Over recent years, the way in which the internet has been used for marketing has evolved through many stages. Initially it was banner advertising that held the high ground where an advertiser paid another website for hosting an advertisement. A similar model involved purchasing a few lines of anchor text and the corresponding hyperlink from a website with content appropriate to the advertiser. These early internet marketing models showed initial promise, but ultimately lost their sting as gradually people became immune to them. It was during the very late nineties that paid search marketing first made an appearance, and its development has continued apace until today with new developments being introduced regularly. It is certainly by far the most successful internet marketing model.
There are a number of features that paid search marketing (also known as PPC – Pay Per Click) encompass that make it quite unlike any other marketing tool so far developed. If an analogy can be drawn, then it might be with the market trader who is attempting to attract passers by to take an interest in the goods he has for sale on his stall, and to make them more interested in his goods than in those of a similar trader on a nearby stall. He will call out some words which may or may not bring in the customers. If these don’t work, he will change his words until eventually he has developed a winning patter, a process often referred to as ppc management. Naturally his competitor will be doing the same and may even use the same or similar pattern. Each one will try to outdo the other. In effect they are vying for business in real time.
Paid Search Marketing is doing similar things. Different businesses are vying for market share by choosing keywords that they hope potential customers will use when searching the web for the kind of products and services that they supply. Should the appropriate keywords be entered into search engines then, depending on a number of factors, the business’s ad may or may not appear in the search results. Using keyword tracking software and similar tools, parameters such as the rate of appearance of the ad, the cost of the campaign, the click through rate, and the customer conversion rate can all be monitored in near real time and immediate modifications can be made to the keyword lists; just like in the market.
