Major PPC Search Engines

Google AdWords

    Google AdWords was launched by the search engine giant in year 2000. Initially, website owners who wanted to advertise would pay Google monthly fees to post their links on search results pages.

    Later on, in 2003, Google AdWords set out to be more site-targeted in their advertising strategies. In this regard, the PPC model for advertising developed, in which clients are to pay Google per click or per impression made on the millions of internet users on the web.

    Google AdWords provides many tools and supporting services for their advertisers. The cost of hiring Google to post your ads can vary depending on your choice of keywords and how you want to bid for them.

    Also, Google AdWords has made it possible for web businesses and site managers to target potential clients in their own country or anywhere in the world. The payment options for Google can be through major credit cards and banks, and the currency can be selected based on the preference of the advertiser.

    You can learn more about the possibilities for your PPC campaign by checking out AdWords at this address: http://adwords.google.com

Overture PPC Ads

    Overture was a company acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Today, the advertising and SEO services that originally belonged to Overture now operates as Yahoo Search Marketing (http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com)

    Included among the PPC services of Yahoo Search Marketing include keyword suggestions, ad testing, as well as monitoring and reporting.

    According to Yahoo, more than 2 billion searches are made on the engine per month. Along with the tools for keyword selection is the ad testing, in which your ad text will be given variations to determine which one has the highest success rate in generating clicks from customers.
Overture from Yahoo will also provide their clients with detailed reports on the number of clicks over a period of time, or during the whole PPC campaign. Aside from that, they offer customer support lines for clients who need help setting up their PPC accounts.

Other PPC Advertising Resources

    One smart way to really get your products and services is to launch PPC campaigns from more than one search engine. Yahoo and Google ensure bigger chances of success for your PPC campaign, but you can still turn to other resources. That is, if you can allot enough funds to manage them effectively.

    Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com) was founded in 1999 and since then has provided search targeted advertising solutions for many advertisers and partners. They can post your ads as sponsored links in search engines like Search.com.

    The ePilot Advertising Network is under the management of Interchange Corporation and has been providing advertising services for more than 8 years. Their site can be found at http://www.epilot.com.

    The company also aims to give you high-ranking ad results in search engine pages, and can post your links and ads in more than 300 of their partner engine sites like Fitness.com, Yellow Pages, Page Seeker, and Index.com, among many others.

    Enhance, which was formerly known as ah-ha, was based in Utah, and was also founded in 1999. Their lowest rate for cost per clicks is $0.05. Enhance provides quality PPC services for advertisers, and you can get your ads shown in any of their hundreds of partner sites, including Yahoo, VeriSign, Open List, Dog Pile, Snap, and more. Their site can be found at http://www.enhance.com.

    Another search engine PPC provider is Miva at http://www.miva.com. This used to be the name for the company that handled FindWhat, which was also into search targeted advertising opportunities.

    Some of the well-known companies who have launched PPC campaigns with Miva are eBay, Toshiba, Orbitz, Shopzilla, ProFlowers, and Barnes and Noble, to name a few.

    Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings can be found at this link http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com. They also provide optimization services and have reasonable price listings for basic to advanced account holders, depending on the PPC campaign budget.

    Before your ad can be included in their sponsored listings, it will be reviewed by Ask.com editorial staff, and may be active in as little as a few hours. In some cases, bid for keywords may take a few days.

    Ask.com strictly adheres to their guidelines on which sites to include in PPC advertising. Among the prohibited promotions on Ask Jeeves are for the sale of illegal drugs, some prescription drugs, online gambling, graphic violence, and others.

    There are also region-based search engines that provide PPC for advertisers. Splut, Ltd, at http://www.splut.com offers search engine listings and CPC advertisement options in the United Kingdom. Other UK-based PPC search engines are Google AdWords UK, Overture UK, and Miva UK.

SEO & PPC Tools for Google

    More on the search engine optimization tools from Google will be discussed in chapter 9. Included for discussion, aside from Google AdWords, is Google Suggest and other keyword density tools.

    PPC tools for Google, as mentioned before, are very important in the maintenance and monitoring of SEO as well as advertising effectiveness across the search engine.

    Another useful PPC tool from Google is Google Analytics, which provides you with up-to-the-minute and relevant data based on the clicks made by visitors on your sponsored links.

    What are the features of Google Analytics? You will be able to track the performance of your ads, determine what percentage of incoming clicks to your site were from email newsletters, search engine results, or referring partner sites.

    You will also receive trend reports through Google Analytics, so you will know how well your ads are performing over time. Plus, you can opt to receive these updates in your email. You can also use Google Analytics along with Google AdWords, to determine the effectiveness of your selected keywords and key phrases.

    Google AdWords also has a division, Google Website Optimizer, which offers options for testing and optimizing web pages for better conversion rates of visitors to buyers to income.

    Through Google Website Optimizer, you can run experiments and test which of the pages in your site gather a satisfactory amount of traffic. This way, you can focus other optimization efforts to pages in your site with low traffic.

SEO & ROI

    How important is the SEO and ROI combination when it comes to doing business? As this site has been repeatedly saying, the main objective of SEO is to help a business generate more sales and income through the millions of internet users that can potentially become customers.

    One can say that all the efforts put into SEO have become successful through a high return of investment (ROI) on the part of the business owner. You already know that SEO along with campaign methods like PPC, are costly, and are investments that can both be risky and rewarding in the long run.

    Smart businessmen and website owners know where to put their money, and in the case of SEO and PPC, that information can be gathered through research and observation of trends across the World Wide Web.

    If you are trying to improve your strategies and techniques on SEO, you can measure that through your ROI. If you want to know if your PPC campaign and your choice of keywords are beneficial to your business, you need to determine how much your ROI will be per amount you spend on clicks.

« Previous Topic Next Topic »