Pay-per-click advertising management is a business strategy that marketing professionals use to maximize the efficacy and profitability of pay-per-click ads on the Internet. Management usually involves everything from selecting and bidding on keywords to monitoring profitability and traffic patterns over time. Branding specialists and marketing professionals engage in pay-per-click advertising management in order to ensure that a company’s online campaigns are meeting goals and attracting the right kinds of consumers.
Most consumer-facing organizations today have multi-layered advertising strategies. They sell themselves in print, on television and radio, and online. Pay-per-click ads are one of many forms of online marketing. These are brief ads, usually no more than a sentence or two paired with a link to the sponsor’s homepage. Companies typically pay nothing to place these ad boxes on host sites, but each time users click them, companies must pay a fixed price.
There are two main ways of approaching pay-per-click advertising: on search engines and on parked sites. Search engines commonly sell “sponsored links” that appear based on keywords entered by users. The pricing of these ads is usually determined by bids. Diversification is usually a key part of pay-per-click advertising management. Companies will often purchase several different keywords and distribute several iterations of the same ad across multiple platforms.
Much of search engine pay-per-click advertising management centers on keyword selection. Companies must determine what sort of keywords correlate to their business as well as what sort of Internet user they are trying to attract. This often involves a lot of demographic research and marketing analysis into the trends of online consumers.
Search engines frequently auction off popular keywords, or keywords that many companies want. Whoever offers to pay the most per click usually wins the top placement slot, meaning that that company’s ad is the first to appear next to the search results. A big part of pay-per-click advertising management is determining how much to bid on desirable keywords.
Parked sites do not usually auction keywords. They typically charge a fixed price for placement. Ads are usually sold in packages based either on a set number of page views or fixed amount of ad run time.
Most of the time, ads on parked pages are placed through online advertising agencies. Companies often have some say in the sorts of sites on which they want their ads to appear, but cannot usually control the actual placements. Brand managers in this scenario must carefully research their placement options to be sure that the packages they purchase are actually serving their ads to the target demographic and are placed on appropriate, relevant sites.
Wording is also crucial element in pay-per-click advertising. Most ads are only a sentence or two long, which means that companies are only able to get their products and services in front of consumers if those consumers actually click. There is a certain science to creating an attractive, click-worthy ad. It is usually the advertising managers who organize and test different wording possibilities.