The Truth About The Pay Per Click Search Engines

Pay Per Click(PPC) search engines are one of the fastest ways to drive large predictable amounts of extremely targeted visitors to your website. There is a huge difference between getting normal top 5 rankings in the major search engines and getting a top 5 ranking in the pay per click listings. 

Achieving a high ranking in the major search engines for your primary keywords takes time and more work whereas with the pay per click search engines, you just need to research, bid for your keywords and achieve a good ranking depending how much you're willing to pay for your position. 

The two major pay per click search engines are Google AdWords and Overture. Let's begin with the first one. 

Google AdWords is a pay per click advertising system maintained by Google. If you use Google, you have probably noticed a bunch of sites, usually 8 on the right hand corner of your computer screen. They appear as little text ads next to search results on Google. This is Google AdWords. They also appear on other Google properties such as Froogle(Google product search) and Google search network sites like AOL, AskJeeves, Earthlink, Netscape and Compuserve. In addition, you can appear on Google content network sites like About.com and Forbes.com in the form of adsense ads. All this, you can decide in your adwords account settings. 

Google AdWords allows you to create your own ads. You choose keywords which tell Google where to show your ads. You only pay when someone clicks on them. For every targeted visitor or click that a particular website receives, the latter has to pay sometimes as low as 5 cents to as high as $5 per click depending on the popularity of the keywords and the positions of the listing. You have total control over every aspect of your campaign, and real-time reporting tells you what's working and what isn't. It's a relatively safe way to advertise
because you can put limits on daily spending. 

On the other hand, the king of pay per click search engines, Overture has a well organized system. You can bid for rankings and also choose the description and title you want, which provides highly targeted traffic to your website. You can control your bids at all times and adjust them, based on the quality of your results. Especially handy is the Search Term Suggestion Tool, which shows you how often people search for a particular word or phrase. 

You'll probably receive more traffic from Overture than from all the other pay per click engines combined. However, because they are less popular, buying highly targeted traffic is much cheaper than at Overture. 

When you use the Overture PPC, your site will appear in its partner sites like Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, CNN and Infospace. 

One advantage for using Google AdWords over other PPC search engines like Overture is that Google AdWords lets you setup a display URL and destination URL in your AdWord. This enables you to use your affiliate links in your Google AdWord. When someone clicks on your AdWord, they are sent to the merchant's web site with your affiliate id in it. If someone makes a purchase, you earn a commission. This is not the case with Overture which requires that you own the web site that you are sending traffic to. Therefore, with Overture you cannot send traffic directly to your affiliate link. You need to have your own website. 

Another advantage of Google AdWords is its algorithm for ranking adwords. It allows the small businesses to compete with the large corporations. Here's why. Cost Per Click (CPC) is not the only factor that Google looks at in determining the ads ranking position. If that was the case, only the large corporations with huge advertising budget will dominate the pay per click listings entirely leaving the small businesses in the dust. 

Google also looks at the ads click through rate (CTR), and ranks ads based on a formula which uses the CPC and the CTR. This allows an ads rank to improve without increasing the cost. The better your CTR, the higher up on the screen your ad will be placed. 

So when you achieve high click through rates, your bid prices go own, down, down and your traffic go up for Google will rank your ad higher as your CTR goes up. Overture does not do this. In overture, the highest bidder always wins. That rewards people who have more money than brain. Which means that for the smart marketer, Google is vastly superior. 

Paying a high CPC alone will not guarantee you a number 1 position in Google AdWords. In Overture it will. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your ads ranking will be on Overture. 

Bidding for the first position is costly for popular keywords. But it's possible to get this position if you're targeting the low cost keywords. Usually it's more profitable to target a bunch of popular keywords and bid for the lower positions or target lots of low cost keywords and bid for the higher positions. 

Bidding excessive amounts just to be listed in the number one position for a keyword is not recommended. It can be a huge money waster. Why pay a huge premium just to be first on the list when second or third is almost as effective? 

The difference between being in the first position or the second can often be several dollars per click. Bid intelligently and reap higher net profits. 

Also avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket. Some webmasters like Google Adwords. Others like Overture. Don't spend all of your pay per click advertising budget on just one search engine. Diversify and spread the risk. 

You can get decent traffic from some of the smaller pay per click venues for as little as $0.01 per click. You'll get less traffic from them of course, but $0.01 per click sure beats $1.50. 

To optimize your ads click through rate, use a relevant title and description in your pay per click listings which makes visitors eager to click. If visitors click on your costly PPC ad expecting to find for example "cheap mobile phones" on the landing page, make sure that's exactly what they'll find when they get there. 

Lots of pay per click traffic to your website is costly and useless if your visitors can't find the item that was advertised in the listing. You simply can't make money with pay per click campaigns unless your targeting is perfect, every time. 

Below is a list of popular pay per click search engines:-
 
http://www.google.com/ads
http://www.overture.com
http://www.findwhat.com
http://www.kanoodle.com
http://www.7search.com
http://www.goclick.com
http://www.enhanceinteractive.com
http://www.epilot.com
http://www.espotting.com
http://www.searchfeed.com
http://www.search123.com
http://www.xuppa.com 

Promoting a business via pay per click search engines is risky for if done and managed incorrectly, can cause waste of money and time. So the best way is to learn as much as you can about this marketing technique before adventuring in it. 

To get started in Google AdWords, you only need to pay an activation fee of $5 to get your account running and start driving targeted traffic to your business immediately.