Ever noticed those ads on the right of the page on Google? Those ads appear according to what you are searching for. Why is this so powerful? As an advertiser, you can be sure that the person looking at your ad is interested in your product or service. This beats the pants off of traditional advertising. The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of price per click (PPC) advertising and its benefits.

How It Works

Let's say that you own an ecommerce site selling fishing tackle. You want to increase your sales of salt water tackle. How can you do this? PPC advertising is a good way to start. To get the ball rolling, you sign up for a Google AdWords account. You compile a list of the keywords you want to target, configure your daily budget, and voila! If you configured your campaign correctly, whenever a user searches for salt water tackle your site shows up on the first results page of Google. Of course, there's really a lot more to a successful PPC campaign, but that's it in a nutshell.

The Benefits

The benefits of PPC are numerous. We'll start by analyzing other types of advertising and then comparing them to PPC. Television and radio commercials have been a staple in the advertising tool box for many years. The purpose is to come up with a catchy ad that will bring you more business. The big problem with TV and radio advertising is its expensive and it is difficult to really target people that will be interested in your product/service. Larger companies that spend loads of money on branding can do well with TV and radio, but it is difficult for smaller businesses. It's even harder for ecommerce businesses. I won't even start on how TIVO is killing this market... Now let's compare PPC to TV/radio advertising. With PPC, you can easily target people who are interested in your product or service. You specify the keywords, so you can rest assured that the people viewing your ad are at least interested. The cost of doing a PPC campaign is much lower than TV/radio advertising. To give you an example, making sure that I am on the front page of Google for the keyword "web design" in my area only costs me about $25 a month. If you want to target a broader market, your costs will be higher, but the key to remember is that the people you are reaching are already interested.

The same comparison works for print advertising, billboards, etc. I've done a decent job at making PPC marketing look like the best thing since sliced bread, but is it really? Not exactly. To have a successful PPC campaign, you need to keyword research, modifying keywords to see what works, changing your web site to increase conversions, etc. Though it's not an easy process, it's still cheaper and more effective than traditional forms of advertising. If this is blowing over your head, consider hiring an online marketing consultant. They can help you get your campaign going while educating you on the details of search engine marketing. Once you have tasted the success of PPC, you'll think twice about other forms of advertising!