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So... What is Pay per Click, Anyway? In the early days of the Web, you pretty much needed to know where you were going (i.e.,
your destination’s URL) to get anywhere at all useful. If you were lucky, you might happen
onto one of the few “portal” sites with links to lots of other sites; and then you could engage
in the quaint practice of “surfing”, or simply following a chain of links that seemed interesting. If you were trying to do serious research, this was akin to going to a library prior to the
development of the Dewey Decimal System; there was some chance that what you needed
was in there somewhere, but your odds of finding it were fairly remote. (Truth be told, there
also wasn’t much chance that what you needed was even “in there”; there just wasn’t yet
that much content of value on the Web in those days.) As the Web matured and vast amounts of content began to be deployed on it, the need for a
means of efficiently searching through all that content became obvious to a number of
companies, including Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and Hotbot. Collectively, they
pioneered the search engine industry; later, they were joined by “second-generation”
providers such as Google and AskJeeves. Early on, all of these firms made the fundamental decision to charge not the searchers, but
rather those – primarily commercial companies – wishing to be found: i.e., they would be
supported by advertising revenue. Initially, this took the form of submission fees paid by the
web site owner and banner ads similar to those on the portal sites, virtually unrelated to the
particular search being conducted. But the innovation that put the search-engine industry
into the financial big leagues was the pay per click ad, first offered by GoTo.com (which
became Overture, until its recent acquisition by Yahoo) in 1998. Last year, paid search
accounted for some $5.5 billion in worldwide revenues. Under the pay per click model, the advertiser indicates willingness to pay for the display of a
priority or “sponsored” listing in response to a user’s search on a particular set of keywords,
simply by establishing a “bid” price with the search engine on those keywords. A user
launching a search using those keywords will see the advertiser’s listing displayed in
premium real estate: highlighted at either the top or right-hand side of the search-results
page, regardless of where the site would normally land by “organic” or natural means. If the
user actually clicks on the sponsored ad (thereby hitting the advertiser’s website), then and
only then does the advertiser pay for that instance of running the ad. That charge can not
exceed the advertiser’s maximum bid price ...and may actually be substantially less. Why You Should be Using Pay Per Click
OK, it’s a valid question: should you be using pay per click (we’ll use PPC hereafter)??
If your company is a B2C, or takes any customer orders online, you probably already are
...for the same reason that most B2Cs have substantial traditional (offline) advertising
budgets. You simply can’t afford to be relatively invisible in a medium that at least some of
your competitors are almost certainly exploiting. No surprise, then, that some of the highest
keyword bid rates – and some of the most skilled PPC specialists! – are to be found in the
B2C or e-commerce arenas. But B2B companies also have many reasons to at least experiment with PPC and determine
what it can do for them. Let’s look at some of them... next >>
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