Free-Reprint Article Written by: Bill Platt
See Terms of Reprint Below.
*****************************************************************
*
* This email is being delivered directly to members of the group:
*
* internet_marketing_articleblaster@yahoogroups.com
*
*****************************************************************
We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article.
Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS
OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you.
This article has been distributed by:
http://Article-Distribution.com
Helpful Link:
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Article Title:
==============
A Comparison of Paid Search Advertising Models
Article Description:
====================
The most common advertising offer at the search engines is the
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. There are also other
search advertising models such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand
Impressions) and Featured Listings. In this article, we will
look at the advantages and disadvantages of each advertising
method.
Additional Article Information:
===============================
1464 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line
Distribution Date and Time: Wed May 3 15:51:41 EDT 2006
Written By: Bill Platt
Copyright: 2006
Contact Email: mailto:comments@thephantomwriters.com
Article URL:
http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/d/p/paid-search-advertising-review.shtml
Bill Platt's Picture URL:
http://thephantomwriters.com/x-images/bill_platt_80x105b.jpg
For more free-reprint articles by this Author, please visit:
http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/d/index.shtml#Bill_Platt
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A Comparison of Paid Search Advertising Models
Copyright � 2006 Bill Platt
the Phantom Writers
http://thePhantomWriters.com
As webmasters, we are all chasing customers. We are looking for
human visitors to come to our websites and to buy what we are
selling.
To serve our needs for targeted traffic --- potential customers
--- the search companies have begun to offer us a share of their
significant traffic through many paid advertising methods.
The most common advertising offer at the search engines is the
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. There are also other
search advertising models such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand
Impressions) and Featured Listings.
In this article, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages
of each advertising method.
PPC (PAY-PER-CLICK) ADVERTISING MODEL
By far, PPC is currently the most popular advertising model. From
the buyer's perspective, it is usually the most expensive type of
advertising and the one that generates the most fear of fraud. In
fact, many experts suggest that click-fraud might be as high as
20 to 25% of all click-traffic.
Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like. The advertiser bids
on keywords and tells the advertising company that they will pay
X number of cents or dollars for every click that they receive to
their website through the PPC-provider's website.
Advertisers compete for position within the search results with
the highest bidder getting the best advertising spot at the top
of the results. The second highest bidder gets the #2 spot, etc.
Generally, Pay-Per-Click providers serve three listings on
the first page of search results. Only when there is strong
competition for a particular keyword term and a number of
advertisers vying for placement, will the PPC-provider show
results with more than three advertisers.
If you bid the minimum five cents per click (the standard for
most PPC systems), then it is possible that you might not see
your listing on page one or page two of the search results. Let's
face it; PPC providers are interested in making the most money
they can from the traffic they send to people. So, if one
advertiser is paying a dollar per click and you are only bidding
five cents a click, who do you think will receive the best
placement? Yep, the one-dollar per click advertiser will get
the most attention and the best placement, even if it requires
pushing your placement back to page three of the search results.
The top two PPC-providers are:
http://adwords.google.com/
http://www.content.overture.com/d/ - Now owned by Yahoo!
Other not-so-well-known providers of PPC traffic, in
alphabetical order, include:
http://www.411web.com/
http://www.7search.com/
http://www.abcsearch.com/
http://www.adbrite.com/
http://www.ask.com/
http://www.brainfox.com/
http://www.enhance.com/
http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://search.looksmart.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.miva.com/ - Formerly FindWhat.com
http://www.search123.com/
http://www.searchfeed.com/
http://turbo10.com/
The biggest advantage to these systems is that they serve large
pools of consumers online, and they let you target specific
search keywords.
The disadvantages are numerous. Those most often cited include:
the high cost of bids for certain keywords, poor conversion
rates on purchased clicks, and click fraud (generally regarded
as people clicking your link just so they can get paid for it).
Personally, I have paid as high as a dollar per-click for a
service that sells for $35, and $20 in volume. I have spoken to
others who operate for-profit websites and have paid as much as
$2.50 per click on an average keyword. In some really competitive
markets, people pay as much as $30 per click.
If you use the Web-Professor bid tool to check keywords at
Overture ( http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/ ) and you
type in the keyword "mesothelioma", you'll find 30 bidders vying
for that term and a maximum bid of $29.88 per click! If the
maximum bidder converts traffic to sales at the national average
of 3%, then he or she is paying an average of $900 to get one
client! Insane, but true.
CPM (COST PER THOUSAND IMPRESSIONS) ADVERTISING MODEL
CPM advertising is most often associated with banner advertising,
but can now be purchased for text ads as well. This type of
advertising is available from many sources, including:
http://adwords.google.com/
http://www.realtechnetwork.com/
http://www.joetec.net/
CPM advertising can be cheaper than PPC, but it fails to address
the effectiveness of your advertising copy. Before undertaking
a large CPM campaign, you need to be confident your advertising
copy will deliver results.
As with any other type of advertising, you need to track click-
through and conversion rates to determine the advertising copy
that is most effective for your business.
You also need to have a solid understanding of how many
impressions it will take to generate a visitor, and how many
visitors you will need to generate one sale. And, on the
backside, you will need to know what the average earnings from
your sales will be. With these stats in hand, you'll know how
much you can afford to pay for CPM advertising or any other type
of advertising.
Using Google Adwords, you can buy CPM advertising for as little
as $2 per thousand impressions. The one time I went that route,
thinking my advertising might be cheaper, I ended up dropping
$180 in three days with only one sale to show for my investment -
-- utilizing the exact same ad that generated a 4% click-through
rate (CTR) in Google's PPC advertising system.
The major appeal of CPM advertising is its perceived low-cost,
with rates ranging between $2 - $3 per thousand impressions.
The major disadvantage to this type of advertising is that you
need a good handle on how well your advertising is performing.
Your advertising copy can make or break you. Additionally, you
need to keep an eye on your advertising budget. From first hand
experience, I can tell you that although CPM advertising can
appear inexpensive, it can in short order surpass the costs of
PPC advertising.
FEATURED LISTING ADVERTISING MODEL
Featured listings differ from the other two advertising models
in that you do not pay for "ad clicks" or "ad impressions". With
featured listings, your advertisement appears in the purchased
location for 30 days, 90 days, or one year.
Featured listings can be bought on individual websites and even
on networks of websites. Below are a few examples of advertising
networks that offer featured listings:
Geek Files ( http://www.geekfiles.com/advertising/ )
Geek Files offers various Featured Listing placement options with
ad rates ranging from $19 to $179 per month. You get two months
free if you buy advertising for a full year.
Aardvark Travel ( http://www.aardvarktravel.net/featured/ )
Aardvark Travel is a travel search engine. Featured listings
appear in a colored box between the top five listings and the
bottom five listings in the travel-related search results. There
is a $50 setup fee for each Featured Listing and a $10 per month
recurring charge for as long as you keep your listing active.
Aardvark claims featured listings generate 40 times more clicks
than any other listings on their pages.
The Independent Search Engine & Directory Network
( http://www.isedn.org/ )
The ISEDN offers a program that allows you to purchase Top Ten
exposure for your website(s) across their network of 200 plus
member websites.
The network is comprised of specialized search engines, search
directories, and article directories. Featured Listing placements
for specific keywords are displayed across the entire ISEDN
system.
The cost of a keyword term (the word or phrase associated with
the listing) is $12 for three months or $36 for 12 months. The
price drops for each additional 5 listings you purchase. If you
are buying in volume, discounts can be significant. For example,
the cost for 16 to 100 listings is $6 per listing for 3 months
and $18 per listing for 12 months.
The main drawback to the ISEDN program is that the network,
although large, does not yet have the traffic volume of the major
engines.
The major benefit, of course, is that you can buy a lot more bang
for your advertising dollars. Additionally, you can see your ads
appearing on pages in a position that will attract more attention
and click-through traffic to your website.
WHICH ADVERTISING MODEL IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
It really depends on your business model. More so, it depends on
your absolute click-through averages and your website conversion
rates.
Your advertising needs to cost you no more than what it earns for
you. Ideally, your advertising will cost less than it earns for
you.
Some businesses trade on the lifetime value of customers and are
willing to pay more to get customers than what they earn on their
first sale, but not all of us can afford to build a customer base
in the same way that Amazon built theirs.
If your advertising budget is small, your goal should be to make
every advertising dollar count. Grow your business to the point
where you might be able to afford some of the more expensive
advertising solutions. But then, if the lower-cost solutions
generate sales for you, why would you want to pay more?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Article
Ghost Writing and Reprint Article Distribution Services. Bill
has been providing his services to online merchants since 2001.
If you would like to talk to Bill personally about his services,
you can reach him from 9:30am to 6pm CST at: (405) 780-7327.
ARTICLE TIP: The About the Author information that follows an
article is your chance to provide a strong call-to-action to
get your readers to your website. Keep it short. Let your
website do the selling, and let your website close the sale.
--- END ARTICLE ---
.....................................
TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules
(Last Updated: April 7, 2005)
Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of:
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR:
.....................................
*** Digital Reprint Rights ***
* If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog,
You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body
of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as
Hyperlinks (clickable links).
* Links must remain in the form that we published them.
Clean links should point to the Author's links without
redirects having been inserted into the copy.
* You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or
Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks
must be retained with articles. You can change where
the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all
paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do.
* Email Distribution of this article Must be done through
Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email.
* You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for
proper display of the article in your website or in your
ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests
within the article.
*** Author Notification ***
We ask that you notify the author of publication of his
or her work. Bill Platt can be reached at:
comments@thephantomwriters.com
*** Print Publication Reprint Rights ***
If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT
publication, you must contact the author directly
for Print Permission at:
mailto:comments@thephantomwriters.com
.....................................
If you need help converting this text article for proper
hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this
free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl
=====================================================================
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION
http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution
service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com
are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Enid, Oklahoma USA.
The content of this article is solely the property
and opinion of its author, Bill Platt
http://thePhantomWriters.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/internet_marketing_articleblaster/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
internet_marketing_articleblaster-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
No comments:
Post a Comment