Pay Per Click ain’t your average advertising

The Superbowl is the advertising event of the year. Ranging from serious to funny, marketers design their year’s most expensive commercials to appeal to a wide audience in the hopes of finding those few people that really want that hot new item. If you watch closely and pay attention to various ad campaigns (a series of ads aimed to accomplish a specific task) you can notice a trend and through that, the public culture the sponsoring company is trying to create. Budweiser is funny, always a party. Geico provides great customer service and doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Godaddy realized that sex sells so Danika Patrick was featured prominently for a while. So what makes Pay Per Click, or PPC different?

If you haven’t heard of PPC before, it’s similar to a commercial in that your company will appear in front of interested audiences. The primary difference is the medium, and the audience. Have you ever noticed those color highlighted results of an internet search? Those companies paid for the privilege to be there. It’s direct marketing to someone already interested in what your result has to say, because they searched for it. Simply appearing isn’t enough though, the companies in question don’t actually get charged until someone clicks on their link and continues through the process of locating that widget.

Advertising is an investment in hopes to increase revenues and therefore the bottom line of the company. This type of advertising has been around for years, and many companies have been very successful doing nothing but PPC advertising. The investment is less brand recognition based, and more to fill a specific need the searcher has. If the searcher happens to recognize the website they click on, they may end up trusting the site more, but recognition isn’t what drove them to the brand’s site, otherwise they would have just gone there directly instead of through a search.

Personally, when I do a search I skip past all the sponsored links and go directly to the native search results, but it’s become obvious that many companies depend on those paid search results. It’s not exactly cutting edge investment strategy, but it just might work for your company anyways.