Pay-Per-Click or PPC ad campaigns are common across the internet. You have seen, but not necessarily known, what to call that annoying box that’s always on the periphery of text you want to read, but PPC is important. It’s a potential lead generator when done right.

What Is Pay-Per-Click?

A business owner posts an advertisement on a host website. When people click the box, this leads them away from the host, to the ad owner’s website. Each time someone clicks this box, a fee is charged to the business by whoever owns the host site. This can be very cheap or extremely expensive, ranging from a dollar for every click to several dollars per click.

Elements of Developing a Paid Campaign

There are several elements to designing a PPC campaign which an SEO professional can help a client with. The very first is deciding if such an ad campaign makes good business sense. Which sorts of business are best suited to PPC marketing? Usually, these are firms which offer something tangible; a visible product which consumers are drawn to. Services are harder to promote this way, but they can still earn success when clever SEO consultants construct their campaigns thoughtfully. As a general rule, it’s easier to sell clothing or jewelry than plumbing and dog-walking services.

The next part of the program is developing an ad. It has to be short and crisp, containing only the most attention-grabbing information. A location, product, or a give-away could be enough to draw in a browser who had no intention of clicking on ads for anything while researching his landscaping project or reading celebrity news.

One must also select where the ads will run (e.g. Google? Yahoo? Facebook? Someone’s private website?). At this point you really have to weigh cheap rental against expensive and don’t imagine that initial cost is all that matters.

The Cost of PPC

A website’s prices for hosting ads are frequently their source of revenue, especially when the website is a blog page talking about issues or recipes but not overtly selling anything. They have to be careful about whose ads they post because they affect how potential readers view their legitimacy. Search engines can tell when PPC ads aren’t appropriately placed too and the host could lose a place in the rankings by posting random, unassociated ads.

The person writing and posting this ad needs to decide if the host is likely to attract a lot of attention. One SEO service is to determine rankings and traffic for that site and whether these are promising enough for the client. Some pages are wildly popular, but that doesn’t mean they should host your ad.

Here’s the thing: an appropriately placed ad gets the attention of people who are already interested in what you’re selling. That’s why they visited this site in the first place. Recipe blogs are a good example. If you are interested in learning to make chocolates, a company selling candy-making and other culinary equipment belongs here. If your host posts recipes for healthy, vegan foods, your advertisement for pre-packaged vegan goodies has been sensibly placed. Even if this blog site charges more than an unrelated page, your conversion rates are likely to be higher and the money better spent.