If someone was going to start advertising for the first time and they asked me, where is the first place they should start, out of all the mediums I would say pay-per-click search engines (from now on referred to as PPC advertising) is the place to start.  I've worked with a few other ad mediums that brought in far more profit over a given period of time, but the low start-up cost (which means low risk) and tractability of PPC advertising makes it great for beginners, and a must for long time established businesses alike.

 

What Is PPC Search Engine Advertising?

PPC search engine advertising is placing links to your website on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN and you pay each time the link is clicked.  You select a specific keyword, and when that keyword is typed into a search engine, the link to your website appears in the search results.  The amount of money you bid on the keyword determines in what position your link will appear in the search results.  If you bid more than anyone else (whatever that may be) you'll appear #1, and so on.

 

Tracking Results

This is a big plus and a major break through for PPC advertising.  At the time of this writing, Yahoo and Google allow you to put a java script on the sale approval page of your shopping cart, enabling you to log into your account and see exact details on each keyword; like number of clicks, cost per click, total cost, and number of sales, amount of sales, total sales, and more.  By doing this, you can see which keywords are making profit and which are not, so you can put more money on the good keywords and remove the losers.

 

Which PPC Search Engines Should You Advertise On?

There are several players in this game.  Google and Yahoo make-up around 80% of the PPC search engine traffic.  Then there's MSN at 10% and ASK.com at 5%. 

 

I've advertised on EVERY PPC search engine there is on the net.  If you ever have, you'll notice that to rank around 6-8 for a keyword like "business opportunity" might cost $2.80 on Yahoo, $1.25 on Google, $0.60 on MSN, $0.30 on ASK.com, $0.10 on Findwhat.com, etc. per click.  The logic here would be to go with MSN, ASK.com and findwhat.com because they're all much cheaper per click.  In this example, for $2.80 you can get 1 click from Yahoo, or 28 clicks from Findwhat.com.  Common sense tells you Findwhat.com is the best deal.  Why would anyone pay 28 times more for a single click? 

 

There are two problems I found that make this not true:

 

1.) Though you get far more clicks for your money with the small PPC search engines, my sales were very low.  I believe this is because the small PPC search engines get most of their traffic from affiliates who split the revenue with the search engine.  There’s a chance that a good percentage of the clicks you receive may not be potential customer clicks, but rather affiliate website owners trying to earn money for themselves, by clicking on your links.  I'm not saying I "know for a fact" this is happening, but it is a fact that the sales were VERY poor considering the number of clicks received. 

 

2.)  Traffic volume is so low that even though you may be paying 0.10 a click and you're #1, you might only get 10 clicks a day.  Maybe at Google for 0.70 a click, you're getting 300 clicks a day.  It costs more but there's more traffic volume.  More traffic volume means more potential sales.

 

If you'd like to try all of the top 10 or 20 PPC search engines, I guess there's nothing wrong with spending $20 and tracking the results to see if they're profitable.  But I myself personally, only advertise with Yahoo, Google and MSN.

 

My Personal PPC Results

Remember these were “my” results.  Yours can and will vary.  But I know for myself personally, I'm basing all of my future advertising on these results.  I'm going to be vague with the results, but you'll get the idea of which search engine was best for me.  Google was great and received the most traffic.  I spent around $30,000 in a year with Google and sales were around $180,000.  One would say why not spend triple and make triple, but it doesn't work that way.  I was ranking between 4th-7th positions (which I recommend) for all of the keywords that pertained to my business, and the traffic I received cost me $30,000.  Paying more per click got me more clicks but less profit.  So $30,000 for $180,000 was the best I could do with Google.  $15,000 spent with Yahoo for the year brought back $40,000, and $3,000 spent with MSN brought back $25,000 in sales. 

 

Percentage wise MSN was the best for me, bringing in 833% more than the cost, but the traffic was so low that it brought in only $25,000.  The percentage with MSN was so great because there was little competition in 2006 and the bids were pretty low.  This may have changed by now.  The Yahoo keywords I wanted to bid on were very high and I had to limit my advertising with them, though I did still make money with Yahoo.  Google was king.  Profit percentage was lower then MSN but the traffic was very high and sales topped $180,000 for the year.