Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Drawbacks Of Pay Per Click Advertising

By Brian Basch

The red-hot trend in Internet marketing, Google Adwords has made a big impression on pay per click advertising. The lure of placing an ad and sitting back while the search engine works for you is irresistible to a large number of advertisers.

At first sight the partnership of search engine and advertiser looks ideal. The advertiser will generate an ad and rely on the search engine to do the rest of the work. The search engine in turn will get leads for the advertiser through keywords. When a person types in a keyword into the search bar, the advertiser's ad will be seen when search results come up.

However this is not really as simple as it looks. This is because keyword research is not so easy. Tracking through the search engines is not enough. The keywords you find here are popular and will bring up too many pages of results. It is good to know that most searchers will not look beyond the first 5 pages of their search results. This makes it very important to be listed in the first five pages, if you want to make money.

A second thing to consider is the fact that the amount you bid per click on your keyword will be the deciding factor for how you are positioned in the search engine. With the old form of advertising you would be paying for the length of time you wanted your ad to be seen, not the mount of traffic it created. The drawback with this form of advertising was that it could cost a lot of money.

The next form of advertising to emerge was Pay per click marketing. The idea was straightforward; advertisers would simply pay a fee every time a visitor clicked on their ad. This meant that if the ad had a good ratio of clicks the advertiser would make more money. Next came the question of positioning your ad in the search engines. In order to gain a superior position advertisers would have to bid higher than their competitors.

Pay per click advertising is not without risks. Costs can rise dramatically and the advertiser can soon find himself seriously out of pocket. You need to be sure that an ad that is drawing a lot of traffic is in fact making sales, or you might lose a lot of money.

There are many things that can go wrong in a pay per click campaign, and you will have to be extra careful, especially if you are new to this form of marketing. it is not so easy. However you do not need to feel alone as there are many different marketing strategies to try out.

So consider your options and do not rely on one method of marketing. Remember the more methods you use the better chances you have of making a profitable business. - 15246

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