The 5 Secrets PPC Agencies Don't Want You To Know
Nearly three-fourths of companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied, according to a Jupiter Research published late last year.
What causes this dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work:
• Most agencies specialize in consumer search marketing and their services are inappropriate for your unique needs as a B2B company.
• The agency business model skews in favor of the largest spenders and under-serves the majority of B2B advertisers.
• Agencies will never understand your customers and your business as well as you, especially B2B firms that sell more complicated products and services.
• The need to coordinate with outsiders implies latency and information loss, meaning you lose the flexibility and agility to react quickly.
• Outsourcing means losing control over a critical portion of your demand generation strategy to outsiders who may have different incentives than you.
The main value provided by agencies is expertise with SEM, and as I'll explain, you can bring much of that expertise in-house by using the right kind of pay per click management software. A technology solution can create the best of both worlds: the control and business knowledge of doing it yourself, combined with the SEM best practices and techniques of an expert.
Before diving into this "inconvenient truth", it helps to understand the common arguments used by agencies to convince B2B marketers to outsource their PPC campaigns.
Why Companies Outsource PPC Campaigns
The first argument falls into the broad category of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It takes on various forms, but comes down to this basic point:
"Search is really, really hard – you should leave it to the experts."
Tactics like this are meant to instill fear that if you don't outsource, you will fail miserably with search. The head of one agency likes to say that "There are only two kinds of marketers at the top of the auction based search results: Brilliant Marketers and Total Lunatics." Since most people don't think of themselves as brilliant search experts, the implication is that if you don't hire his services then you must be a total lunatic.
A more subtle form of this argument says that the world of PPC is changing so fast that you could never keep up yourself. No matter what form it takes, this argument is self-serving to the agencies. Although it might have been true a few years ago, today the in-house B2B search marketer has access to easy-to-use PPC management software. These tools help to level the playing field by automating the techniques and best practices used by the agencies.
While the first reason B2B companies outsource their PPC marketing has to do with knowledge and expertise, the second reason has to do with time. The core of this argument is:
"I'm too busy to manage search. It's easier to pay an agency to take care of it for me."
I have no doubt that most B2B marketers feel beleaguered for time, and that dealing with PPC can feel like yet another burden. The allure of being able to pay an agency to have one less thing your plate is appealing. This can be a valid reason to hire an agency, although the appeal fades once you realize you should be highly involved on an ongoing basis to get the best results from an agency. The agency doesn't understand your business like you do, so they can't react to competitive changes or deal with new business initiatives as well as you can. The only things they can do without you are tweak bids, use tools to suggest new keywords, and generate reports – all tasks that automated software can do better and cheaper than a consultant can.
Why Companies Shouldn't Outsource PPC Campaigns
1. Most agencies don't specialize in B2B search marketing. B2B search is different from B2C search, meaning it requires different techniques and optimization methods. B2B keywords tend to be lower-volume than B2C keywords, but the value of a B2B lead is much higher. Also, B2B transactions have a more complex sales cycle, involving multiple decision makers – each using search in different ways, with different motivations, and at different times during the sales cycle.
An agency that works mostly with consumer companies may not have the proper expertise to deal with the specialized needs of B2B.
2. Agency business models are focused on the largest spenders. Agencies are, by their nature, service businesses that are only profitable if companies spend $10,000 per month or more on search. (These minimums keep going up every year.) That leaves the majority of B2B companies out in the cold. Be wary of agencies that promise to provide reasonable service at levels below $10,000, since at those levels an agency can profitably give you only a few hours a month. It is much more profitable to focus on the largest accounts, leaving the smaller accounts to run mostly as-is. (Of course they still earn their fees every month, regardless of how much time they spend on your campaigns.)
3. You know your business better than the agency. One of the most important skills for PPC success is picking the right keywords that your prospects actually use when they search – something you know best. Also, when determining rankings, Google and now Yahoo! care as much about the relevance of your content as they do about your bid (aka "what you say is as important as what you pay"). This means a good understanding of your business and your industry is at least as important as being a search "expert". Over time, the balance of power between business knowledge and SEM knowledge will shift even further towards business as Google continues to find ways to reward relevant content and discount search agency tricks.
4. In-house improves flexibility and the agility to react quickly. I recently met with one B2B marketer who was paying his agency a whopping 40% of his overall PPC budget, yet they were still bidding on words that were not converting to leads. All the back-and-forth emails and phone calls required to coordinate changes created latency and information loss. This meant it took weeks to get a new campaign launched. In contrast, his competitor who kept search in-house could launch new campaigns in under one day. It's no wonder the competitor had better PPC results.
5. Agency incentives are not aligned with your goals. When you outsource PPC, you give up control over how your money gets spent. Whatever your agency promises, their first incentive is to grow their own business – meaning they will usually tell you that search is performing great. This is the fox guarding the henhouse! It is up to you to put their information in the context of your overall demand generation strategy and to make the critical decisions about whether your marginal dollar is best spent on search or another demand generation activity.
When to Bring Search In-House With Technology
There are a few basic skills required to succeed with SEM: pick the right keywords, optimize bids to achieve desired business outcomes, create great landing pages that drive conversions, and use testing and measurement to continuously improve your process. Each of these requires business expertise and SEM expertise. Only you can provide the business expertise. SEM expertise can be found in an agency, and for some companies that will always be the right choice. For example, I have no problem with outsourcing your SEO campaign. Also, if you don't use search today and outsourcing gets you started, or if don't have enough time to spend on search, then using an agency is certainly better than doing nothing. (This is especially true if your agency takes advantage of technology to automate the tasks that software does best!)
However, I believe that your best results will come from having your PPC campaigns managed by the true experts – you. The same techniques and best practices used by agencies can and should be automated with technology. Choosing B2B search marketing software allows you to optimize your PPC campaigns like an expert, without the loss of control, latency, and overhead associated with an outside agency. And that's an inconvenient truth for the agencies.
Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon's blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.
Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.
Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in "keyword too" into any search engine.
Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.
Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don't get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.
Test Your Ads
Once you've written an add and included the keywords you'd like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through's or sales. Once you've found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.
Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.
Manage PPC Spending With Bids, Not Budget
Many companies take advantage of the Budget control in Google AdWords to limit their daily and monthly spending to their desired goal. What not everyone realizes is that this can result in higher cost per click (CPC) and fewer clicks! This is because the way that AdWords ensures you don't exceed your budget is by limiting the number of times your ad is displayed (which limits clicks).
Here's a simplified example to illustrate the point. Say you have only one keyword and it has the following monthly cost and volume data (hypothetical data):
First, imagine you have a bid of $7.14 (since this is an important keyword, you want to rank high) and your monthly budget is $2,750. In this case, your ad will show up at position 2, but only $2,750/$5,720 = 48% of the time. This means you get 48% x 1,100 = 528 clicks. Your cost per click is $5.20, which brings your monthly spending in right under your budget of $2,745.60.
Now, imagine that your bid was $4.52, with the same budget of $2,750. Here, your ad shows up in position 3 but shows 100% of the time. Now, you get 800 clicks at a cost per click of $3.43 for a total cost of $2,744, coming in right under your monthly spending target.
Comparing these two cases, in the first one you were budget limited and got 528 clicks, and in the second case, you used your bid to achieve your spending target and got 800 clicks for the same cost. That's why managing PPC spending using your budget results in higher CPC and fewer clicks.
PPC Management Software Makes It Easier
Of course, it can be hard to estimate which bid will result in what cost, especially when you are dealing with 100s or 1000s of words instead of just one. However, this is exactly what we designed Marketo's pay per click management software to help you do. You simply tell the tool how much you want to spend each month (at the campaign or ad group level), and the software optimally allocates that spending across all your keywords to drive the most conversions and calculate the bids that will achieve that target spending. You can check this out yourself, and please tell us what you think.
Why Are PPC (Pay Per Click) Ads Are So Popular?
In the offline days long before the World Wide Web and PPC (Pay per click) ads came along, publishers as well as radio and TV stations experimented with something called PPO (pay per order) and PPR (pay per response) or PPL (pay per lead) advertising. As the names suggest, these were ads where the advertisers either paid per lead generated or order generated. But the truth is that these ads never really took off and were never widely accepted.
So what happened in the case of online PPC (pay per click) ads? What caused these kind of advertisements to become so wildly popular as they are today?
Google Launched The PPC Revolution
To answer some of these questions it is useful to go back in time a little and trace the origin of the popularity of PPC ads. There is the amazing story of well known search engine giant Google which has experienced phenomenal growth within such a short time of existence.
The Google fairy tale is still a fascinating read even today. Started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still students at Stanford, for a long time this venture grew tremendously in popularity and usage and was very widely used and yet had not found a way to generate revenue. It was obvious that charging a fee for the use of their revolutionary search engine was not the right model. That search for a way to generate revenues ended when Google was already receiving millions of visitors daily and the company just found a convenient and non-intrusive way to display advertising.
It is clear that the founders of Google realized quite early on in the game, what many others have not seen to date. That is the fact that although the Internet is widely seen as an improvement of the Television, this is not true and the web is actually an adavanced telephone more than anything else. This is easily proved by the fact that TV and the web are in fact two very different mediums. TV can accommodate a lot of advertising comfortably, but advertising on the web is usually viewed as a nuisance and intrusion into people's privacy. This is the main reason why PPC ads took off quickly even when a similar concept offline never really proved attractive to most publishers and advertisers alike.
Google looked for a way to carry advertising online to its' huge audience without intruding and came up with the idea of displaying only relevant advertisements based on searches on its' popular search engine. The idea was simple but extremely powerful and meant that somebody using keywords to search for information would end up with the organic results of their search on one side and on the other relevant advertisements on the same subject.
The next problem they had to solve was the fact that based on the huge audience they had, they would be justified in charging very high advertising rates. However the market accustomed to cheap online advertising was unlikely to accept those ad rates.
And that is how PPC ads came into use at Google. By charging only for click throughs to the site, advertisers were very happy to pay huge sums as long as it was for actual visits to their sites from people who had clicked on the Google PPC ads because they will usually have been able to generate an even larger sum of money from orders placed by a percentage of the visitors who arrived at their sites.
The rest as they say, is history. The Google PPC concept rapidly grew in popularity and is today by far, the most popular form of advertising on the web.
Others Join The PPC Party
As you read this, there are numerous other online companies and sites that offer PPC ads. They make lots of sense because advertisers can easily measure their response and sales revenue against what they have spent on advertising.
Today there are a number of interesting search programs that include PPC advertising and are well worth taking a look at because they are capable of providing the perfect solution for many online marketing and advertising problems.
Nearly three-fourths of companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied, according to a Jupiter Research published late last year.
What causes this dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work:
• Most agencies specialize in consumer search marketing and their services are inappropriate for your unique needs as a B2B company.
• The agency business model skews in favor of the largest spenders and under-serves the majority of B2B advertisers.
• Agencies will never understand your customers and your business as well as you, especially B2B firms that sell more complicated products and services.
• The need to coordinate with outsiders implies latency and information loss, meaning you lose the flexibility and agility to react quickly.
• Outsourcing means losing control over a critical portion of your demand generation strategy to outsiders who may have different incentives than you.
The main value provided by agencies is expertise with SEM, and as I'll explain, you can bring much of that expertise in-house by using the right kind of pay per click management software. A technology solution can create the best of both worlds: the control and business knowledge of doing it yourself, combined with the SEM best practices and techniques of an expert.
Before diving into this "inconvenient truth", it helps to understand the common arguments used by agencies to convince B2B marketers to outsource their PPC campaigns.
Why Companies Outsource PPC Campaigns
The first argument falls into the broad category of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It takes on various forms, but comes down to this basic point:
"Search is really, really hard – you should leave it to the experts."
Tactics like this are meant to instill fear that if you don't outsource, you will fail miserably with search. The head of one agency likes to say that "There are only two kinds of marketers at the top of the auction based search results: Brilliant Marketers and Total Lunatics." Since most people don't think of themselves as brilliant search experts, the implication is that if you don't hire his services then you must be a total lunatic.
A more subtle form of this argument says that the world of PPC is changing so fast that you could never keep up yourself. No matter what form it takes, this argument is self-serving to the agencies. Although it might have been true a few years ago, today the in-house B2B search marketer has access to easy-to-use PPC management software. These tools help to level the playing field by automating the techniques and best practices used by the agencies.
While the first reason B2B companies outsource their PPC marketing has to do with knowledge and expertise, the second reason has to do with time. The core of this argument is:
"I'm too busy to manage search. It's easier to pay an agency to take care of it for me."
I have no doubt that most B2B marketers feel beleaguered for time, and that dealing with PPC can feel like yet another burden. The allure of being able to pay an agency to have one less thing your plate is appealing. This can be a valid reason to hire an agency, although the appeal fades once you realize you should be highly involved on an ongoing basis to get the best results from an agency. The agency doesn't understand your business like you do, so they can't react to competitive changes or deal with new business initiatives as well as you can. The only things they can do without you are tweak bids, use tools to suggest new keywords, and generate reports – all tasks that automated software can do better and cheaper than a consultant can.
Why Companies Shouldn't Outsource PPC Campaigns
1. Most agencies don't specialize in B2B search marketing. B2B search is different from B2C search, meaning it requires different techniques and optimization methods. B2B keywords tend to be lower-volume than B2C keywords, but the value of a B2B lead is much higher. Also, B2B transactions have a more complex sales cycle, involving multiple decision makers – each using search in different ways, with different motivations, and at different times during the sales cycle.
An agency that works mostly with consumer companies may not have the proper expertise to deal with the specialized needs of B2B.
2. Agency business models are focused on the largest spenders. Agencies are, by their nature, service businesses that are only profitable if companies spend $10,000 per month or more on search. (These minimums keep going up every year.) That leaves the majority of B2B companies out in the cold. Be wary of agencies that promise to provide reasonable service at levels below $10,000, since at those levels an agency can profitably give you only a few hours a month. It is much more profitable to focus on the largest accounts, leaving the smaller accounts to run mostly as-is. (Of course they still earn their fees every month, regardless of how much time they spend on your campaigns.)
3. You know your business better than the agency. One of the most important skills for PPC success is picking the right keywords that your prospects actually use when they search – something you know best. Also, when determining rankings, Google and now Yahoo! care as much about the relevance of your content as they do about your bid (aka "what you say is as important as what you pay"). This means a good understanding of your business and your industry is at least as important as being a search "expert". Over time, the balance of power between business knowledge and SEM knowledge will shift even further towards business as Google continues to find ways to reward relevant content and discount search agency tricks.
4. In-house improves flexibility and the agility to react quickly. I recently met with one B2B marketer who was paying his agency a whopping 40% of his overall PPC budget, yet they were still bidding on words that were not converting to leads. All the back-and-forth emails and phone calls required to coordinate changes created latency and information loss. This meant it took weeks to get a new campaign launched. In contrast, his competitor who kept search in-house could launch new campaigns in under one day. It's no wonder the competitor had better PPC results.
5. Agency incentives are not aligned with your goals. When you outsource PPC, you give up control over how your money gets spent. Whatever your agency promises, their first incentive is to grow their own business – meaning they will usually tell you that search is performing great. This is the fox guarding the henhouse! It is up to you to put their information in the context of your overall demand generation strategy and to make the critical decisions about whether your marginal dollar is best spent on search or another demand generation activity.
When to Bring Search In-House With Technology
There are a few basic skills required to succeed with SEM: pick the right keywords, optimize bids to achieve desired business outcomes, create great landing pages that drive conversions, and use testing and measurement to continuously improve your process. Each of these requires business expertise and SEM expertise. Only you can provide the business expertise. SEM expertise can be found in an agency, and for some companies that will always be the right choice. For example, I have no problem with outsourcing your SEO campaign. Also, if you don't use search today and outsourcing gets you started, or if don't have enough time to spend on search, then using an agency is certainly better than doing nothing. (This is especially true if your agency takes advantage of technology to automate the tasks that software does best!)
However, I believe that your best results will come from having your PPC campaigns managed by the true experts – you. The same techniques and best practices used by agencies can and should be automated with technology. Choosing B2B search marketing software allows you to optimize your PPC campaigns like an expert, without the loss of control, latency, and overhead associated with an outside agency. And that's an inconvenient truth for the agencies.
Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon's blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.
Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.
Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in "keyword too" into any search engine.
Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.
Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don't get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.
Test Your Ads
Once you've written an add and included the keywords you'd like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through's or sales. Once you've found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.
Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.
Manage PPC Spending With Bids, Not Budget
Many companies take advantage of the Budget control in Google AdWords to limit their daily and monthly spending to their desired goal. What not everyone realizes is that this can result in higher cost per click (CPC) and fewer clicks! This is because the way that AdWords ensures you don't exceed your budget is by limiting the number of times your ad is displayed (which limits clicks).
Here's a simplified example to illustrate the point. Say you have only one keyword and it has the following monthly cost and volume data (hypothetical data):
First, imagine you have a bid of $7.14 (since this is an important keyword, you want to rank high) and your monthly budget is $2,750. In this case, your ad will show up at position 2, but only $2,750/$5,720 = 48% of the time. This means you get 48% x 1,100 = 528 clicks. Your cost per click is $5.20, which brings your monthly spending in right under your budget of $2,745.60.
Now, imagine that your bid was $4.52, with the same budget of $2,750. Here, your ad shows up in position 3 but shows 100% of the time. Now, you get 800 clicks at a cost per click of $3.43 for a total cost of $2,744, coming in right under your monthly spending target.
Comparing these two cases, in the first one you were budget limited and got 528 clicks, and in the second case, you used your bid to achieve your spending target and got 800 clicks for the same cost. That's why managing PPC spending using your budget results in higher CPC and fewer clicks.
PPC Management Software Makes It Easier
Of course, it can be hard to estimate which bid will result in what cost, especially when you are dealing with 100s or 1000s of words instead of just one. However, this is exactly what we designed Marketo's pay per click management software to help you do. You simply tell the tool how much you want to spend each month (at the campaign or ad group level), and the software optimally allocates that spending across all your keywords to drive the most conversions and calculate the bids that will achieve that target spending. You can check this out yourself, and please tell us what you think.
Why Are PPC (Pay Per Click) Ads Are So Popular?
In the offline days long before the World Wide Web and PPC (Pay per click) ads came along, publishers as well as radio and TV stations experimented with something called PPO (pay per order) and PPR (pay per response) or PPL (pay per lead) advertising. As the names suggest, these were ads where the advertisers either paid per lead generated or order generated. But the truth is that these ads never really took off and were never widely accepted.
So what happened in the case of online PPC (pay per click) ads? What caused these kind of advertisements to become so wildly popular as they are today?
Google Launched The PPC Revolution
To answer some of these questions it is useful to go back in time a little and trace the origin of the popularity of PPC ads. There is the amazing story of well known search engine giant Google which has experienced phenomenal growth within such a short time of existence.
The Google fairy tale is still a fascinating read even today. Started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still students at Stanford, for a long time this venture grew tremendously in popularity and usage and was very widely used and yet had not found a way to generate revenue. It was obvious that charging a fee for the use of their revolutionary search engine was not the right model. That search for a way to generate revenues ended when Google was already receiving millions of visitors daily and the company just found a convenient and non-intrusive way to display advertising.
It is clear that the founders of Google realized quite early on in the game, what many others have not seen to date. That is the fact that although the Internet is widely seen as an improvement of the Television, this is not true and the web is actually an adavanced telephone more than anything else. This is easily proved by the fact that TV and the web are in fact two very different mediums. TV can accommodate a lot of advertising comfortably, but advertising on the web is usually viewed as a nuisance and intrusion into people's privacy. This is the main reason why PPC ads took off quickly even when a similar concept offline never really proved attractive to most publishers and advertisers alike.
Google looked for a way to carry advertising online to its' huge audience without intruding and came up with the idea of displaying only relevant advertisements based on searches on its' popular search engine. The idea was simple but extremely powerful and meant that somebody using keywords to search for information would end up with the organic results of their search on one side and on the other relevant advertisements on the same subject.
The next problem they had to solve was the fact that based on the huge audience they had, they would be justified in charging very high advertising rates. However the market accustomed to cheap online advertising was unlikely to accept those ad rates.
And that is how PPC ads came into use at Google. By charging only for click throughs to the site, advertisers were very happy to pay huge sums as long as it was for actual visits to their sites from people who had clicked on the Google PPC ads because they will usually have been able to generate an even larger sum of money from orders placed by a percentage of the visitors who arrived at their sites.
The rest as they say, is history. The Google PPC concept rapidly grew in popularity and is today by far, the most popular form of advertising on the web.
Others Join The PPC Party
As you read this, there are numerous other online companies and sites that offer PPC ads. They make lots of sense because advertisers can easily measure their response and sales revenue against what they have spent on advertising.
Today there are a number of interesting search programs that include PPC advertising and are well worth taking a look at because they are capable of providing the perfect solution for many online marketing and advertising problems.
