It’s one of the more significant advertising innovations, ever. If you haven’t at least experimented with Pay Per Click, you may well be handing cost-effective leads to competitors.

There are some very good reasons to be using Pay Per Click advertising (“PPC”): you pay only for results (“click-throughs” to your site); it’s incredibly flexible; it’s simple to set up and get started. Perhaps best of all, you can track its ROI clearly and objectively; so there’s never a reason to spend more on PPC than it’s worth to your business.

Because of its startup ease and relative transparency (compared to SEO), many companies embark on a PPC program totally on their own ...and we’ve supported that approach via the material in this section and in our PPC White Paper . Maintaining a PPC program with good ROI is another matter: the testing and chronic fine-tuning involved tends to require much more staff time than many companies want to allocate to it. For them, outsourcing their PPC campaign management to a professional Web marketing firm such as eMagine is generally the best decision.

So... What is Pay Per Click, Anyway?

Back in the Dark Ages when the Web was new, 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” websites displaying 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.

As the Web matured and vast amounts of content began to be deployed on it, the need for a means of efficiently navigating through all that content became obvious; and thus the search engine industry was spawned. Early on, search engine firms made the key decision to charge not the searchers, but rather those wishing to be found (primarily commercial companies, or dot-coms): i.e., they would be supported by sponsor revenue. Initially, this took the form of submission fees paid by website owners 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 on the fast track – and cheered many a marketer – was the pay per click (“PPC”) ad.

Under this model, the advertiser indicates willingness to pay for the display of a priority listing – plus a brief ad message – 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. If the user actually clicks on the sponsored ad (thereby hitting a landing page on the advertiser’s website), then and only then does the advertiser pay for that “impression” of the ad. That charge can not exceed the advertiser’s preset maximum bid price ...and may actually be substantially less.

Why You Should be Using – or at Least Testing – Pay Per Click

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 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 B-to-B companies also have many reasons to at least experiment with PPC and determine what it can do for them. Here are some of those reasons...

Pay for result. One of the most compelling features of PPC – perhaps even more to CEOs than to marketers! – is the notion of paying only for leads that actually come to your web site. This is “narrowcasting” on steroids! You don’t pay to show your ad to everyone watching the Super Bowl at 9:03 pm, or everyone who picked up the January issue of Networks Incredible ...which is 96% waste. Instead, your ad is seen by only those with some interest in your product or service (as evidenced by keyword match); and you pay for only the subset of those viewers who actually clicked on your ad.

Trackability ...aka, clear & objective ROI: Because PPC is all-electronic, everything that happens is explicitly measurable. The kind of measurement that you’d love to do with your offline programs – but probably don’t because of the difficulty and the extent of “hand-waving” involved – is completely trivial with PPC, and requires no hand-waving whatsoever. A click-through to your landing page comes about only in response to a specific keyword/phrase and ad, and all such events are captured and available for raw inspection or summary analysis.

Incredibly granular control/flexibility: With PPC, you can control...

• your chosen keywords/phrases
• your bid price for those keywords (and consequently your spot in the rank-ordered PPC listings)
• your ad copy
• the offer your ad presents to the searcher
• the contents of your landing page

With all those levers available, you can vary them systematically, experimenting until you achieve your ROI target across your entire campaign. Given that degree of control, the only way to lose your shirt with PPC advertising is to float an ad at a relatively high bid price and then ignore it ...in which case you really have only yourself to blame. (After all, inattention can kill your offline ad campaigns, too ...just not as quickly!) But with a bit of judicious attention to the controls provided, you’ll generally be able to make PPC pay its way for you quite nicely.

Setup ease: This can be a double-edged sword, since it may tend to encourage that just-noted “set-it-&-forget-it” mentality. But the exciting fact is that you can open an account, select and price keywords, post an ad, and literally see visitors starting to hit your site ...all within as little as 10 minutes!

OK... So How Do I Get Started?

For starters, we’d suggest reading the other pages in this section, where we give you the keys to success and discuss conversion, analytics, budget and ROI. We even preview the methodology we’d use should you decide to outsource your PPC effort to eMagine, as a growing number of companies do ...not because it’s especially difficult, but simply because of the staff time that can be consumed in doing it right.