I was recently answering some questions on Pay-Per-Click ads online and thought this would be a great place to share too.
How it works: Companies who have search engines charge you when someone clicks on your ad. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
For instance with Google (Which I’m sure is the most common) I decided to search for something lets say “dog food” (feel free to open a new tab or window and try it) Google then brings back a whole bunch of sites for me to choose from. If you notice the top 3 links and the links to the right say “sponsored” or “sponsored links” those are the pay per click ads. If I click one of those links then the person who posted the ad gets charged. They won’t be charged if I don’t click. A lot of people don’t realize or even notice because they are usually looking for a solution or product.
One of the nice things about pay per click is that you can set a budget. If you only want to pay $2 a day, then you can set that limit. Google has all these algorithms (sp?) and matrix on how they charge per keyword basically its like an silent auction. They do give you guidelines of what price point to aim for. You say you’re willing to spend five cents on the words “dog food” Then some other manufacturer wants the top spot so they put a dollar. But you don’t know that because its a silent auction so They would come up first and you would come up second if we pretend no one else is buying ads. Some keywords can be expensive, like mortgage and insurance because they are big competition.
Its a sliding scale, depending on the word and popularity. Google has it all figured out, there is some sort of formula they’ve got that decides how much you pay and who goes first. Its a mystery. You never wind up knowing how much other people are willing to pay or are paying. Just what your willing to pay, but Google will tell you the likely hood of your ad being seen. Google will tell you if your even in the ball park after you fill out your stuff. It all depends on how much the words you want are going for, and you choose the words, how much your willing to pay per word and what your budget is per day. Your in total control the whole way.
If you could only pay a dollar a day that would be your “budget”. But you could have your ad come up anytime people search for a variety of words or phrases. Our example earlier was “dog food” we would want that to come up anytime someone searched “dog” or “food” or “dog food” I don’t know what the real prices are for those words, but just for the example. Lets say I’m willing to pay a nickel for the word “food” and a dime for the word “dog” and twenty cents for “dog food”. After a variety of people search for those words my ad comes up each time, When enough people click and my dollar is spent my ad doesn’t show for the rest of the day.
From what I understand you’d want to shoot for the 2-5th spot for when your ad comes up. I don’t know if its just line of site or people just don’t take the first one? Also some companies are aggressive because they want the brand recognition not because their stuff matches the search. I’ve noticed Ebay comes up a lot.
How effective is it? Well It depends on your ad. You want to write such a good “classified ad” that it gets clicked on by your target. Google lets you run two similar ads at once so you can test which one is better.
You can check your keywords
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Also Google bought YouTube so they run commercials now too.
Unless they changed it when you start out Google gives you a basic adwords account which only lets you do one campaign. When you feel like your comfortable enough you can switch to the more advanced. It was nice to start that way.
The only real way to find out is to do it. The hosting company I’m using now has a free $50 getting started coupon for google adwords, and one for yahoo you should see if yours does too. If you need a hosting company click here and sign up.
Let me know if that is clear or if you have any other questions. I’ll give it a go!
© Lyndi Lytle 2009
