The High Cost of Living

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is the new way to get your website listed near the top of Search Engine results in only a matter of days.

The secret of the Internet Revolution is that advertising is so damn cheap, and PPC is no exception. You don't pay for how many times your ad appears, only for each "click through", that is, each time a person clicks on your ad and arrives at your web page.

Today the number one search engine is Google, used by 75% of people searching the internet. Google's PPC advertising program is called AdWords.I opened my own AdWords account two weeks ago. Since then, my advertisement has appeared about 1,400 times near the top of Google search results. My click-through rate is pretty good, a little less than 2%, which means in this time period I've paid for 26 people to visit my website. AdWords also tells me that of these 26 people, more than 1/3 of them were "converted", which means they sent me their e-mail address, so I could reply with my sales pitch. My total cost for advertising was $11.00. My "cost per conversion" was $1.19, which means I paid only $1.19 for each customer who sent me their e-mail address.

How much did it cost me to open an AdWords account with Google? Only $5.00, and I am not required to spend a minumum amount per month on advertising.

A couple days ago I opened a second PPC advertising account with Google's competitor, and the second biggest supplier of PPC advertising on the web, which is called Overture. (Overture is a Yahoo company). They haven't started showing my ad yet, but I can give you some idea of how this system differs from Google.

Overture requires a monthly "minumum spend" of $20.00. There is no charge for opening an account,but they do require you to start with a $30.00 deposit. At this time they are offering a nicecredit to new customers which in effect makes your first two advertising months "free". However up to this point I have not been able to find a trace of this "credit" online at Overture. This is just the first of three complaints about Overture, a service I will have to use in addition to Google, in order to sustain my web traffic using PPC.

Google will review your ad copy to ensure it conforms to good taste, but they allow you to post your ad immediately. Overture makes you wait "three business days" (it took them 4 and 1/2 in my case) until one of their reps can review the demeanor of your ad.

Google makes it easy to run classical "split" tests on your advertisement. The "split test" is where, for example, you run two ads with the same text, but a different headline, to see which headline pulls in more responses. Then you get rid of the bum headline, because that is the one costing you money.

Overture only lets you submit one ad, and it better be a good one! Fortunately I knew which headline was best from my Google responses.

The one good thing about Overture is their more liberal ad display policies. They allow you a headline twice the length that Google permits. And they permit ad text three times the length allowed by Google. Additionally, Overture ads look more like real search engine results, appearing at the very top of the results page. Google ads look like they are commercially sponsored, appearing on the right hand side of the "real" Google search results.

It's not like the good old days (1995 to 1998) when you could tweak the keywords on your web page and appear in the top ten search results of your favorite engine. Today, if you want to be at the top of Yahoo or Google, you'll have to pay per click. But considering the paltry cost, the guarantee of your ad appearing for free hundreds of times, and with the efficiency of paying only for visitors to your web page, maybe the PPC model is better.