Pay Per Click Campaign

A Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign which is also referred to as a 'sponsored link' or even 'adwords' campaign is one way a company can either make sales or generate qualified leads from their website.

A PPC campaign is one where you set up an advertising campaign with one of, or a number of the major search engines. The way it works is that you pay a pre determined amount to be listed on the right hand side of the search results for whichever search terms you wish to be found for, and every time a unique IP address (Internet address) or prospect clicks on your site you are charged that amount. You may be involved or have noticed the results in the main body at the top on the left hand side in the blue (what a mouthful), these are clients who are rewarded by the Search Engine for their continued business and spend.

There are a number of positives as too are there negatives associated with this sort of online marketing strategy.

A PPC campaign can ensure that your company has an immediate web presence in the search engines, which can give you a chance that you may get some traffic. The only time you pay when having a sponsored link is when someone clicks on your link, which as an advertising medium can be relatively inexpensive.

Although there are a few positives there are however some negatives associated with a PPC campaign. With a PPC campaign statistics show that you will never receive more than 15% of the traffic looking for your good or service. This 15% is only possible in very limited industries and only in number 1 position (the percentages decrease dramatically after 1st position), which means that you are missing at least 85% of the traffic in most cases.

It can also be very expensive to run a PPC campaign, as whichever company is prepared to spend the most per click maintains the highest ranking. It is not unheard of that companies may spend $20 per click to ensure a high ranking with budgets well into the tens of thousands of dollars per month. Also, once you hit your cap (Total budget you are willing to spend for a 24 hour period which is also pre-determined) your website disappears until the 24 hour period from which you were posted expires (Unless you are ranked naturally).

Therefore, if your website is posted at 6 in the morning and you hit your cap/budget by midday, you will have 18hrs of downtime which can cost your business a significant amount of money. It has also been rumoured that there are programs out there which are designed to click your website on multiple occasions and register different users each time, if this were to happen you might find yourself spending a lot of money with very little result.