What is Paid Placement (Sponsored Search /Pay Per Click/PPC)?

If you want your website to be listed in major search engines immediately, you can set up a sponsored search campaign to give you greater control over how searchers find your site, what keywords they search for, and which page they land on when they enter your website.

To use an example, in a normal search, you might search for “bookstore” in Google and get the following result.

You’ll notice there are two sets of results – those that show up in the free (aka “organic”) search listings (“Barnes & Noble,” “Amazon,” “Powell’s Books”) on the left and the “Sponsored Links” (ShifferBooks.com, Firstbook.org and Barnes & Noble) on the right.

The links found under the “Sponsored Links” header have bid a specific amount of money on the search term “bookstore” to be guaranteed placement in the search results along the right side. If you then click on the “ShifferBooks.com” ad, the company will be charged the amount they bid for your click-through. Average click-throughs are usually between $.50-$2.00 for popular terms, though through click-through price depends on the popularity of the search term and how much you are willing to spend.

There are a couple of interesting things here. First, those sites that show up in the organic results have very little ability to affect how their site is displayed. Google chooses the page from your site it calculates as most relevant to the query and pulls some relevant content from the page – the site’s title and some text including the search query terms – to be displayed. If you had searched for a more specific term like “religious bookstore,” you might find the results Google provides lead you deep into the website rather than the site’s main entrance page.

By contrast, sites that appear under the “Sponsored Listings” section have complete control over the ad’s title, description, and even which page it links to within the website. Marketers can link directly to relevant content and revise the landing page to improve conversion rates (or the number of people that take the action they want them to take – such as buy a product, download a guide, or subscribe to a newsletter – as a proportion of everyone that clicks on the ad).

Main PPC Advertisers: Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN

Every major search engine includes some type of Paid Placement advertising that appears prominently at the top of search results. Most of these listings are either delivered through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). MSN is a latecomer to the game but has just launched their paid search services.

Paid search works by allowing advertisers to “bid” on specific keywords they choose that are relevant to their website. Advertisers agree to pay a specific amount of money each time someone clicks on that listing. For instance, say you wanted to bid on the term “bookstore.” Currently, ShifferBooks.com has the top bid and agrees to pay a certain amount for each click through to their website. If you wanted your site to be in the #1 position, you’d have to bid at least $.01 higher than their highest bid. Barnes & Noble might then decide to outbid you to regain their #1 position and bump you to #2.

All three of the major paid search providers allow you to get started with a minimum of $5. You then determine how much you want to pay for keywords and how much you want to spend daily and/or monthly.

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