Google Adwords: Are there Any Other PPC Programs Around?
Kirt Christensen
Pay per click advertising has set the stage for a new evolution in internet marketing. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the search engines finally mastered the art of making a profit off of internet marketing. What does that mean, exactly?
Consider the old style of advertising. The company whose resources you were using to advertise, whether it was a television, newspaper, radio or webpage, would charge you a fee. For that fee your ad would be displayed for a set amount of time and anyone who wanted to could come see it.
Then someone started thinking that this type of system wasn't really fair on the internet; after all, not all advertising venues are created equal. If an ad received a great deal of exposure due to the fact that the website it was posted on brought in a larger number of visitors every day, shouldn't both parties profit from it?
But increasing the fees that they charge isn't right either. The likelihood of traffic maintaining that rate is not good. The site might get to be known for charging too much for a small return.
Therefore, we have the beginnings of pay-per-click advertising.
Advertisers write ad copy for a product or service and use keywords they selected and analyzed with care to see if they would be profitable. Then their ads are given to the search engines to display.
Each time someone searches on the web for a particular keyword the search engine will display the ad. When the ad is clicked on and the searcher goes from the ad to the website linked to the ad, the advertiser pays the search engine a small fee, usually under a dollar, and it is good business for the search engine and the advertiser.
The search-engines also took it a little further and let an advertiser who will pay more money per click to have their ads displayed on the top of the heap, thus receiving greater opportunity for viewing and greater quantities of traffic, and hopefully greater profits for the advertiser as well as the search engine.
If you ask anyone to identify a pay per click "ppc" advertising tool they are probably going to immediately fall back on Google and Google AdWords; however, Google is far from the only search engine to operate a pay per click marketing tool.
Yahoo!, ABC Search, Search Feed, 7 Search, MIVA, Findology, Microsoft AdCenter and Ask.com all allow marketers to advertise with them on a pay per click basis. The prosperous marketer will be the one that is willing to step out from the comfort zone of Google and AdWords and test their advertising skills in these uncharted waters.
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