Pay per click promotion is a way of Online Marketing that allows the advertiser to place adverts on the search results page of any given search. The search engine will basically sell the space for the advert to them but they will only charge to the company for the space if a searcher actually clicks the advert. When the searcher clicks the advert, presumably because they are attracted to what the advert says, they are taken directly to the advertisers web site so that they can find out more information and hopefully make a purchase.

This whole way of advertising relies on the correct selection of keywords – the words entered into the search engine by searchers in order to find what they are looking for. If the business has opted to have a pay per click advert on a keyword entered by a particular searcher the search engine will present the businesses advert beside the “organic” results typically listed in the main body of the page. Therefore it is vital that the business who wants to advertise it’s goods online chooses keywords that are being used by their potential customers to locate their products.

You can either use the services of an Online Marketing firm to handle the pay per click advertising or you can do it in house. The process is fairly simple although a little time consuming and essentially consists of the following:

Deciding on a pay per click provider. These providers are mostly the search engines themselves and indeed pay per click adverts are commonly the largest income generators for the search engines. You may also discover that you can use a pay per click service on a price comparison website. Once you have opted for the provider you need to pick the keywords that you are interested in. Take care to ensure you have opted for the best possible ones to define your product. The majority of the search engines will have tools that you can use to pick the best ones in terms of number of searches.

Then it is crucial to decide how much you want to pay each time someone clicks on your advert. The more you are willing to pay the higher up the sponsored advert listing your Search Engine Placement will be. One pointer here is to look at the less popular but more precise keywords or phrases. If you can get one of these in your campaign you can achieve quite a low spend, get a reasonable number of clicks but have a great conversion to sale rate from those more appropriate customers. To give an example, imagine you deal in “blue desert spoons” only, if you choose a keyword of “spoons” you will get a large number of people searching but they may want any colour or kind of spoon. Of course the majority of them you won’t be able to sell to as they don’t want a blue desert spoon. And yet you will have paid a high pay per click price for a lot of clicks. Now if you chose “blue desert spoons” as your set of keywords you would get a lot less clicks because of the lower number of searches and reduced airing of your ad. The people who do click through to your website however, would be perfect customers. Your sales will be high and your cost per click on such an obscure set of keywords low.

So we can see that pay per click is a valuable tool but pay careful attention to the keywords you go for, help can be given by an online marketing or Search Engine Optimization Company if you’re finding it difficuly.