Online Advertising

These days it's hard to define Online Advertising. With the rise of social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, the definition has at least been extended. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

...a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.

This definition doesn't mention one important aspect of most forms of online advertising: they cost money. Probably one of the most popular - and easy to use - forms of online advertising is called Pay Per Click (PPC), also known as Cost Per Click (CPC).

Organic Search vs. Paid Search

Before I explain what PPC means, it's important to know the difference between organic search and paid search. We've all clicked on organic search results before. They are the results that you immediately see when you perform a search on one of the search engines. The website owner doesn't pay for those clicks.

But what can you do when your website doesn't show up for a search term that is very useful for you? For instance, what do you do if you are a car dealer in Montreal, but your website doesn't show up for the search term used car Montreal? In this case paid advertising on the search engines may be a good idea for you. These advertisements show up on the right hand side of the organic search results, above the organic search results (usually 2 advertisements with a blue background) or on partner websites (usually referred to as the content network).

Choosing a PPC provider

There are different forms of paid search, but as I said before, PPC is probably the most common form. There are many PPC providers, but Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are still the largest ones. The key benefit of PPC is that you only need to pay when an advertiser clicks on your ad. That makes it a relatively cheap form of advertising. Most providers also allow you to track your conversions (e.g. a sign up for your newsletter, an online sale), which gives you insight into which search terms are generating revenue for you.

Your PPC provider choice depends mostly on your goals. If you want to target a large group of searchers, the big search engines may be a good choice. However, if all your competitors are competing on that search engine, it may be wise to choose the smaller search engines. If you're unsure, you can also test your PPC campaigns on several search engines at the same time and see which campaigns are performing best.

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