Pay-Per-Click Process and Search Engines
Pay-Per-Click is a relatively recent phenomenon, many Real Estate Professionals do not understand the meaning of the term “pay-per-click advertising,” nor do they realize its huge potential for increasing their targeted online presence and bringing more traffic to their websites, therefore getting more leads. Even those Realtors who understand basic search engine marketing techniques occasionally fail to make the distinction between pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns and organic search engine optimization (SEO).
Most Search Engines offer the marketing option called "pay-per-click" to users. The term "pay per click" means just what it says: the advertiser pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad. PPC advertising is the placement of a small ad on the search results page for a specific keyword or keywords in return for a particular payment when a visitor actually clicks on the ad. Advertisers pay nothing to appear on the results page if the ad is not clicked on; they only pay the amount they have agreed to (or bid for) when someone actually clicks on their ad and is taken to the landing page on their website.
The most popular search engine offering PPC is Google; their PPC advertising program is called AdWords. The next most popular search engines are Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask. At Real Estate Website Masters, we principally use Google, which drives more than 80% of the searches in Real Estate and occasionally Yahoo, MSN and Altavista.
One of the main advantages of this kind of advertising is completely auditable and traceable to the dollar, the budget necessary is adaptable to all budgets and most of all it generates results immediately.