Small Town News

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

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Many businesses are looking for ways to increase their customer base or to increase traffic to their websites. Pay per click may be one option you may choose "jewelry" as your keyword. Whenever anyone uses Google to search for "jewelry," your ad will pop up on the right of for doing this. The general idea is that the business gets their ad placed on a site and then must pay a flat fee every time the ad is clicked. Google and Yahoo search engines both have pay per click ad options and so does Facebook. A wonderful feature of these forms of advertising is that the business can choose how much it wants to pay per day. Once that limit has been reached, the ad is removed. Thus there are no surprises in terms of daily advertising costs.

Google's pay per click option is called Adwords. Go to www.adwords.com to learn more or to sign up. With Google Adwords, you pay for keywords. For example, if you sell jewelry, the screen under the heading of "Sponsored Links." If someone clicks on your ad, you will have to pay the predetermined amount for that click.

How much will you have to pay per click? The answer is that it depends. In the example above, because "jewelry" is a highly searched-for word, the cost of using it as your keyword is going to be relatively high. The more specific you get with your keywords, the less likely they are to be searched and the less expensive they will be. For example, "Native American turquoise jewelry" is a much more specific keyword.

To get an idea of what your cost per click (CPC) will be, Google the term "Google Adwords Keyword Tool," and use this tool to check your keyword. The keyword tool reveals that "Native American turquoise" will cost $0.97 per click, while "sell jewelry" will cost $2.13 per click. Even though fewer people will be searching for specific keyword "Native American turquoise," those that are will most likely be "better" visitors, since they are already pre-inclined to shop for your specific item.

Yahoo Search Marketing works very similar to Google Adwords. Learn more about Yahoo's advertising options at www.advertising.yahoo.c om. Yahoo even offers a free webinar for people interested in learning more about this form of advertising.

Facebook also has its own form of pay per click advertising. With Face-book advertising, you are able to filter your target audience so that your ad only appears on Facebook pages that meet your criteria. For example, if you want to target, young married families in Oklahoma, Facebook allows you to do that. To get your ad placed, however, you will have to go through a bidding process to determine your cost per click. Once your CPC has been determined, you can set your daily budget. Once your daily budgeted amount has been reached, your ad will cease to appear. The minimum daily amount is $1.00. To learn more about Facebook advertising, go to www.facebook.com/advertising.

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, it's important to try new methods -- like pay per click advertising. Even so, no advertising method should be followed blindly. All three companies discussed in this article offer analytical tools to help you learn more about your website traffic. Careful review of these data can help you determine if your ad is working or if it isn't. But...you'll never know if you don't give it a try.

Dr. Suzette Barta is an Extension Educator, Community and Economic Development, with Payne County OSU Extension. She is also an active member of the Perkins Community Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Perkins Area Economic Development Authority. To contact her regarding the content of this or other articles, e-mail her at sbarta@provalue.net.



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© 2011 The Perkins Journal Perkins, Oklahoma. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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