PPC / Paid Placement: For High Rollers Only, or a Cheap Place to Pick the "Low-Hanging Fruit"?

The early days of the search engines were for all intents and purposes fairly "clubby". It was all about this wonderful new invention, the World Wide Web, and how we could use it to communicate, to find information, and to get our own message and ideas out to the world. You made your Web site, and anyone could use Yahoo! or AltaVista or MetaCrawler to find it. But sure enough, like any other invention in the history of mankind, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make money off of it.

That would be a cynical way of looking at things. Rather, it was only a matter of time before someone saw a need--enabling content providers to make their messages and ideas available to the world--and filled it. In 1998, GoTo.com introduced "Pay-Per-Click". Anyone with a Web site could receive prominent placement in the search engines, for as low as $0.01, paid to GoTo.com, each time someone clicked on the link to their site.

Google picked up this model in 2000 with the adoption of Google AdWords--or, those ads identified as "Sponsored Links" in the right hand column of a Google Search. Initially, PPC was an effective and affordable way for smaller businesses to get their sites seen.

Fast forward to 2006, PPC can still be an effective way to get a site exposure right out of the gate, but the model is rife with danger, especially for smaller businesses on a budget. For many popular terms, bid prices have become exorbitant and even prohibitive. For example, a top bid on Yahoo SM for "laser hair removal in chicago" is $14.88 per click; for "mortgage refinance california", $12.28 per click. With a click-through rate of 10% and lower, and a conversion rate even lower than that (not to mention rampant instances of "click fraud" that require considerable time and vigilance to track, prove, and redress), PPC can be a costly and fruitless strategy.

There are other paid inclusion options among the search engines, but increasingly this model is going the way of the cassette tape, if not the 8-track. Google, which as of July 2006, boasts a 43.7% share of the search engine market, has never offered a paid inclusion option, nor does Microsoft (12.8%) nor Ask.com (5.4%). Among the big players in search, only Yahoo! (28.8%) still offers a paid inclusion option, but they've also incorporated a pay-per-click compenent into this option.

Wow, PPC and paid placement don't sound like very good bets, do they? As a primary revenue stream and a long-term strategy for your site, no. However, PPC is still an excellent way not only to get people to see your site right away. And, properly managed and with a modest amount of care, attention and homework (there's that word again), PPC can buy you traffic that would otherwise be unavailable to your site without a long-term SEO strategy or a corrupt relative who works at Google. Okay, I'm kidding about that last part. Still interested in PPC, though? Drop me a line and let's talk about it.