Paid Internet Marketing

Paid Internet Marketing includes fee-based strategies and tactics outside of Search Engine Optimization to increase online equity and drive traffic to your site. The most common strategies include paid search, directory submission and banner advertisments.

Paid search refers to ads appearing in the for-hire ad space of search engines. (In Google, text ads appear as ‘Sponsored Links,’ distinct from the natural listings.) Advertisers purchase the relevant keywords—often via auction, as with Google AdWords—and the ads are subsequently distributed by the search engines over their affiliated system of Web sites. The unique feature of PPC is that search engines display ads (text or image*) based on the user’s search query.

Though it costs you nothing when your ad is displayed, when a user clicks on it and is taken to your site, you pay the search engine what you’ve bid—depending on the keyword’s desirability, costs range from pennies to many dollars per clickthrough.

PPC allows the advertiser an unprecedented ability to accurately measure a campaign’s effectiveness: one can discover what terms were searched for, which Web sites displayed your clicked-upon ad, what pages your visitors came to—and, most importantly—if they converted to your goals. This clarity is not found anywhere in traditional advertising media.

In terms of flexibility, a PPC campaign can be turned on or off at will, specific ads can be paused, and ad text can be tweaked for greater effectiveness.

In short, PPC is recommended for several reasons:

• You get qualified traffic to your Web site—increasing brand awareness and sales—that supplements your organic search results.
• You may reach your target market at the end of the buying cycle, typically when it is ready to buy (in contrast to ‘informational’ organic listings often sought in the research and consideration phases).
• PPC can be targeted to specific geographic locations and for specific periods—making it the ideal promotional tool.
• The extra volume of Web traffic and additional inbound links from PPC increases your online equity and indirectly improves your search engine rankings.

Relative to its costs, the benefits of paid marketing make it very attractive: quickly appear prominently in the search engines; attract qualified traffic; engage at the optimum time in the buying cycle; adjust your bids at will; target specific geographic locations and for specific periods; and fine tune your power to convert on your landing pages by tweaking your copy. Paid Internet marketing complements SEO—the results are synergistic.

As you can clearly see, the options are unlimited, and you have better ways to spend your time like managing your business, let an Acro Media marketing specialist manage all this for you.