A Brief Introduction to the Pay Per Click Search Engine


Defined Tag: Pay Per Click Search Engine.

The pay per click search engine provides a quick and easy way to advertise your website on a low budget. You only pay for the clicks made on your ads and not how many times they are displayed. So, you only pay for actual visitors to your site. Google and Yahoo! are currently the most well known and well used pay per click search engines, with their Adwords and Overture programs. MSN are getting ready to release their own adCenter.

Keywords are essential to be successful in the pay per click search engine. When one of your keywords is used as a search term in that search engine, your ad will be displayed in the enhanced listings on the page – provided you have bid high enough for your keyword to be active in searches. The minimum bid available will be displayed within your keyword list. It is up to you how far over this price you place your bid, but the higher it goes, the more chance you have at being at the top of the ad listings.

Required bid amounts can change daily as competitors come and go, raise or lower their budgets and add or remove keywords. They may even fluctuate with the season. Regular analysis of your keyword performance will help you to maintain good placements in the pay per click search engine ads.

However, the downfall of using the pay per click search engine is click fraud. Used by malicious competitors, click fraud is a problem with all pay per click programs. You need to check your keyword performance for unusual click patterns, where your ad has been repeatedly clicked on in order to drive up the cost of bidding on that keyword. As well as depleting your budget, the competitor hopes they can drive you out of the listings by making keywords unaffordable. If you suspect click fraud, check your server logs or web stats – you may well find that the same IP address is responsible for the repeated clicks in which case it can be traced. Report the same information to the pay per click search engine you are using and you should get a refund on the fraudulent clicks.

This aside, the pay per click search engine is a useful tool to get a new site noticed and is a cost effective and easily managed form of advertising.