Pay-per-click marketing is the use of paid promotion services such as Google Adwords, Overture, or E-spotting in order to appear high in the sponsored sections of the search engine results.
Most of the popular systems involve bidding on the search terms you wish to be advertised for. When someone searches for that term the search engine, in addition to the main organic listing, shows the top bidders in a separate section; often on the right hand side of the page or in a coloured box above the organic results. The higher you bid the higher in these results you appear, but you are only charged when someone clicks on your advert. You can manage your bids so that your spending doesn't exceed a certain amount per day or a certain cost per click and there will often be a facility to target your adverts - for instance at a particular geographical market or within a certain time band.
PPC is a very useful method of promoting your site but we believe it should be viewed as short term method. For instance if you don't have any natural search results then PPC can give you required exposure until an SEO campaign can provide them. PPC is also very useful for widening your search terms on a seasonal basis - perhaps you sell something at Xmas that you don't sell at any other time of year - or for promoting a special offer. An example might be a travel agent with surplus capacity on their holidays for a few weeks near the end of the season.
Used in this way PPC complements natural search engine optimisation rather than replacing it.
Google Adwords
The dominance of Google in regular search means that their Adwords service has become immensely popular with advertisers. Because of their partnerships with other search companies your adverts will also appear on sites such as Ask and AOL.
Further information can be found at www.google.com/adwords and www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
Overture - Yahoo
Overture are now part of the Yahoo empire and their products are now appearing under the banner of Yahoo Search Marketing. As well as appearing on the Yahoo search results pages adverts will also appear on MSN, Alta Vista, Go2Net, and Excite amongst others.
searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/
Espotting - Miva
Now operating under the name Miva, the former Espotting tends to offer ads that appear on major sites such as eBay, British Airways, Kelkoo, etc. rather than on other search engines.
Please note that we do not currently offer PPC management since the amount of time involved in it means that it is only the larger companies with substantial PPC budgets who find it worthwhile to employ someone to handle their management requirements. For others the cost generally outweigh the benefits. The basic principles are not difficult to learn and we recommend that most companies should administer it in-house.