The pros and cons of pay-per-click advertising

The pros of pay per click advertising are that once you have your ad set up, you can have the ad up and running in as little as 10 minutes. pay per click advertising enables you to show your products prominently when people are searching online for related keywords or phrases.

You’re only charged for the clicks you get - so you only pay for your advertising when it actually engages someone. Once you get an idea of what you're doing, you can be running multiple ad campaigns, testing new headlines for web pages and sales letters that can be used online or offline. Pay per click advertising has allowed an average person to run a business from a small room in their home and compete with the largest companies around the world. Some people make 100% of their incomes from pay per click advertising methods and others make large incomes. Such a radical, efficient form of advertising has changed the way many businesses market themselves, and it’s now a vital part of their advertising plan. With online purchases surging enormously – and with 50% of those purchases preceded by search engine research – there has never been a better time to use Pay Per Click.

The cons of pay per click are that it costs money, you can burn through your advertising budget very quickly if you're not careful. That's because the way you buy advertising on pay per click search engines is by bidding on keywords. There are various formulas used, but for the most part, the highest two to four bidders have their ads shown in the top positions in paid search results and get the most clickthroughs. Since most advertisers want their ads to show up top, they bid up the cost of keywords for popular terms, driving costs up.

To give you an example, when Google first came out with Adwords it was easy to put up an ad and get traffic that was relatively inexpensive. Until last year, ads only costed a nickel per click for the end position if there were less than eight advertisers on the page. This is not the case anymore. Google now charges a designated amount for each keyword and phrase, some of which can be extremely expensive. With the explosion of it's popularity, it has also become extremely competitive.

As you can see, there are pluses and minuses to pay per click advertising. It's portability and ease of use make it a profitable excursion for the small business. There are pitfalls, however. THe cost per click can be astronomical as businesses compete for keywords so they can show up in a search. Many small business owners can make great amounts of money using pay per click advertising. But competition in this department makes advertising in this manner a bidding game. Overall pay per click is a game of numbers. It costs a lot to make a lot. Pay per click advertising is no different.