Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Many Chicago businesses have built websites that
are very attractive (such as sites built in Macromedia Flash which
can be dynamic and exciting to look at). However, few take into
account that their site was not built with Search Engine Optimization
which can help the website naturally rank at the top of search engines,
or Search Engine Marketing which is a more global plan of adveristing.
To account for this, many companies now use Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Pay-Per-Click advertising is one of the hottest
trends in advertising. In the 1990s, this form of advertising was
restricted to banner ads, which Internet users got sick of fairly
quickly. The new incarnation is to have text-based ads which is
intuitively makes more sense.
How Pay-Per-ClIck Ads Work
This is how it works: Suppose your store or company
sells flowers. Demand for your product increases at certain times
of the year such as Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, and the Christmas/New
Years holiday season. As such, more people will be looking to buy
flowers online during that time (just as more people will be buying
them at traditional brick and mortar stores).
To increase traffic to your website and take advantage
of the increased demand, you sign up with a PPC publishing company
and bid on keywords. Note that this is different from hiring a company
(which are listed below) to take care of it for you (which is frequently
a smart idea). The two biggest PPC publishing companies are Google
(Google Adwords program and Yahoo (Yahoo's Overture program). For
example, if you bid on the words "Chicago Flower Shop"
then your ad will appear at the top of the search engine results
page as many times as possible, as long as your budget can afford
it. You could pay anywhere from 10 cents to a few dollars each and
every time someone clicks.
One of the drawbacks to this form of advertising
is that as you soon as you stop paying, the sudden spike in website
visitors disappears. Also, PPC can become expensive and is frequently
too costly for smaller companies which is why Search Engine Optimization
saves money in the long run.
While PPC campaigns can be run by non-professionals,
they can become quite complex depending on the number of keywords,
competition, pricing and so on. As such, it is frequently recommended
that PPC companies handle the campaign. Typically these companies
take a percentage of the budget as payment or ask for a flat-fee.
Lastly, many web design companies as well as advertising
agencies run PPC campaigns on behalf of businesses. It is simply
another form of Internet marketing. If you cannot find a company
you are satisfied with, visit our
site! We'd be happy to help promote your business!
Company Listings
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Launch - Chicago Internet is a complete
web development firm, creating corporate Internet solutions from
start to finish. We provide site development, web design, hosting,
database development, flash, and e-commerce.
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