Is Pay Per Click Advertising Effective?
You may have heard a lot about pay per click advertising and what great things it can do for your business. It is supposed to be quite easy to organise, quick to launch, and relatively inexpensive. If indeed it can give you ad placements that do not cost too much, then it should be an extremely attractive alternative.
Pay per click advertising has become an attractive option to advertisers, especially in recent years, because it appears to do better in reaching target audiences than other forms of online advertising.
One reason for its effectiveness might be the convenient location of PPC ads on search result pages. When the page is displayed, the PPC ad is usually displayed in the viewing area, and that draws a visitor’s eye more quickly than other parts of the page. However, this may not be the only reason. The actual product concept itself appears to have a number of advantages in comparison to the concept of other online advertising options, and these factors contribute to the marked effectiveness of pay per click advertising.
It has been observed that searchers are more receptive to this form of advertising, and it generates a good response as compared to the relatively weaker searcher response to other types of online advertising, such as banner ads or popup ads. In part, this acceptance may be because pay per click advertising is still a novelty, relatively speaking, compared to banners and popup ads, which have been highly visible fixtures on websites for many years.
Actually, though, the concept of paid search engine advertising has been around for the larger part of the last decade. However, it was not really until Overture introduced its pay per clickprogram in 1997 that the potential of the product became evident. Not long after that, the competing search engines also launched their own pay per click programs.
Ever since the Yahoo organisation acquired Overture late in 2003, the two largest search engines on the Internet, namely Google and Overture-Yahoo, ratcheted up their competition to a higher level in the pay per click industry. This intensified competition has resulted in a vastly improved product with more sophisticated features. The success of these two pay-per-click giants (they dominate about 90 percent of pay-per-click traffic) has encouraged smaller search engines to add their own versions of paid search advertising. This then raised the interest of search engine users and advertisers to the stratospheric levels that you now see.
Searchers find great utility in pay per click advertisements, mainly because the ads clearly spell out what they are selling. The results of a general search may or may not lead to companies actually selling products; in contrast, these paid search ads tell searchers that when they click the ads, they will get routed to a website with relevant products or services.
Pay per click advertising thus becomes more effective because the audience is already targeted and pre-qualified. It is likely that your PPC ad will be clicked on by people already interested in your product.