rivaled heritage: The advantages and disadvantages of PPC

When compared to other forms of promoting or advertising your business, Pay Per Click advertising (sometimes known as Cost Per Click or CPC) has many advantages over using ?free? advertising mediums like writing and publishing articles.

? Using PPC to promote or advertise your business is an extremely quick way of getting your marketing message live and out there on the net. In many cases, your adverts can be online and viewed within an hour of creating them.
? Pay Per Click advertising enables you to extend your market reach. Although you may be able to get pages of your website featured in the natural organic search results, doing so takes some time and is something of a lottery, whereas using PPC guarantees that your advert will appear on appropriate search results pages and websites.
? The traffic that you bring to your website from PPC advertising is targeted, prequalified traffic. Because your advert has been shown only to people who have already expressed a degree of interest in the product or service that you?re offering by using a specific search term, the chances of them taking the action that you want them to take when they land on your site is significantly increased. Consequently, the conversion rate from PPC advertising is likely to be considerably better than it would be using free advertising resources like article marketing.
? PPC advertising programs usually offer the ability to track the performance of the adverts that you place using that particular system. It is therefore considerably easier to calculate such important factors as conversion rates (the number of people who do what you want them to do), the acquisition cost of each visitor and your return on investment (ROI). Because most PPC systems offer this information, you are able to improve your advertising and your subsequent results, which will ultimately improve the profitability of your business.
? If you want individual pages of your website to appear high up the search results page in the natural search results (those on the left-hand side of the search page), you have to optimize your site for the search engines. If you are using PPC advertising, there is no need to worry about search engine optimization although it is obviously a very sensible idea to make sure that your site is optimized too.

? Search engine optimization strategies take time and effort to learn and implement. Using PPC advertising, you can bypass this learning process to get your promotional materials live almost instantly.

? You have complete control over your advertising campaign. This is particularly appropriate if, for example, you are promoting a product or service that has relatively temporary appeal or is seasonal. For instance, you would not want to be promoting a Christmas related product in the middle of August and PPC advertising fits in very well with this idea because you can turn it on and off as you want.
? You choose whether you want to advertise only on the search results pages, or whether you want your advertising to appear on websites and blogs in your niche as well. If you do, it is even possible to target specific high traffic sites on which you want your advertising to be placed, thereby almost guaranteeing a healthy flow of traffic from these adverts. At the same time, because as a general rule, you should bid lower for content network advertising (i.e. ads on individual sites), this traffic is often extremely cost-effective.
Alongside these advantages, there are a couple of disadvantages but in truth, the upsides of using PPC advertising far outweighs the downside.
The most obvious disadvantage of using PPC advertising is that it costs money to do so.

There is also the factor that whilst most of the individual clicks on your adverts are likely to be genuine, there will be a certain amount of ?wastage? caused by clicks from people who are not really interested in what you have to offer, competitors or even just people who think it is funny to waste your money.
Furthermore, using PPC only works for as long as you are willing and/or able to continue paying for your advertising. As soon as you stop paying, your advertising also stops.
Less obviously, if you are using the most popular PPC advertising program on the net, which is Google AdWords, you need to do some work to make sure that your advertising efforts fit in with what Google want you to do.
If you create adverts in the way that Google wants you to, your cost per click will be minimized whereas the opposite is also true. If you do not create ads the Google way, the cost per click is likely to be multiplied several times over.
Nevertheless, apart from the fact that using PPC advertising costs money, it is by far and away the most effective strategy for maximizing the number of people who are introduced to your opportunity or offer.