PPC Advertising
Most of us are familiar with PPC services such as Overture, Yahoo's sponsored
listings,
Google's sponsored listings and Google Adwords. These employ the PPC
model originally pioneered by Overture (then called GoTo) where an
advertiser pays a specified bid amount for each visitor that is delivered from your advertisement.
Essentially, advertisers are establishing their own targetted traffic by creating their
own listings and bidding on how much they will pay for each click that lands a human
visitor at their website.
As Overture pioneered the basic PPC model as a directory, others have applied the
PPC model to hosted ads, as well as to domain name parking. This allowed many more
options for ad delivery on a much broader network.
Pay-Per-Click advertising has grown-up quite a bit since the pioneering days. Now,
most PPC advertising partners employ rather sophisticated technologies to catch and
and deter fraudulent clicks. So beware, if you setup a script or macro that will click
on one of your domain's parked PPC ads repeatedly, you are almost insuring the demise
of your account.
Certainly, check your PPC listings. Make sure the directories actually have advertisements
in them, but do not click on any of the actual ads. Clicking on your own advertisements
is like paying yourself and is against the terms of your parking partner's TOS (Terms
of Service).
Another thing that has grown-up about PPC advertisments is the format of the ads themselves.
It used to be that PPC were all directory styled listings with tracked text links,
or perhaps a tracked GIF banner campaign. Nowadays, you can see all sorts of multimedia
formats used, including custom HTML, JavaScript and Flash making it into PPC advertisements.
Why do advertisers like and use PPC advertising systems? Advertisers are using
specific keywords that are relevant to their business and PPC listings deliver targetted
human traffic which is in search of a particular service, product or resource. On top
of this, PPC ad campaigns can alleviate the downtime a new website has to endure while
it awaits the search engines to index it, and then the time that it most likely will
spend kept down in the lower rankings (often refered to as being caught in the sandbox)
by the search engines simply because it is "too new" to the scene.
Overcoming The Sandbox Effect
The sandbox I just spoke of is actually a myth, or a
theory, that search engine optimization professionals use when explaining the problem
with promoting new websites to thier cliente, though. While I agree that there is a
certain time of lag as the search engines take notice of a new site, it is often the
very search engine optimization techniques employed that keep a website low in the
rankings. But the sandbox does not last long, and certainly not for the years these
so-called SEO Pros will tell you it does. Of course, as an SEO oriented Web Designer
myself, this is a little pet peeve I have and would require a whole new site in order
to explain it all.
But the sandbox effect is nothing more than the newness of a website. As a new domain
is registered and a new site is created for it, there is absolutely no promotion for
it. Once the site goes live, online promotion can start. Obviously, all of the major
search engines and directories need to be informed of its presence. Plus, the business
should submit to all related and niche search engines and directories. This, in itself
can take some time if done correctly (by hand) so that the human submission will have
more weight than an automated software submission program.
Once a search engine actually has been notified that a site is available for it to
crawl that it didn't previously know about, it still has to index the site. This can
take up to 30 or 40 days with the major search engines and very likely will take from
3 to 6 months with smaller niche search engines and directories.
Once a website has been indexed by a major search engine, that search engine has to
also index all of the other links to that website in order to give it any kind of a
decent ranking. Since it may be some 3 to 6 months (or more) for the related niche
search engines and directories to list the site, the newness of a website won't wear
off for at least 6 months and many businesses lose interest and dedication to the site
by the time they finally are recognized with a decent ranking and wind-up losing any
kind of ranking potential.
This is where PPC Advertising becomes such an important resource for a new business.
Simply by signing-up with a PPC advertiser such as Overture, Google
AdWords, Kanoodle or other pay-per-performance system, a fresh new business that is just on the scene
can instantly start buying targetted traffic and selling products and/or services.
This is quite significant, since you have to remember that a large, custom, one-off
professionally designed and developed website takes a mininum of a month's in-house
workload by staff to get online. This of course, is after grueling out the business
name, plan, mission and other details by the suits. Suddenly, you realize that the
website itself which was intended to sustain the business may have actually taken quite
an investment and once available online the suits again expect this worldwide presence
to start succeeeding immediately. No other online advertising or free promotion system
can provide the expected results so quickly as PPC advertisements.
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