By now you have already heard of paid advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC). It’s a way to advertise on the search engines and drive traffic to a specific landing page on your website with the click. What you may not know, is that PPC is substantially different that organic ranking in the search engines. Paid listings typically show up on the top or side-bar of the search results page when a specific string of text is input (shown below).
Organic rankings are a direct result of your on-page SEO efforts, link-building strategies and other SEM methods. Pay-per-click on the other hand, is a direct result of bidding for specific keywords.
I have often found myself wondering why some people would pay for a keyword that they already rank organically for. Simply stated, I don’t have the answer, but I would imagine it has something to do with complete domination of a keyword and aligning a brand with the keyword. Some people may have more trust in your brand if you rank high for their search query and at the same time, you have a paid-listing. I do agree that it enhances the chance of a click-through.
There are three key players in the pay-per-click industry, you may already know of them for obvious reasons, but you need to know why they are what they are.
Google:
The Google Adwords tool dominates keywords. When setting up a PPC account, nearly everything is keyword driven minus the fact that you are able to geo-target based on IP address. This certainly helps if the intention is local search.
Bing/Yahoo:
Yes, I said Bing and Yahoo. Their PPC tools, AdCenter, are combined to give you one location to position your ads for both search engines. Bing and Yahoo are keyword and demographic driven. I will put a disclaimer on the “demographic” piece of that statement. It’s only demographic driven if the searcher is signed into Live or Yahoo, which takes into account their personal information to make assumptions of age, location, etc. It would be silly to neglect Bing/Yahoo as they account for 34% of all searches.
Facebook:
Facebook is demographic targeting on crack. An advertiser is able to take into account nearly everything in one’s profile, even their ‘likes.’ This is a tremendous opportunity for those that know exactly who is in their target market. I have heard some no-so-good things about Facebook that I thought I would mention, and that’s the fact that it may be hard to set a daily maximum, so it’s forced advertisers to monitor closely. Another issue is not toggling ads frequently, but this is not a Facebook thing, it’s an advertiser issue, but one they need to take into consideration as the same ad may show up too often for one person.
You should know that I have never actively had any live ads for any of these tools, although I have signed up for all of these tools and have gone through the process of setting up an ad to the very end. The reason I mention this is because PPC is worthless unless you have a great landing page to send your prospects to. If your website isn’t ready for the world, work on that before you waste your resources on PPC. Which is why I have held off on any of my previous websites, personal and work-related.