Self Serve Pay Per Click Platforms

If you’re new to internet marketing the term “Pay Per Click” may be a foreign term to you.  Chances are though, that you have already seen it in your day to day internet activities.  😉

If you’ve ever done a search using the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines you have probably already seen them.  Usually, they are the first three or four positions in the search results with a yellow background(Google and Bing) and on the right hand side under the word “Ads”.

Why Is It Called Pay Per Click?

The reason why they are called “Pay Per Click” is because the person who the ad belongs to pays a certain amount of money every time the ad is clicked on.  The amount of money that is paid ranges depending on how many other advertisers are bidding on the same keyword, how relevant the ad and the advertiser’s website are to the search term, and many other factors.

The term self serve simply refers to the fact that you set the ad up yourself, kind of like a self serve gas station.  There is an account section where you set up your ad and enter your billing information.  You then submit your ad for approval.  Once your ad is reviewed and approved it then is eligible to be displayed.  I only say eligible because your bid might not always be high enough for it to be displayed depending on the bid of other advertisers.

Advantages Of PPC

The advantage of Pay Per Click advertising is that it is an easy way to get traffic to your website provided that you have the budget for it.  On the other hand if you do not know what you are doing or how to properly set up a pay per click campaign it is quite easy to blow through hundreds and thousands of dollars without getting any return on your advertising spend.

Not all advertising platforms are based on “Pay Per Click”.  Other platforms charge on a CPM basis which stands for “Cost Per Thousand” with M being the Roman Numeral representing the number 1000.  On some platforms they tell you the CPM you have to pay in order to advertise on their website.  On other websites it is set up like a bidding system.  If you bid a higher CPM than another advertisers your ads get shown until your advertising budget for the day is exhausted.  Then the next highest bidder’s ads get displayed until their daily budget is exhausted and so on.

There are other ways which in the ad impressions get allocated based on your bid, but the ones I mentioned above are probably the most common.  Now that I have given you broad overview of pay per click, below you will find articles on how to setup a pay per click campaign, tips to using pay per click and much more:

Additional Resources:

• Coming soon… 🙂

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