by Hillary Marshall

Created on: May 28, 2008

When you have a company, regardless off whether that company is web based or brick and mortar, you need to advertise to increase your customer base. Having a web based company brings with it the distinct disadvantage of trying to make yourself stand out among the millions of other web pages online. The Internet is constantly evolving and with those changes come changes to the way people market their web based businesses. One of the methods of Internet marketing that has remained steady through all of these changes is pay per click marketing. Pay per click marketing offers web based companies an affordable and proven method for advertising their web based business.

Pay per click marketing works exactly the way it sounds. Advertisers pay for an ad and that ad is placed on various search engine result pages or content network websites. The advertiser is only responsible for paying an agreed upon fee when a user clicks on their ad. The advertisers bid on keywords that they feel target their key demographic and when an Internet user uses those search terms the pay per click ad pops up as a sponsored ad or link. The pay per click ads are located in the outer margins of the search engine result page or content network page.

When advertisers decide to use the pay per click method of Internet marketing they must know what keywords will best represent their business. The advertisers then bid on those keywords with the company in which they will placing the ad. Naturally, the more popular the keyword is the more it will cost the advertiser per click. Search engines and content web pages organize the pay per click ads on their site in succession by how much each advertiser is paying per click.

Pay per click advertising is not without its own set of unique problems. Knowing how to avoid these problems is key to an advertiser successfully launching a pay per click advertising campaign. First, advertisers must take the time to carefully select business relevant keywords to bid on. This is essential to your ad being placed within related search engines result pages and or content network pages. Next, you must make sure that your pay per click ad is well written and that the landing page that the ad is linked to is relevant to the ad.

Click fraud is another possible pitfall in the world of pay per click marketing. Click fraud occurs when individuals, an automatic script or a computer program purposely click on an ad with the intention of increasing a companies advertising costs. There are many reasons why this takes place, but primarily it is perpetrated by a businesses competitors in an effort to deplete the companies advertising budget. Many companies take click fraud very seriously and have developed programs to prevent and detect it. That said, it can be very difficult to prevent click fraud, so it is best to advertise with a reputable company that has established guidelines for compensation if click fraud is proven to have taken place.

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