Pay Per Click Advertising

“Pay Per Click” advertising can deliver fantastic results for some clients in driving prospective customers to their website.

Search engines have two types of results which are displayed when a user searches. There are free search results (sometimes referred to as the "organic results" or the "natural results"), and "Pay Per Click" advertising results.

"Pay Per Click" advertising, as the name implies, involves paying these search engine providers – but only if a user clicks on your advertisement and visits your website. It costs nothing to display your advertisement if the user does not click on it. How much you pay is governed by an auction system where you “bid” for particular search phrases or keywords that users may be looking for on the search engine.

The screenshot below shows the presentation of these 2 different types of results for the Google search engine. The green sections are the "Pay Per Click" results.

You are in control of how much you pay for the clicks – the more you offer to pay, the higher your ad appears in the list of advertisements. There are some other factors involved as described below, but bidding is the basic principle behind ad position.

Your ad is only displayed when the user searches on those keywords that you have bid on, so you are in control of relevance in the targeting of ads to your prospective audience.

For example, if you sell vacuum cleaners you might bid $0.50 a click for terms such as “vacuum cleaner”, or “hoover”. Whenever a user searches on these – your ad is displayed (for free), and you only pay the $0.50 if they click on your ad which takes them to your website. If the user searches for some other terms, your ad is not displayed.

There are some key benefits of this system including:

• Exposure of your advertisement for free as people aren’t going to click on the ad each time it’s displayed.
  
  
• Because the user was searching for keywords or search phrases that are so highly relevant to your products and services, if they click on your ad, they are likely to be a well targeted potential client.
  
  
• Because the user is likely to be seeking products and services in your field, the ads displayed may in fact represent what they are looking for, whereas in other forms of advertising, the ads may be a distraction from the primary user goal.
  
  
• You can tightly control your ad expenditure with a budget of as little as $5 per month or up to thousands of dollars per day, depending on how aggressively you want to promote your website.
  
  
• Detailed statistics provided by Google, allow you to analyse which words and ads are the most successful, allowing you to focus your investment on strategies which work.

"Pay Per Click" advertising should not be the entirety of a marketing campaign, but it is often an excellent addition to an overall strategy.

If you are overwhelmed and need some guidance, Jala Design can perform a thorough analysis to determine whether "Pay Per Click" advertising will be lucrative for your business. To learn more, contact us at (02) 9680 4004 or via e-mail at info@jaladeisgn.com.au.

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