Pay-Per-Click

Pay or Bid Per Click

Pay-per-click is a great way to get an immediate (well almost) flow of traffic on targeted keywords by paying a known amount per visitor. Whilst Overture (formerly Goto) was virtually the only player in this market for a while and still dominates the US market, a more recent entrant into the European PPC market is espotting who offer a faster turn-around on keyword acceptance and have similar services for the major European countries. Espotting claim to reach 72% of the UK online population via their relationships with large portals.

Pay-per-click allows you to tap into an existing stream of country/language specific traffic. Visit your chosen pay-per-click site, search on your very carefully researched keywords, look at what other advertisers are bidding, and decide at what position you'd like to enter the bidding. If by some great fortune, you have a little used keyword or phrase with no other bidders, you can pay the minimum of 5p per click to get into the top position (but only in your wildest dreams!). You just need to ensure that you can achieve sufficient sales on a per visitor basis to offset the cost.

Pay-Per-Click also allows you to target a wide range of different keyword phrases and therefore bring in visitors, who looking on search engines alone, may not previously have found you. Once your Pay-Per-Click account is set up you can return to add new keywords at any time, thereby tapping into new sources of visitors, or to coincide with a new product or service you're offering.

Just one caveat; because you're bidding against competitors, you need to monitor your bids daily in order to stay within the top 3 - 5 results for your keyword combination, otherwise your referals will drop dramatically. This is because only the top 3 - 5 results are shown on espotting's partner sites. If you don't have the time to manage your bids in this way, espotting do offer managed services.

Less well known in the UK pay-per-click market is Sprinks, a part of the mighty About.com. With this service you can target a huge number of keywords and direct them to individual pages on numerous web sites. I've tried this service and have yet to see any many referrals. I suspect that this is due to the fact that the main syndication of Sprinks is through the About.com guides, which generally target a US audience, whereas my keyword selection was UK specific.

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