In a competitive environment, marketing is an integral part of a business and requires significant effort to reach out to people. Businesses employ various media like TV, radio, print, etc to promote their products and services. Through these media, businesses pull people to attract attention, elicit interest and finally buy their products and services. With the advent of Internet, businesses have gone online and established their own websites. Internet, as a virtual world, has thousands of websites offering similar products and services. How does an online user search for the products and services that satisfy his needs for the best bargain? How would online businesses pull a prospective customer to their websites? Where would they advertise? Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the powerful marketing tools employed by online businesses. PPC advertisements are placed in websites and search portals and the business model is advertisers pay the host only when the advertisement gets clicked. When a prospective customer searches for products and services, he/she goes to search engines and types some keywords related to what he/she wants to buy and the search engine returns with listings along with advertisements of products related to what he/she is searching. Each time any of the prospective customers click any of these advertisements, the advertiser has to pay a predetermined amount to the search agency. The features of this tool are the advertiser pays only when someone clicks through the advertisement and the advertiser can decide which position/space he/she wants the advertisement to be placed in the web page. The latter one is decided by the amount one bids for. The advertiser who bids for the highest amount gets the top slot. The challenge for online advertisers is to identify the keywords the prospective buyers key in when they search for products/services. Businesses can utilize various search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc to list their websites. PPC is ideally suited for small and medium businesses and is employed by various sectors like hotel industry, travel, consumer goods, etc. |
