There are over 650 pay per click search engines. Google AdWords is becoming the most popular PPC search engine, along with Overture (now Yahoo Sponsored Search) pay for performance. There are many other PPC search engines that work well, where you can often pay lower prices for clicks and still get highly targeted traffic.
Paid search ads have become a major source of search engine income by creating a flexible market for business leads, which allow an advertiser to reach a new customer. According to Jupiter Media Metrics:
"Paid search placement....has proved itself one of the more successful online advertising models, capitalizing on the alignment of consumer need and advertiser interest"
These are the most popular Pay per Click Search Engines:
Google
Although Google is not a pay-per-click search engine, it provides pay-per-click advertising in text ad boxes on the right hand side of search result pages, and also delivers pay-per-click ads to other content sites.
Google Adwords is very popular amongst Internet Marketers due to the fact that Google is the most popular search engine, and providing new exciting facilities for its customers on a regular basis. Google also offers the use of many languages, so you can choose your own target countries to place your ads.
Google has an Adwords Discounter which dynamically raises and lowers your cost-per-click bids within the range you specify, to keep you in the position you want. They also offer a very low start up cost, multiple ads per keyword, and reward relevance with higher positions at no extra cost.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo and Overture are now merged to provide what they call Sponsored Search Marketing. Yahoo claim that you can reach 80% of internet users, as their Sponsored Search lists your business in the search results on six of the top U.S search properties: MSN, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AlltheWeb and NetZero.
You can bid for rankings and also choose the description and title you want. You can control your bids at all times and adjust them, based on the quality of your results.
Editorial staff review your search terms for relevancy to ensure your website contains content that is consistent with your keywords. After the review your ads are distributed amongst a vast network of leading sites.
Investigate Different Pay-per-Click Search Engines
Its worth investigating different pay per click search engines to to find how much traffic they draw and what it would cost to bid on your keywords. Because they are less popular, buying highly targeted traffic is much cheaper than the larger search engines. For example:
MIVA
Espotting and FindWhat have now merged to form MIVA.com/uk which has a network of partner sites. Your ads are distributed across the network of 100,000 clients.
This is a UK based pay per click search engine, and your ads will reach a large percentage of the UK Internet population. It also allows you to target a German, French and or Spanish audience.
In the short run, Pay-Per-Click engines are a useful tool for online marketing. They require a little money to be used effectively and many require daily or weekly policing to ensure that you are not outbid and therefore ranked too low. The trouble can be worth it, though, as you drive more and more visitors (usually highly targeted) to your website.
Just a Reminder:
You can attract a constant flow of free targeted traffic to your website with quality search engine optimization which will place your website high in the search engines, and listed in the directories. Whilst it takes a little longer to achieve top listings, this traffic builds steadily and is much cheaper to maintain in the long term.
You will need to optimize your website pages for a Pay per Click campaign to work
Your best strategy would be to organize your SEO & Marketing package first, and when your pages are optimized, that's the best time to start a Pay per Click advertising promotion.
