Chapter 17
Paying Per Click
In This Chapter
Pay-per-click basics
Figuring out how much a click is worth
Creating ads that are acceptable
Automating pay-per-click campaigns
H
ere’s a quick way to generate traffic through the search engines: Pay for
it. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns provide a shortcut to search engine
traffic, and many companies, particularly large companies with large market-
ing budgets, are going directly to PPC and bypassing the search engine opti-
mization stage totally.
In this chapter, you examine these PPC programs, discover both their advan-
tages and disadvantages, and find out how and where to employ them. It’s an
overview, of course. If you decide to spend money on this form of advertis-
ing, I recommend that you read the quite splendid Pay Per Click Search Engine
Marketing For Dummies (Wiley) by, um, me.
Defining PPC
If you use PPC advertising, you’ll pay each time someone clicks on one of
your ads. Take a look at Figure 17-1, which shows search results at Google,
and Figure 17-2, which shows results for the same search at Yahoo! As you
can see, many of the search results on these pages are actually ads. They
are placed mainly based on pricing. (Google AdWords, as their PPC ads are
known, is a special case, as I explain in a moment.) In other words, rather
than going through all the trouble of optimizing your site and getting links
from other sites into your site — the things that are explained in most of the
rest of this book — you can simply buy your way to the top of the search
engines! Maybe.
