If you have a website and are looking for a way to attract more visitors to it or if you want to monetize your website, then you might consider pay per click advertising.
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the hosting service when the ad is clicked.
We'll set you on the way with the best pay per click advertising programs below.
LookSmart’s (http://www.looksmart.com) logo text sums up this PPC search engine pretty well – “Where To Look For What You Need”. Based in San Francisco, LookSmart has come a long way since it caused a stir in 2002 when it switched to a pay-per-click basis from a one-time placement fee-based listing setup.
LookSmart now is directed towards vertical search, using categories for organizing its ad and listings content, rather than the more typical Google-type “open” search.
Vertical search allows the user to narrow their search easily into the available categories and LookSmart has extensive listings in the markets they have chosen – currently Auto, Cities, Education, Food, Health, Home Living, Money, Music, Recreation, Sports, Style, Tech & Games, and Travel.
Under each major market is a page that breaks the category down further into a number of sub-categories with short descriptions for each. Also on each category page is a list of resources, including links to a number of articles and web sites, as well as a list of pages others have recently viewed. The integration of the Furl network is evident in the option to save a copy of any page you reach via LookSmart, and options to Find, Save or Share your results or web sites you have found with others via an easy-to-use interface.
The PPC product is called LookListings, which delivers content from Lycos, InfoSpace, Search.com (CNET), Apple’s Sherlock, Snap.com, among others. LookSmart has more than 180 demographically targeted search sites in addition to their distribution network. Two types of keyword matching are offered: Smart match (where slight variations of the keywords are included) and Broad matching (brings up all results containing the keywords).
LookSmart is customer-oriented, with a great deal of information on their site to help you optimize your ads, and easy access to customer service reps to assist you in setting up a campaign. Various documents are available explaining the options in detail and recent customer webinars are available for viewing online as well that deal with LookListings CPCs, budgets, using the online Advertiser Center, as well as more general advice on keyword choices to garner more leads. You can also subscribe to an email containing news, tips, best practices, and LookSmart special offerings.
The online demo of the Advertiser Center reveals a robust and versatile system with spend data being updated each hour, so that advertisers can access their accounts and check out their ads, make changes to their campaigns, and view a huge variety of customizable reports online. Traffic is monitored using a service called TrueLead, which verifies responsiveness and screens for click fraud. An extremely comprehensive FAQs section answers a myriad of questions about LookSmart and LookListings in a clear and attractive manner.
Non-commercial sites can be listed free with the community directory and will also be listed in Zeal’s directory for possible distribution to other search engines, but commercial sites are limited to LookListings. There are a number of handy resources for help with keyword selection, etc.
LookSmart has made a foray into the vertical search arena that historically mostly shopping comparison search engines have excelled at. The inclusion of other aspects, such as the ability to save your searches and listings for recent searches made by others, as well as their extremely detailed and versatile reporting, make this a search engine worth considering experimenting with and comparing results with similarly placed search engines not set up for vertical search.
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Findology.com, a division of TrafficAds Media, Inc. has grown enormously through 2005, from under 1 billion searches per month earlier this year to over 2 billion searches per month. Partnered with LookSmart in 2004, Findology’s offerings for PPC ads are fairly standard for the industry. The search engine itself has a clean, Google-type look to it.
All listings all sponsored (paid), but Findology’s key advantage is its partnerships with a number of channels typically not yet attached to other search engines, providing advertisers with “the most affordable bid rates at an even higher ROI” because of their reach into traffic other search engines don’t have access to.
Five different types of search are available: Web, News, People, Shopping and Research. Using the phrase “computer monitors”, we ran the different search types to see what the results would be.
Running the Web search, we received results showing sponsored ads above the organic search results (which had a fair number of duplicate entries for the same web page) and along the right side of the page.
The News search brought up a number of recent news items with the words “computer monitors” in them, with some useful links at the top of different categories of news for further search opportunities. The news page appears limited to a single banner ad along the bottom.
The People search brings up a different search box for first and last name, age, and state. Results that come up (if any do) are provided via Reunion.com (If you click on a name from the search, you are taken to the Reunion.com website where you must register to access information on those names). No advertising is included for this search tab.
The Shopping search comes up with virtually the same results as the Web search, which may be a temporary glitch in the system. I will recheck this feature in the near future to see if there is a difference between the two.
The Research search was quite interesting, bringing up a listing of articles concerning the topic, branded as being provided via HighBeam Research. No advertising is found on these search results Depending upon what you are researching, your results can include very recent material or more dated items, reflecting the database from which content is being drawn. Still, this useful search function can provide a lot of good information that could add significantly to the search engine’s popularity.
A part of the portal is taken up with a comment box for users to provide feedback to Findology, a welcome addition that makes your opinion easy to give and should provide the company with lots of information.
If you are interested in advertising on Findology, it features traffic reporting, keyword statistics, automatic and fixed bidding options, as well as the ability to submit more than one site. To open an account, the minimum deposit is $25 and the minimum bid is 3 cents.
User comments are generally as one would expect with smaller search engines – a relatively lower amount of traffic than Google or Yahoo!, but often better ROIs and more conversions. They like the portal and many hope to see Findology grow larger due to some of the high-quality features offered, such as the instant messenger and research capabilities.
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Advertise.com uses the classic PPC model, where an advertiser identifies keywords and bids in real time for ranking based on the “per click” cost. The higher you bid on a keyword, the higher your ad will appear in search results pages. Bid gap problems are eliminated via a dynamic bid program, which will set your bid at 1 cent above the second ad position, up to the bid you have identified as your maximum.
Maximum bids can be set for individual keywords or across your entire campaign (if the advertiser feels all keywords are of equal importance to the campaign).
Geo-targeting is available for the US and Canada, as well as a number of other countries. Local search at the state, city or area level is supported.
In August 2009, they announced the availability of their Remarketing Platform which “targets previous site visitors and brings them back with highly customized ads that maximize conversions and return on advertisers’ interactive spend. Through the use of a simple visitor tagging technique, advertisers create a custom population of highly qualified web users for current and future marketing campaigns.”
Late in 2006, Advertise.com introduced their patented ClickShield program to prevent click fraud. Using information gathered about network traffic patterns, each click is scrubbed against this user info and other methods of statistical analysis to identify fraudulent clicks. Additionally, Advertise.com allows full traffic optimization under the advertiser’s control.
Their network is comprised of more than 300 niche search engines and content publishers. Advertise.com serves over 10 billion searches per month. Contextual ads are offered via their Adentify product (beta). Traffic still coming in through the ABCSearch URLs is being redirected seamlessly to Advertise, but stats available for Advertise over the entire network may not yet reflect the change (as the Compete.com figures below illustrate).
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Since 1998, Google has grown from a two-man operation to what is arguably the largest and currently most popular search engine on the Internet. Most agree that Google garners more than 50% of all search traffic, with some estimates as high as 80%.
The clean interface (recently patented), its broad access to products still in development (but relatively bug-free), and well-supported advertising package (AdWords) appeal to the majority of users and advertisers.
Starting an AdWords campaign is fairly straightforward, but a Starter Edition offers an even simpler interface (minus some features).
Local search with advanced mapping via Google Earth, day-parting, geo-targeting, site targeting, free Google Analytics, the choice of contextual advertising, site map generation, Webmaster Central—the list of options and useful tools for advertisers to choose from is long and varied.
The Google paid ad display is the industry standard. An ad appears along the right side of the search results page or within content pages if content search is on. Recent changes in ranking parameters concentrate not just on bids, but also on the quality and relevance of your ad and the landing page associated with your ad (and indeed your entire website). This “Quality Score” concept has led to keywords becoming inactive for search plus reports of many huge jumps in keyword pricing.
The Google network includes entities such as AOL, Ask.com, Netscape, EarthLink, AT&T WorldNet, and CompuServe. Content partners include About.com, The New York Times, US News & World Report, and CBS Sportsline.
Advertisers are guided along the way when opening an account, provided with numerous tutorials, and given access to a variety of tools to help you track and optimize your bidding and keyword choices. With a searchable support database, almost any question can be answered in seconds.
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Yahoo! Search Marketing evolved from GoTo.com and Overture.
Advertisers enter a bid and a daily ad spend they are willing to pay, and Yahoo! will tell you what position in the sponsored listings is available for that amount of money. Estimates of the number of impressions, the number of clicks likely to occur and the total cost over 30 days are provided to help you plan.
Advertisers can specify goals they wish to reach with a campaign and Yahoo! Sponsored Search will provide information on how best to accomplish that given the keywords and creative available. Geotargeting can be applied to campaigns, instead of merely including the location in the ad creative for a search match. Campaigns can be scheduled by date.
Yahoo! can automatically select the versions of your ad that are most profitable and rotate those more often. Contextual advertising will, in the future, be based upon your ad and landing page content rather than keywords, which should provide more relevant listings. Ad listings will no longer take days to appear; most will be active within a few hours.
The partnership network includes AltaVista, InfoSpace, CNN, and others. With Content Match, it expands to include major content sites such as iVillage, The Weather Channel, and National Geographic.
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SearchFeed first began operations in November of 2000 and has relied upon a technique of personally and thoroughly researching any potential Web advertiser and providing assistance and software tools to help each advertiser target the most relevant traffic to their site.
There are presently more than 8,000 websites integrated with SearchFeed and they estimate traffic of more than 360 million searches each month. SearchFeed claims to have more than 20 million unique keywords available and with a starting bid of 1 cent for many of those keywords, SearchFeed has built a reputation as a solid base from which to run an effective marketing campaign, especially for smaller businesses.
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1.) Create and place your text ads on thousands of relevant websites
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1. Browse the categorized directory of websites
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