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Pay Per Click
Search Engine
The pay per click search engine provides a quick and easy way to
advertise your website on a
low budget. You only pay for the clicks
made on your ads and not how many times they are
displayed. So, you
only pay for actual visitors to your site. Google and Yahoo! are
currently the most well known and well used pay per click search
engines, with their Adwords and Overture programs. MSN are getting
ready to release their own adCenter.
Keywords are essential to be successful in the pay per click search
engine. When one of your keywords is used as a search term in that
search engine, your ad will be displayed in the enhanced listings on
the page ¡V provided you have bid high enough for your keyword to be
active in searches. The minimum bid available will be displayed
within your keyword list. It is up to you how far over this price
you place your bid, but the higher it goes, the more chance you have
at being at the top of the ad listings.
Required bid amounts can change daily as competitors come and go,
raise or lower their budgets and add or remove keywords. They may
even fluctuate with the season. Regular analysis of your keyword
performance will help you to maintain good placements in the pay per
click search engine ads.
However, the downfall of using the pay per click search engine is
click fraud. Used by malicious competitors, click fraud is a problem
with all pay per click programs. You need to check your keyword
performance for unusual click patterns, where your ad has been
repeatedly clicked on in order to drive up the cost of bidding on
that keyword. As well as depleting your budget, the competitor hopes
they can drive you out of the listings by making keywords
unaffordable. If you suspect click fraud, check your server logs or
web stats ¡V you may well find that the same IP address is
responsible for the repeated clicks in which case it can be traced.
Report the same information to the pay per click search engine you
are using and you should get a refund on the fraudulent clicks.
This aside, the pay per click search engine is a useful tool to get
a new site noticed and is a cost effective and easily managed form
of advertising.
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