Buying your way to the top with Pay Per Click Advertising (Part 2)
The ads are ranked based on how much a business is willing to pay to advertise on each search phrase. In the example search for “DVD players” the current top advertiser is currently paying $0.81 per click � one penny more than the #2 advertiser.
The ads are purchased through pay per click advertising suppliers, and the two largest happen to be owned by Google and Yahoo. Google’s program is called Adwords and displays results on Google.com, AOL, Ask Jeeves, many smaller search engines. Yahoo’s program is run by an acquired company called Overture, and the results appear on Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and many other syndication partners.
Why should I pay for traffic?
For businesses that have had success with search engine optimization, the idea of paying for visitors is not particularly enticing. However, if you can make more money off a visitor to your web site than it costs to get them there, why wouldn’t you pay for those visitors? Keep in mind that you can choose exactly what search terms you want to advertise on, and you only pay when a searcher actually clicks on your ad, so it generally comes down to deciding how much you can afford to spend for those visitors rather than whether it’s worth doing at all.
