The Power of Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising has revolutionised the advertising landscape. Never before has there been an advertising medium that allowed you to advertise specifically to your target audience and measure accurately the results of that advertising.

It’s for these reasons alone that any business should seriously consider using pay per click as part of its marketing mix. However many businesses fail to grasp this opportunity properly.

The other compelling reason for using pay per click is that services like Google Adwords will actually allow small business to compete successfully alongside the big companies with deep advertising pockets. This is because Google rewards advertising that is relevant rather than just selling advertising space to the companies prepared to pay more.

Before I explain all this in more detail, let’s just first make sure we all understand what we mean by pay per click.

I’m sure you’ve all seen those adverts down the left hand side of your search results in Google. Those advertisers have bid in an auction to appear on that page whenever the search phrase you used was entered into Google. They will only pay if you click on their advert. They don’t pay anything just to appear. Hence the name pay per click.

Can you imagine paying for newspaper adverts in the basis that you only paid them for each person that was to contact you? There is no way the newspapers could offer that type of service. They simply can’t measure how people react to adverts. This is one of the great benefits of pay per click. You only pay when your advertising successfully brings in potential customers.

Also because you pick the words (called keywords) that you want your adverts to appear for, then you can effectively control who sees your adverts. By carefully choosing keywords you can ensure your adverts are only seen by people who are looking to buy your products.

Imagine the newspaper example again. Do you think newspapers could sell adverting based on only charging you for the newspapers that are read by the people who are specifically looking to buy your product? Not likely. Of course newspapers do have demographics they appeal to and that does give you some targeting for your advertising but it’s not as precisely targeted as pay per click can be.

So already you can see how pay per click makes a lot of sense.

However, what about my point that services like Google Adwords allows you to compete successfully with the big companies? The reason this is so is because they reward advertisers who deliver adverts that meet the needs of the people searching on Google. They assign a quality score for your keywords and your adverts. This quality score is used to decide the minimum bid you need to pay for your advert to appear and it also decides how high up the page you appear. 

So by tailoring your adverts to closely match your keywords you can achieve a good quality score. If your advert then gets more clicks than the average expected for that keyword then Google rewards you by increasing your quality score. Thus you pay even less for your clicks.

The big companies rarely understand this and they just pay high bid prices. They also tend to bid on practically every keyword that can find and they use the same advert for all these keywords. Savvy internet advertisers can beat them every time.

So I urge you to embrace the power of pay per click.