Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

PPC advertising is becoming increasingly important as part of your marketing mix. Statistics revealed at a recent Yahoo conference suggested that companies that were listed on the first page of search in both organic and PPC links had 50% more consumer awareness associated to their brand. So what is it and why pay for people to visit your website?

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is a relatively new phenomenon in the marketing world. It is internet advertising that allows all business to compete head on with the biggest competitors in the market. Looking at the picture below, the PPC advertisements are the ones highlighted in blue and listed under sponsored links on the right. These are paid ads, positioned on a bidding system, whoever pays the most gets top spot and so on.


Why pay for someone to visit my site?
One of my clients asked me why she should pay for people to visit her site. The whole reason she set it up was to benefit from free advertising she said. This is a typical response from modern day business, it is slow adoption of new technology and resistance to change that restricts their willingness to understand PPC advertising.

PPC ads allow you to directly target people in the buyer decision phase and direct them to your website, even land them on the page of your site that is most relevant to their need. For example, if you sold flowers, you might bid on the key word (term user types into google) "flowers in toorak". When a user types this into a search engine, your ad shows up with information about what they are searching for:


Josh Strawczynski's Opinion:
The value of PPC ads are undeniable, users are taken to the information that they are actually seeking and hence more likely to use your site to make their purchase. A great example came up the other day when I was looking for a cheap flight to Bangkok. Instead of going through the painfully slow webjet or working my way across several different airlines, I search 'melb to Bangkok cheap', the first PPC ad to come up said "Melb to Bangkok from $600", the perfect solution to my need...I was very satisfies.

Sam Berringer's Opinion
Where PPC falls down is that many business's do not set their web site up well enough to make a sale. The first thing that gets blamed is always the advertising. If only marketing execs put as much capital towards creating a website as they do a new product, the online world of marketing would be a lot bigger.