It Pays To Pay Per Click

Every year more and more of us avoid the commute into an overcrowded shopping centre to do the Xmas shopping run. Less and less of us choose to go to high street travel agents to sort out our annual holiday arrangements. Instead we prefer to spend our time and money online, researching and buying all manner of things that you we used to do in brick and mortar shops.

This trend will only continue which means one thing for every business regardless of size - the need to get seen on search engines. The need to get to the top of search engines can be translated into the need to get to the top of Google, such is its market share of searches made and only pay per click can guarantee 1st page positioning.

Traditional advertising spend is gradually shifting to increase the volume of online advertising spend and there is no greater bang for the buck than can be had with pay per click. Essentially it allows anyone to advertise on the worlds biggest consumer medium (Google) for free with the advertiser only paying per call to action i.e. per clickthrough to their website. Pay per click therefore allows small businesses to compete with the biggest for traffic and sales. Many small businesses rely heavily on pay for online and offline based sales.

As well as traditional business types facing the need to adapt and embrace the rise of Google and the search engines other traditional advertising mediums and publications are facing the need to adapt. For example we never book a hotel by looking through the Yellow Pages anymore or scan the local paper for the weather forecast, so publishers advertising revenues are disappearing. The answer is to diversify and embrace online change and search behaviour, hence looking at the above example we now see Yell.com & online newspapers now being amongst the most widely used websites to find information and, of course, where the publishers can achieve large advertising revenue. The former even now has its own pay per click system to sell to would be advertisers.

It is of course Google’s own system of pay per click advertising, Google Adwords, which has generated Google’s huge profits most of us gawp at. Adwords is by far the most effective and impressive pay per click system for most advertisers. Campaigns can be set up within hours and traffic, leads and sales can arise almost immediately. At its simplest advertisers choose keywords to appear highly on Google’s search results and control the copy of their search listings that appear, in effect qualifying the visitors that click on the listing. Additional advantages include the ability to change campaigns immediately according to demand, seasonality or budget as well as an ability to target any specific geographic area. Google Adwords ultimately then allows advertisers to put their message in front of prospective customers at the very moment they are looking to buy completely free of charge until the searches clicks on the listings and reaches the clients website.

The message to businesses big and small as well as established media bodies and networks is fish where the fish are...online.