The Pros and Cons of Pay-Per-Click advertising - Part 1

Pay per click is a technique of search marketing. If you are thinking of starting a pay per click campaign, you will need to do a bit of research in several areas before even thinking of starting an advertising campaign using PPC. Walking blindly into a PPC campaign can be hazardous to say the least. Doesn’t matter which pay per click service you use, understanding what you are getting into is crucial.

Pay per click search engines are where the advertiser pays money for each visitor that visits his site through the ad that is posted by him. The best part of this kind of advertising is that you pay only if someone clicks on your ad. You will not have to worry about sinking too much money into your advertising campaign.

Generating traffic
It is one of the fastest ways of generating targeted traffic to your website. You may even be lucky enough to have visitors crawling all over your site in just a matter of minutes you start your advertising campaign. From the advertisers point of view, getting traffic to the website is the biggest problem and this is resolved with pay per click advertising.

Targeted traffic
You not only generate traffic, you can target traffic in a particular region of you choice. If you don’t want your ad to be seen by people living in a particular country, say Namibia, you can exclude them. You have options wherein you are allowed to choose the countries where you wish to advertise.

You can also get targeted traffic based on specific keywords and phrases you choose. Searchers or browsers of the internet will be directed to your web page targeted by the keyword phrase they are looking for. You are in fact in a position to pre-qualify your customers even before they visit your website.

Budget control
Pay per click search engines do not charge a fee to run your ad. You can even set a budget of your choice, as low or as high as you wish, to set up an advertising campaign, where the amount of money spent can be controlled, based on the amount you bid on each keyword. Many times, you can get targeted traffic for very less, depending on the keyword phrases used. You are only going to pay when your ad is clicked on.

Tracking
Ability to track the performance of various keywords used in your campaign gives you the advantage of trial testing with different keywords, until you finally achieve success in your campaign. All the details that you ever need to see how your advertising campaign is doing are provided. You have keyword tracking, you can have multiple ads running at the same time and track which ad is doing better, you can pause an ad when you want, and you can check the conversion rates and much more.

Reaching people
Where else can you get the advantage of reaching people in different countries with just a click. If you need to reach people in Indonesia, all you need to do is enable your ad to be seen there and within minutes your ad is within their reach.

Market testing
Another advantage with PPC is that you can test the viability of a market or product. Of course, it goes without saying that the keywords, landing pages, ads etc have to be set up perfectly. If you know what you are doing, it is a great to run test after test and find hot markets and products to move into.