Ever since Google AdWords made its grand splash on the market, pay per click advertising has become the latest rage in internet advertising. The ability to write an ad and allow a search engine to do the rest of the work for them has turned out to be a proposition that many advertisers find impossible to say no to.
In theory the relationship between search engine and advertiser is a symbiotic one. The advertiser writes an advertisement, then pays a search engine to do the work in identifying potential customers for them through the use of keyword identification.
When web surfers put a search term into the browsers search box the search engine displays the advertisers ads at the same time as the search results are displayed.
The reality however, is a bit more difficult than that.
For marketers looking for keywords, this is not always a simple process. It is not always just a matter of heading over to the search engines keyword selection tools. The keywords they have there are often overused and will produce many, many search results pages.
Since the average web surfer is going to lose interest in the hunt for information after the first five or ten pages it is important that an ad be among those five or ten pages in order to realize a profit.
Here is where things get a bit difficult. The ads that are shown with the top search results are put their because the advertiser is willing to bid more money "per click" than other advertisers.
The standard form of advertising allowed the advertisers to have an ad displayed for a set amount of time for an established fee, regardless of how many people saw it. Advertisers realized this was an inefficient way to get customers.
Thus the pay per click marketing was born. With this the marketer paid only when his advertisement was clicked on. He could also gauge how his ad was being received and make a better profit when it was chosen often.
Of course, from there the next logical step was to ensure the ads that would bring in the greatest amount of money every time they were chosen were among the top search results; therefore, in order for an ad to be among these top results the advertiser must be willing to "out bid" their competition.
The costs of a pay per click advertising campaign can multiply exponentially before the advertiser is even aware of what is happening due to the fact that advertisements at the forefront of a search generate a lot of false interest; there may be hundreds of clicks a day but less than one hundred sales. This is money out of the advertiser's pocket.
Pay-per-click advertisement has potential to be a perilous obstacle course for an unaware advertiser to make his way through; it is a more complex enterprise than many marketers say it is. The good thing is that there are some great resources available (as well as other ways to advertise) out there on the internet for those sharp enough to use them.
