Pay-Per-Click or PPC in Affiliate Marketing Business

Pay-Per-Click or PPC in Affiliate Marketing Business

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and is generally used when described paid search engine results. There are plenty of other per click payment metrics, such as CPC (cost-per-click) banner advertising, and even some affiliate programs. However, despite similarities in payment structure, when someone says PPC advertising they almost always mean paid search engine results.

There are four major PPC programs out there, Overture, Miva, Google, and Looksmart. While there is no rule saying that you can only use one, and in fact many people use all 3, what if you want to get the most bang for your buck? Which do you choose? This article isn’t going to answer that question for you, but it will give you the information you need to answer that question for yourself.

All of these programs provide tools for monitoring your listings, for picking good listings, and all around campaign management. So instead of focusing on those features I’m going to be focusing on effectiveness and cost.

Overture/Yahoo

Overture is the grand daddy of PPC search engines. They started out as Goto.com and after spending millions of dollars branding themselves they relaunched as Overture a couple years later. This change make a shift in their main promotional efforts. Previously, as Goto.com, they wanted to get surfers to visit their site to perform their searches. In other words they were competing with other search portals. Now, as Overture, they are more focused on providing their services to search portals that they once competed with. They have recently purchases AltaVista and Lycos, two former heavyweights of the search engine world. In addition to those two they also have distribution deals with Yahoo, MSN, and Infospace among others.

Overture works by allowing you to bid on a keyword, and whoever has the highest bid gets listed first, the next highest gets listed second, and so on down the line with the minimum bid being 10 cents. Usually Overture’s partners only show the first 3 or so results. This bidding can create bidding wars and in general advertising on Overture is more expensive than it is on Google or LookSmart. Additionally due to how the listings look and because partners often only take the first few being a high bidder is important if you want to drive a lot of traffic. Because of these reasons Overture is the most expensive option for a long term campaign. One more downside with Overture is that they’re partnered with Gator, which is an infamous spyware company that most honest webmasters do not want to be associated with. They also can take awhile to approve your listings and they require a minimum expenditure of $20 a month.

Miva

MIVA is the new name for the FindWhat.com Group. In 2004, FindWhat.com undertook an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy, bringing together numerous companies from around the globe, including Espotting, Miva Corporation, B&B Advertising, MVCool and Comet Systems.

MIVA provides partners with customized solutions to monetize website traffic. We listen to your needs and provide solutions which increase the value per visit to your website.

MIVA Distribution Partners benefits:

1. Solutions are Customized and branded that perfectly integrate into your site.
2. Dedicated to your success. We are the largest independent Performance Marketing Network.
3. Delivering more value per visit with a large choice of solutions which provide relevant information at the right time for the user. MIVA is passionately dedicated to customer service. The bottom line: MIVA delivers more revenue to your bottom line.

Google Adsense

When you display Google ads on your website, you’ll be maximizing your revenue potential. Google places relevant CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads into the same auction and lets them compete against one another. The auction takes place instantaneously and when it’s over AdSense will automatically display the text or image ad(s) that will generate the maximum revenue for a page — and the maximum revenue for you. With AdSense, you can monitor your ad performance with customizable online reports that offer details like the number of page impressions, clicks and click-through rate. You can track the performance of specific ad formats, colors and pages, and spot trends quickly and easily. Our flexible reporting tools let you group your pages however you want, so you can gain insight into your earnings by viewing results by URL, domain, ad type, category and more. And best of all, of course, you can check your earnings anytime.

When you display Google ads on your website, you’ll be maximizing your revenue potential. Google places relevant CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads into the same auction and lets them compete against one another. The auction takes place instantaneously and when it’s over AdSense will automatically display the text or image ad(s) that will generate the maximum revenue for a page — and the maximum revenue for you. With AdSense, you can monitor your ad performance with customizable online reports that offer details like the number of page impressions, clicks and click-through rate. You can track the performance of specific ad formats, colors and pages, and spot trends quickly and easily. Our flexible reporting tools let you group your pages however you want, so you can gain insight into your earnings by viewing results by URL, domain, ad type, category and more. And best of all, of course, you can check your earnings anytime.

It isn’t perfect though. One issue is that you’re drastically limited by the size of the back and must often be creative when trying to figure out how to write your ad copy with only a handful of characters of text at your disposal. Another issue is that they monitor performance and if your ads do not perform well they disable them – this can become annoying after awhile and expensive as well. Eventually they’ll charge you $5 every time you enable a deactivated ad. One final problem is that Google will not allow you to advertise a site that has popups. On the surface this sounds fine but they don’t care what the popup is. For instance I run a popup that is cookie controlled so that each user only sees it once, ever, and it advertises my newsletter. My Adwords listing was eventually disabled when a Google editor noticed this.

LookSmart

Their change from a pay directory like Yahoo to a PPC directory annoyed many webmasters. The main draw with LookSmart is getting into the primary results at MSN. See Overture provides MSN with a couple sponsored listings, then LookSmart provides primary results, and after LookSmart results (which can go on for pages) Inktomi comes in and provides secondary results. So for the time being the only way to get into MSN’s primary results is through LookSmart. LookSmart also differs from the other in that they don’t allow you to bid for keywords, everyone in the program pays 15 cents per click. This price fixing is nice because it prevents bidding wars like what you’ll find at Overture. It also means that you can get to the top of the listings if you know how to optimize for directories and still only pay 15 cents per click. You can also budget your listings with Looksmart and once you reach your maximum they’ll turn your listing off for the remainder of the month.

LookSmart does have its downsides though. It charges a high $29 setup fee, and you could still rejected. It also charges for listing changes and requires a minimum of $15 a month. However LookSmart does have one bonus that the others don’t, that is link popularity. Being listed in LookSmart gives you incoming links from LookSmart itself and from places that use LookSmart’s directory (such as AltaVista).