Is Pay-per-click Worth Your Time ?

One method of search engine marketing techniques widely used today is pay-per-click advertising and many website owners are questioning the cost of such ads and whether the return on their investment justifies the expense. Other forms of advertising online, including regular search engine inclusion, banner ads, cross-linking, and listing with directories, can have decent results but few are as effective and affordable as pay per click. This doesn’t mean you should choose pay per click and avoid other forms of advertising, a good combination is always the best decision for any business, whether on the net or in the real world marketplace.

Pay per click advertising has been slowly gaining popularity as the way to go in online advertising since its start in 2002. Many search engines offer pay per click ads based on the sale of certain keywords, and there are also networks that offer pay per click as a means of gathering more customers to their sites. The minimum cost to set up an account has really come down which some belief makes pay per click advertising one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise online.

The major benefit of pay per click advertising is that you don’t pay unless a visitor clicks your advertising link. This usually means a higher percentage of your advertising budget actually leads to customers. I suggest that you read the terms of any pay per click site that you’re considering. Both pay per click and another form of online advertising have their strengths and their weaknesses. Other forms of advertisings may not take as much time to perfect as pay per click advertising. With pay per click, you can expect to spend an amount of time every week reviewing your keywords and revising your ads and the keyword they are linked to. Although the pay per click advertising may cost less it also takes up more valuable time. The results are targeted to an extent but may not necessarily lead to interesting customers so weekly revising is needed for each keyword account. Other advertising may cost more but are usually intended for superior targeting of customers. Moreover, they don’t call for quite as much upkeep as Pay-Per-Click advertising requires.

When you are deciding to participate in any pay per click advertising, there are factors to consider such as keywords you will have to buy to be assured coming up on the first page of search results and how much those words will cost. Depending on the popularity of the keywords, they can be pricey and too expensive for many websites. However, for the bigger sites with deep pockets, it can mean generating a lot of traffic. Others see it as a way to buy their way onto the front page of search results, often considered an envious position, and plan on increased sales making up for the cost of the keywords. And most advertisers do not limit themselves to just one word, however, and the cost can quickly escalate, making the pay per click program a questionable investment. They ended up spending more on pay-per-click, than making sales on the products they advertised.

With network advertising such as Google’s Adsense and Yahoo’s publisher network when a person visits a site, ads are automatically generated to that site with information related to the site they are on. The advertiser pays a similar scale for every click of their ad and the website owner receives a percentage of the income the search engine receives from pay-per-click advertisers.

Additionally, with many network pay per click programs, if the owner of the website clicks on a pay per click ad it could result in termination from the program and the loss of any income previously generated. Even if the site owner is interested in an ad, it is in their best interest to find it another way as opposed to the risk of losing the program.