Every year businesses and marketing companies around the globe search for new ways to increase revenue and traffic to their website. Publicity is generally always a good thing and increased number of unique visitors to a website usually results in a larger number of sales. Businesses are constantly competing for the top spots on search engine result pages but reaching the top 3 natural links is often a long tedious and challenging task.
Pay per click or adword marketing campaigns have become ever more prevalent in recent years as companies have began to realise its potential to increase profits exponentially. A PPC campaign is the process of bidding on a phrase that you have deemed relevant to your industry. When your paid link is followed through by a potential customer you will be charged according to the amount bid for.
Paid links are so popular because they eliminate the need to earn a top spot in natural search listings. Paid links are always placed in prime locations of the website and taking google as an example we would mostly likely see these phrases as the top 2-3 search results (usually highlighted in yellow) and on the right hand side of a page. By having links in such opportune positions you will significantly increase the chances of consumers visiting your website.
The price of each click is determined by many factors and can start from pennies per click, however this is not always the case any many businesses find themselves paying upwards of $140.
Competition is generally regarded as the reason for inflated costs. An example of this would be the search term 'Mesothelioma attorney' which along with many other asbestos compensation phrases holds a spot as one of the most expensive phrases. It was suggested that a legal firm in Florida was paying upwards of $200 for each click owed to competition in that area being so great. Asbestos compensation claims are a rather lucrative industry so attorneys are willing to pay 'over the odds' to not only generate a lead but to prevent a rival company from benefiting from the lead.
The type of industry that the search is related to can also affect the cost of a phrase, industries that sell legal services, web space and insurance dominate the top spots of most expensive PPC phrases. Most legal services are around $100 per click whilst insurance can range anywhere from $30-$80 per click.
Google is by far the most popular place for businesses to bid for keywords using their adwords platform. This is due to the fact that over 60% of people use google with the other sharing the other 40%. This give you more opportunity to bring potential custom to your business. Other search engine such as Yahoo and bing offer a similar service and are usually cheaper per click.
Finally the length of a search term can make or break a PPC campaign, a phrase that is overly broad may acquire many unique visitors however the amount of people who purchased your service would be lower (due to you not being quite what they want) and you would be paying a much higher rate per link. An overly specific search term would be cheaper and would receive far less visitors however the percentage of people who go on to buy something would be no doubt higher.
An example of this would be a company selling custom t-shirt, paying for the search term 'buy a t-shirt' would yield vast amounts of visitors however not many would purchase the item whereas 'buy a black t-shirt with a picture of a dog' would have far less visitors but a greater turn around rate.
Author - Adam Howard writes for Atrium on workers health. Asbestos is the biggest killer of industrial workers so litigation in this area is very lucrative. Due to this it is very competitive which is reflected in paid search click prices.
