Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of website advertising and promotion which combines search engine technology with established online advertising techniques. Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC advertising) is both the fastest growing and most popular form of Search Engine Marketing.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising, in its purest form, consists of a series of contextual, geographically targeted advertisements served on a search engine’s results pages (SERPs), alongside the search engine’s organic results. The appearance of the advertisements is often strikingly similar to the real results, although there will be an indication that the advertisements are sponsored or paid listings. When a visitor clicks on an advertisement, he is taken to the appropriate page of the advertiser’s website – an event known as a clickthrough. As charges for this type of Search Engine Marketing are typically related to the number of clickthroughs, rather than the number of times the advertisement is displayed, the terms pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-click advertising, or sometimes pay-per-performance advertising, are commonly applied.
Simple Affordable Advertising
For the advertiser, the attraction of pay-per-click advertising is the ability to deliver targeted advertising simply and affordably, whilst retaining complete control of the advertising budget. It is the advertiser who determines both the maximum amount that he is willing to spend for each clickthrough and the total daily budget for the pay-per-click advertising campaign.
Instant High Quality Traffic
A major advantage of pay-per-click advertising is that it produces results instantaneously - as soon as a pay-per-click campaign goes live, traffic will be directed to the website. The traffic generated by pay-per-click advertising is of high quality, sometimes termed qualified traffic. Qualified traffic represents visitors who are easiest to convert into customers. Pay-per-click advertisements are shown only in a chosen geographical area and only to people actively searching using the keywords or key phrases the advertiser selects. Visitors who arrive at a website via the pay-per-click route are actively looking for the goods and services it provides and live in the locality it serves. These visitors are ripe for conversion into customers.
Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Implementing a successful pay-per-click campaign requires a range of different skills. Text advertisements need to be concise and compelling, key phrases must be carefully selected, bid amounts closely controlled, and the overall campaign monitored and managed proactively to maximise the rate of return on investment (ROI) achieved.
Expert Pay-Per-Click Management
Few businesses have the necessary skills or experience to manage their own pay-per-click campaign effectively. In many cases a self-managed pay-per-click campaign will be a costly failure; in others a positive ROI will still represent a far from optimal performance. Optillion’s personnel possess the experience and knowledge to plan, implement and manage successful pay-per-click campaigns for any size or type of business. Pay-per-click management is offered either as part of a comprehensive Optillion Internet Marketing campaign or as a stand-alone service.
