Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Drawbacks Of Pay Per Click Advertising

By Brian Basch

The red-hot trend in Internet marketing, Google Adwords has made a big impression on pay per click advertising. The lure of placing an ad and sitting back while the search engine works for you is irresistible to a large number of advertisers.

It looks as if the marriage of advertiser and search engine is really made in heaven. The advertiser just has to create an ad then pay the search engine a small fee to do all the legwork. The search engine will find potential customers through keyword searches. When a searcher enters the keyword into the search engine the related ad will be seen along with the search results.

But do not be fooled! Pay per click is not quite that easy. This is because a certain amount of keyword research needs to be done. You cannot get away with plain tracking of the ad. Many popular keywords bring up a vast array of pages in one search result. On average the searchers will not look through more than the first 5-10 pages. This means Your ad must be shown in the first 5-10 pages range.

A second thing to consider is the fact that the amount you bid per click on your keyword will be the deciding factor for how you are positioned in the search engine. With the old form of advertising you would be paying for the length of time you wanted your ad to be seen, not the mount of traffic it created. The drawback with this form of advertising was that it could cost a lot of money.

The next form of advertising to emerge was Pay per click marketing. The idea was straightforward; advertisers would simply pay a fee every time a visitor clicked on their ad. This meant that if the ad had a good ratio of clicks the advertiser would make more money. Next came the question of positioning your ad in the search engines. In order to gain a superior position advertisers would have to bid higher than their competitors.

You need to exercise caution when using pay per click advertising. The reason for this is the fact that costs can rise quite fast and take you by surprise. Ads in top positions will generate a great deal of traffic but also a lot of wasted leads. This can drain your budget.

Pay per click advertising is full of pitfalls, especially for the new marketer. It is not the smooth ride that the ads proclaim. The good news is that there are many other resources to help you and other methods of marketing for those who want to look.

It is important not to rely on one source for promoting your business. Savvy marketers use multiple ways to market their businesses and rapidly develop them into profitable concerns. - 17944

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