Characteristics of pay per click advertising model

Internet has emerged as a big advertising platform where business owners of both big and small businesses can advertise their products and services. In this way, they can reach out to millions of potential customers located any where in the world. In fact, with the global numbers of Internet users exceeding 2 billion pretty quickly, the stakes have got higher as more and more business owners are vying for the attention of Internet users.

Advertisement programs: There is a huge potential of earning revenues in Internet based advertisement. The current scale of such revenues can be gauged from the fact that Google had revenues in excess of $22 billion in year 2008 most of which was composed of advertisement related income. Popular websites such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo etc have started sharing their advertisement related revenues with individual website owners around the world by using various programs such as pay per click and cost per click etc.

What is pay per click advertisement model?

It is such an advertisement model in which the advertiser may host its advertisement on an existing website. It needs to pay the owner of the host website in case its advertisement is clicked by any one. Though a number of pay per click advertisement programs are available on the Internet, the most popular ones in the order of their popularity are: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

Google AdWords pay per click program

Among these, Google AdWords is the biggest program and its reach extends to over ten billion web pages. It offers certain benefits which aren't available with other PPC campaigns. These benefits include:

  • High exposure: Google search index has a reach over ten billion web pages and that too in multiple languages. Thus, Google AdWords program can ensure maximum exposure as compared to that available with its competitors.
  • Flexibility: You can have a higher flexibility with regards to the advertisements placed by you. These ads can be edited by you as per your requirement and change their format in whichever way you may find suitable.
  • Target: With Google AdWords you can direct your ads to a particular geographical location and language.

Yahoo! Search Marketing pay per click program

Advertisers can advertise their products on search engine listings of Yahoo. Yahoo provides a feature known as Local Sponsored Search in which advertisers can target Internet users in their vicinity.

Microsoft AdCenter pay per click program

Though it has appeared quite late on the PPC advertisement horizon, it has shown a lot of promise. Numerous options are available to the advertisers who set up their advertisement campaigns with Microsoft AdCenter. So many features are available in Microsoft AdCenter that you may find it very hard to gulp all of them in a single go.

Abuse: A pay per click program can be easily misused by a fraudster who may keep on clicking the advertisement of a competitor with a purpose of increasing the amount which it may need to the pay per click program owner.