Welcome to SearchEnginePPC.info - the site for Search Engine PPC ( Pay per Click )

Search Engine PPC or Pay per Click put simply is a marketing method whereby an advertiser bids for ad placements on a search engine's results pages and pays a fee for every click that then proceeds through to their site. It is otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM and is a quick and simple method for gaining traffic from the search engines, without the labour of engaging in SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. Whenever you search for a popular product or topic at one of the major search sites you will see not only what are called the 'natural' or 'organic' results but, more often than not, a series of adverts too. These are mainly placed down the side of the organic results and often above them aswell. The costs of this traffic varies widey according to the maximum you have bid and the popularity of the keyword that your bid is applied to. Traffic cost varies furthermore as it is frequently modified by the Click Through Rate, or CTR, on your advert and a Quality Score for the landing page and the user's experience on it. Single clicks vary from a few cents up to tens of dollars. In order to achieve a successful and viable Search Engine PPC Campaign a merchant must ensure that the total cost of acquiring their visitors is outweighed by the net profit from all those visitors.

Major Search Pay Per Click Programs

Google's in house program is called Adwords, Yahoo! has Overture and Microsoft MSN Live Search uses a system called AdCenter. Other companies have similar in-house programs or used syndicated results from one of the main search engines. If you elect to advertise on their content networks too this also gives you access to a great number of publishers' sites.

Useful Links

More about the major Search Engines and PPC Marketing with them

An introduction to Google's Adwords

Trial PPC campaigns and Affiliate Marketing

Examples

The following are extremely simplified to show how search marketing may or may not work for your business. They do not take into account VAT, taxation variations, currency exchange, additional staff time, customer service, logistics, systems and the likes

1. If you receive 100,000 ad impressions on related search terms, resulting in 1000 clicks to your site costing £1000 and 100 of those visitors then go on to make purchases, each with an average net profit of £5, then you will be £500 adrift, if all of them are likely to be a one-off purchase and not subscriptions or regular customers. Here you must factor in the chance of repeat custom coming to you directly and the potential value of that repeat custom.

2. If you receive 100,000 ad impressions on related search terms, resulting in 2000 clicks to your site costing £500 and 400 of those visitors then go on to make purchases, each with an average net profit of £5, then you will be £1500 in credit.

3. If you receive 100,000 ad impressions on related search terms, resulting in 5000 clicks to your site costing £500 and 1000 of those visitors then go on to take a year's service subscription, each with an average net profit of £1 per month - £12 per subscription, then your company will have added £11500 profit.

There is absolutely no point in it costing £10 or $20 for each new customer via search marketing if the net profit on each of their transactions is not sufficient to cover the cost of their acquisition. Lowering the cost per visitor and raising the conversion rate on your own site into paying customers can make the difference between a loss making campaign and a successful one.

Search Engine PPC Glossary

CPA - Cost per Acquisition (Cost to gain one new customer from a marketing campaign)

CPA (when used in relation to Affiliate Marketing) - Cost per Action (£ % or £ fixed amount commission on a transaction)

CTR - Click Through Rate

PPC - Pay Per Click

ROI - Return on Investment

SEM - Search Engine Marketing

SERP - Search Engine Results Page

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