There are a variety of advertising options available to
online business owners small and large. There`s traditional
banner advertising, text ads of both static and contextual
varieties, popups and popunders, layer ads and pay-per-
click search engine advertising.

For just about any business looking to advertise online,
pay-per-click search listings should come first and be used
to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They
are the foundation of most online advertising plans,
delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach
for the lowest cost.

The concept of pay-per-click, or PPC search advertising is
simple -- you have your listing placed within or alongside
search results in exchange for paying some fee each time a
someone clicks on your listing in those search results.
Most search engines set advertisers against eachother in
auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search
result pages.

There are several benefits to this advertising method that
make it useful to just about any web business, and make it
so important that it should be exploited to its fullest
before advertising in any other medium.

BENEFIT #1: TARGETING

Targeting is essential to any marketing, online or off. In
order to be effective, ads have to reach the right people.
If that`s not happening, you`re just wasting your money.

More than anything else, people turn to search engines to
find things they need on the Web. Pay-per-click search
engine advertising lets you capture these people while they
are actively seeking out your product or service. By listing
your site under specific search results, you capture your
target audience and pre-qualify them with your ad at the
same time. By the time the visitor is on your site, you
already know they are looking for your product or service
and have an interest in your particular offer.

BENEFIT #2: REACH

No matter how large the website, magazine or newspaper you
advertise on, it will never reach as many individuals as the
top search engines. Google and Yahoo! each reach 80% of the
Internet using population and display pay-per-click ads
above and alongside search results. Billions of searches are
made every month which you can easily be listed within at no
cost until an individual decides to click through to your
website.

BENEFIT #3: COST

Banner advertising can cost $25 for 1,000 impressions of an
advertisement regardless of the number of real website
visits those impressions deliver. Top news portals can
charge even twice that. PPC search ads cost nothing until an
interested individual actually clicks through to your
website. Even with the competitive bidding process that pits
you against other advertisers for top spots at most PPC
search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies.
If you work out the average cost to acquire a new visitor
from other mediums, it`ll likely end up higher than the
search engine ad without the benefits of precise targeting
and pre-qualifying the visit with the ad text.

It becomes clear why pay-per-click advertising should be the
foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider
the combined benefits of the targeting, costs and reach of
the medium:

* There`s no guessing how many visitors will result from an
advertising spend. Since you set your own click price, you
know how many visitors each dollar buys in advance.

* Conversion rates and ROI are easy to calculate.

* Visitors are pre-qualified before arriving at your website
by your ad text.

* Ads are placed without long-term commitments or high
up-front fees.

* PPC search advertising reaches so many internet users
that almost any niche audience can be targeted.

* Ad text can be changed at any time.

PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and
abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at
the many available companies, before spending money
elsewhere as almost any other medium will be less targeted,
less controllable and more expensive.