What Are Search Engine Placement, Or Pay Per Click Search Engines?

Search Engine Placement, or Pay Per Click advertising, is the process by which a web site operator can arrange for a web site to be placed in a pre-defined position within some search engines. This is accomplished via pay-for-placement engines such as Overture (GoTo), buying “Sponsored Links” in Yahoo! or Google, etc…

Search Engine Placement is always a Pay-Per-Click solution.

Pay per click services allow advertisers to pay for clicks through to their web site, either by the number of times (impressions) the ad is shown, or based upon the number of clicks the ad
receives. “Impressions” means the number of times a link or advertisement is seen by the viewer. The method of billing per impression has been found to be less effective than a clickthrough because there is no guarantee that the actual web page is seen. In this method, you pay for the number of times your ad is displayed, not the number of times it is used, or clicked on.

Pay Per Click search engine placement should be realistically viewed for what it is – an online auction. Advertisers bid against each other for a fixed position within a list of search results. The advertiser who bids the most is given the top spot in the list. Each advertiser bids according to their budget, and has to know his or her Return On Investment (ROI) to determine how much money should be spent on acquiring new customers.

For those advertisers where the ROI makes sense, Pay Per click engines are valuable customer acquisition tools. While it can be expensive, you can easily determine the ROI, and determine if it is right for your web site, and youronline business. Remember it’s both the cost of acquiring a sale, and the cost of acquiring a repeat customer. This requires your using your stats reports
carefully, and reviewing your results. Determine the number of visitors who arrived at your web site from a pay-per-click search engine. What was the total
cost by keyword for acquiring those customers? Break it down into a per-click cost, and then look at how much in sales revenue this generated. You can now
determine if it’s worth it to you. Some stats reports, such as Urchin and WebTrends do this work for you – They determine how much revenue each keyword from
each search engine generated for you. All you need to know then is if that fits into your budget. Choose your words wisely, and this can work for you.

At this time, Metamend does not manage these services on behalf of our clients, however, our clients do receive a discount off their Overture purchases.