Pay per Click Overview

Since we’ve not covered Pay per Click (PPC) advertising for about 3 years, we thought it was about time for an update. This month we look at pay per click advertising (or sponsored links) in general and the main advertising platforms out there.

Pay per Click advertising has become big business over the last few years, and not surprisingly, highly competitive in many sectors. However, for many businesses, it’s their first step into online advertising and actually getting their website found online to attract new visitors, enquiries & sales.

So, what is pay per click advertising?
Pay per click literally means what it says - every time anyone clicks on your link in a PPC advertising campaign, you pay a sum to the PPC provider. You bid on key phrases relevant to the products or services you sell on your website, but the more competitive the key phrases are, the more you will have to pay per click. Prices also vary depending on which PPC service you use to advertise on. Campaigns can be set up almost immediately, or within a few days. They complement traditional search engine optimisation efforts as you can gain traffic to your website whilst you are waiting for natural search engine results to kick in, which can take several months.

Which are the best pay per click platforms to use?
Here is a run down of the 3 major PPC search engines for advertising to a UK or worldwide audience. They differ in price, cost per click, how the campaigns are set up, as well as where the PPC links are served. The return on investment can vary enormously from one PPC campaign to another.

1. Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) is the one of the best known PPC search engines. Its ads have a wide reach and are shown on some of the major search engines, such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Excite, some meta search engines such as Dogpile and MetaCrawler and ISPs such as Tiscali and Wanadoo. For a complete list, you can visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing website.

Yahoo! Search Marketing give you the option of setting up the campaign yourself (Self Service), or paying their staff to set it up for you (Fast Track). It depends on how many key phrases you have, how much time or how confident you are about setting it up as to whether or not you would pay the extra £79 for the Fast Track service.

To assist you in targeting the right key phrases, Yahoo! Search Marketing has a couple of tools to help you. Firstly there is the Search Term Suggestion Tool, which gives you a rough idea as to how many searches are carried out per month for your chosen key phrases. You can also find out how much people are bidding on your key phrases when you carry out a search on Yahoo! Search Marketing's bid tool. This can help you work out roughly how much you could spend per month along with the number of searches per month. Once your key phrase list is complete, you can then write titles and descriptions for your key phrases, insert your maximum bids then wait a few days for Yahoo! Search Marketing to approve your listings.

To activate the account, you need to start with a minimum of £60 plus VAT, with a minimum monthly spend of £20. If your monthly spend is used up quickly, you need to ensure that you deposit further funds as soon as possible to keep it active.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is in the process of changing their user interface over to something similar to Google Adwords, as their current interface is very cumbersome and not very user friendly. However, Yahoo! do offer a helpline where you can speak to a customer service adviser, which is something that Google doesn’t offer.

2. Google AdWords
Google Adwords is probably the best known PPC advertising service, which allows you to advertise on Google, its search network and its content network. The best thing about Google Adwords is that the ads can be set up within a few minutes and you can edit them at any time. However, from experience, Google Adwords usually work out more expensive per click than Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google Ads appear on Google, Ask Jeeves, Kelkoo, The Times, Reuters and a variety of other websites, which are listed here.

To set up a Google Adwords campaign, you firstly need to write some ad text - you have 35 characters per line so need to be very specific about your offering. They also have a keyword suggestion tool, to help you target your key phrases for the best return. You choose a daily budget amount and a maximum amount for all your key phrases, or for individual key phrases. This is where it can start to get expensive, particularly if your keywords are quite competitive and you want them served every time a search is made. The daily budget means that once you meet your budget, your ads will be stopped until the next day, which is a good way of spreading your budget out evenly over a month or your chosen advertising period. Google do monitor ads and will stop them if they do not adhere to their guidelines.


3. Microsoft AdCenter
Microsoft AdCenter was launched in August 2006 to rival Yahoo! Search Marketing & Google Adwords. The ads are shown on Microsoft sites such as MSN, Live Search and Hotmail. The set up is much the same as Google Adwords, so once you know your way around that interface, you should find it easy to use Microsoft AdCenter. The ads can be set up quickly with set daily budgets, as with Google Adwords.

However, there are some extra features that Microsoft AdCenter offers that the other platforms don’t which is demographic targeting by age and gender. They can do this for visitors searching with Microsoft Passport accounts (e.g for Hotmail or MSN Messenger) as they have their location data and their age & gender data. Therefore you can opt to target certain age groups and genders. Microsoft also claim to have a higher conversion rate from their ads than Google Adwords & Yahoo! Search Marketing.

When using the PPC advertising media to complement search engine optimisation, it's important you track your clicks and conversions to make sure it’s worthwhile and your money is being spent in the right way. You may find that you’ll need to edit and tweak your campaigns by changing key phrases and descriptions quite frequently as you go along to maximise on the click through rate and conversions. After a month of so of advertising it is worthwhile going through your campaign stats and web log files to ensure it is money well spent. The return on investment varies greatly from one campaign to another and we would strongly recommend comparing cost per click and sales or leads achieved. I cannot advise you which PPC media to choose as it really depends on which one gives you the best return on your investment. My advice would be to trial a few of the options available and stick with the one that gives you the best return on your money. Having said that, if you’re targeting consumers then it’s probably worth trialing all of the services, Google Adwords may prove better for B2B offerings.