What is Pay-Per-Click Marketing?

Pay-Per-Click Marketing is sometimes referred to as performance based marketing. It is an auction style advertising method of paying for placement on the search engines. With pay-per-click marketing, an advertiser has the ability to get exposure on any search engine results page on the internet.

How Does Pay-Per-Click Marketing Work?

Most search engines have two sets of results on every webpage they show to users. The top results are normally paid (sponsor) results and the other results are called organic results. The difference between these results is straight forward. Sponsor results are websites that have paid to be displayed on the results page of the searched term. Organic results are websites that have been optimized so that they would be placed on the results page of a particular term or phrase being searched by a user.

With Pay-Per-Click Marketing(paid), you can bid on ANY variation of a term being searched. For example, Dallas Texas real estate is different from Dallas TX real estate which is still different from Dallas real estate. Each search engine offers their own specific program for PPC, but overall, the theories behind their solution are very similiar.

Multiple variations of pay-per-click marketing in the marketplace but for most website marketing programs, you need only focus on Google adwords, Yahoo search marketing and MSN adcenter. The tremendous value which can be pulled from this marketing technique is two-fold:

• First, you only pay if a user clicks on your link. It costs nothing to be displayed on the results page. As a result, this doubles as a branding opportunity.
• Second, your website can only be optimized for a certain number of phrases.

As a result, utilizing these programs allow you to get coverage on terms which are not highly trafficked and it is cheaper to use pay-per-performance instead of having a web page built to attack that particular term or phrase.

Is Pay-Per-Click Marketing the only way to generate traffic to your site? The answer is NO. Is it a form of internet marketing which has multiple positive ramifications on your website? The answer is YES. Pay-Per-Click Marketing is a part of the Search Engine Marketing Process. Remember Search Engine Marketing is an ongoing process and no one strategy is going to guarantee total success.