The pros and cons of PPC

Long gone are the days of ranking well for competitive keyword phrases within weeks of putting a site online. As a matter of fact, new sites can rarely rank well within their first year of existence. This is where the pay-per-click advertising alternatives comes to the rescue. As long as you have a valid credit card handy you can start getting visitors to your site immediately once you sign up with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter pay-per-click advertising. The greatest benefit of PPC is the immediate traffic you get to your site, but the downside is the on-going cost of bidding on keywords month after month.

Who uses Pay-Per-Click advertising?


It's not uncommon to hear of advertisers who spend tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis for immediate visibility on Google. Also many advertisers have new websites that are either too young to rank well or may have been penalized for spammy SEO techniques. The point we are trying to make is, PPC is a great alternative to get your site in front of millions of search engine users quickly providing (1) you have allocated a monthly budget, (2) researched your keywords thoroughly, (3) and set up a proper visitor and conversion metrics reporting tool. We can't emphasize enough the need for visitor and conversion measurement tools prior to engaging in any PPC campaign. Google Analytics is great free choice for webmaster to track their keywords and conversions that can be tied back to their Google Adwords campaign keywords.

PPC can also come very handy to find suitable keywords for your site by testing a large number of keywords at once and measuring the conversion results closely. This process can help you weed out the poor performing keywords and find the true gems. The key is to set up proper visitor tracking prior to starting any large scale PPC campaigns.