Pay-Per-Click Advertising vs. Traditional Online Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) has been around since 2002 and gaining popularity as the way to advertise online. The minimum cost required to start an account has gone down drastically which makes pay-per-click advertising one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise online.

Other forms of traditional online advertising, including search engine inclusion, banner ads, cross-linking and listing with directories, can give you decent results over a long period of time. Pay-per-click will give you results immediately. This doesn't mean you should rely solely on pay-per-click advertising and avoid other forms of advertising. You need to mix it up a bit because it will be better for your business in the future.

One of the great things about pay-per-click is that minimum deposits range between $5 and $25. The way most PPC accounts work is that you will link a credit card or bank account to the account, and when your balance reaches a certain amount the money is withdrawn automatically.

Some examples would be Bidvertiser, Looksnap, Questclick, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MIVA, Search123 and Searchfeed. There are many others and can be found by doing a simple search for PPC search engines. There’s also the famous Google AdWords; however, you don’t need a minimum deposit to get started. You’re credit card or bank account gets billed every month for the total amount your clicks add up to.

Traditional online advertising usually requires full payment up front for the particular service you are using. This can be a little intimidating when trying an advertising method for the first time, and you're not sure what kind of results you're going to get for your money. Unfortunately, with many things, advertising is often a trial and error system.

The major benefit of pay-per-click advertising is that you don't pay a single cent until someone clicks your advertising link. In most cases this means that you will get a higher rate of return and a larger percentage of your advertising budget will actually lead to customers.

Make sure you do your due diligence and read the terms of any pay-per-click site that you're considering advertising with since some guarantee clicks as an incentive. People who are getting paid or getting advertising from the company usually produce these clicks. These kinds of clicks are not beneficial to your business and are usually not targeted and should be avoided.

Other forms of advertising will not take as much time or effort to perfect as pay-per-click advertising. When it comes to PPC, you can expect to spend a good amount of time every week reviewing your keywords and revising your ads and the keyword they are linked to, making sure you are getting a good click-through-rate (CTR).

Both pay-per-click advertising and traditional online advertising have their pros and cons. Pay-per-click may cost less but it also takes up more valuable time. The results are targeted to an extent but weekly revising of ad copy is needed for each keyword account to get the best possible CTR for your campaign.

Traditional online advertising may cost more but is usually intended for superior targeting of customers. The traditional forms of advertising online don't require as much upkeep as PPC advertising does. The best thing you can do is use a combination of both advertising methods.