Pay Per Click Advertising: The Bidding Process

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a way for businesses to promote their business and draw visitors to their site.

 It’s a straightforward process on the surface: you pay a certain amount to have adverts placed in strategic places online. These adverts have a link to your site. When people click on the advert, it takes them to your site. The hope is to make a sale. Underneath, though, it’s a bit more complicated than this. Don’t worry, because, here, we have created a guide to help you understand the process in more depth.

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 The Search Engines

PPC advertising is based on the way that the search engines work. A search engine is a complex computer programme that organises web pages in a logical fashion that enables people to put in search terms and then receive relevant results. The best-known search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

 Businesses bid for keyword placements. For example, two web development companies may bid on the keywords ‘Web development’. When someone searches Google for ‘web development’, Google will decide whether to enter those two companies in that particular bid. The process is automatic, the businesses have already told Google that they want to bid for ‘web development’ – the businesses aren’t on the end of the phone waiting for someone to search for it.

 A note about keywords: they’re not searches. So, although they may bid for ‘web development’ Google may decide to enter them into searches such as ‘web growth’ or ‘how to build a website’. You may think this is a bit unfair, because the business may bid on something that isn’t relevant. However, this is solved by charging the company only for the successful adverts: those that people click on. If someone clicks on the ad, the business gets charged for that click; hence the name Pay Per Click advertising.

 A Bit More about the Bidding Process

The business that is advertising selects the keywords that they want to bid for. Google then enters the ad when someone searches for a relevant search term surrounding that keyword.

 You will notice that the adverts on Google are in different orders. Some are more visible than others are. This is not an accident, but is due to the process of bidding. It works like this:

  • The advertisers specifies how much they are willing to pay for a click
  • Google determines how relevant your website is to the search term; the more relevant, the higher your quality.

 Google then combines these two qualities to determine where your ad is ranked. The higher the quality of relevancy, and the more you bid, the higher the visibility of your ad.

 Conclusion

This is simply a basic outline of the process of PPC advertising. It’s much more complicated than described here, and for many companies, outsourcing your PPC advertising to a PPC management services makes more financial sense than going it alone. PPC management services will save you money – even if you have to pay for their services – because they will create bidding campaigns that are optimised to your requirements, and this is a technical and specialised process.

If you would like further information about PPC management services, then please visit Neotericuk

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