You might have heard about online advertising, and the oft-mentioned Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. What is Pay-Per-Click advertising?
Simply put, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a way of displaying your text ads in front of people searching the web, whereby you only pay the ad server when a potential customer clicks on your ad. What happens after the customer clicks through to your site is completely up to you.
Distinct from traditional advertising, which interrupts a potential customer (an advertisement on TV or in the newspaper for example), PPC advertising only shows up to customers who have actively searched for the keywords that you as the advertiser have specified and targeted. This allows the advertiser to be much more targeted in their approach to attracting new customers.
The most commonly used PPC platforms are Google’s AdWords and Bing Ads, and these advertising platforms help you analyse your keywords and compete in their online marketplace for each PPC ad. In markets outside of China, the most popular PPC system is Google AdWords, so it is worth setting up your campaigns here first and then exporting them to the other PPC platforms as you see necessary.
What is Your “Quality Score”?
Google has developed an algorithm that assesses each of your AdWords ads and the associated website or landing page, and subsequently gives each ad a Quality Score. This score is then used in conjunction with how much you are willing to pay for that particular ad to determine how high up Google will display your ad in search results.
This makes it harder to guarantee simply paying your way to the top of the rankings (where click traffic should be higher), but gives a chance for better, more relevant sites to compete, even with lower budgets. The end result is the browsing public getting a better mix of top results in the Google ads section of each page.
Why should you care about PPC advertising?
If you’re interested in advertising to get new potential customers to visit your website, PPC may be for you. Each and every day, millions of people head to search engines in order to find a solution to their question, problem, or need; can your company help solve some of these needs and make money by doing so? Probably, so why not get in front of your new customers via Pay-Per-Click advertising?
