask, LookSmart, Miva,Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, Yandex, Baidu and Kanoodle are some of the best known PPC Keyword search engines.
To save costs, one must choose Keywords very carefully and not pick every other word. Concentrate on your priorities, be descriptive yet specific in choosing terms that reflect the products you want to sell. To economize, one can select hours when the keywords will be switched off, or consult bid management software to keep a tab on your bids.