By Ian Howie

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is different to any other form of online or CPM (Cost per Thousand) advertising. Your ad could be seen thousands of times, by thousands of different people, but unless someone actually clicks on it you won’t pay a penny for the privilege.

However, many advertisers are only using the Search part of Pay Per Click, believing that Search is good for direct response and Display & Video are good for branding.

Here are our top five reasons why we think there is more to Pay Per Click:

1. Google Display Network

Formerly known as the Content Network, the Google Display Network is available from Google AdWords, reaches more than 80% of worldwide Internet users and serves more than 6 billion ad impressions every day across high-quality websites, news pages and blogs. Unlike many other online advertising display networks, there is no minimum spend.

Google has been building tools to make the Display Network more of a direct response platform. Advertisers can run placement reports to find out the sites and pages that produce the best results, then target specific sites in response.

At the other end of the scale, Google’s Display Network can also lead to more searches for your specific brand terms – people have seen your Display ads as they browse different sites on the Display Network, that can lead to them searching directly for your brand when they want to find out more.

American Laser Centers, an aesthetic services provider, used the Google Display Network to start a chain reaction of leads and conversions. Using the Google Display Network text and image ads, they increased conversion by 365% while cutting impressions in half.

2. Mobile Search

With Google AdWords, you can specifically target smart phones and other mobile devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry. Google handles over 98% of mobile search queries, and the fact that a lot of AdWords campaigns don’t target mobile search means that it’s a lot cheaper than desktop search. Mobile search queries tend to be only one or two words long, and it’s common for people to miss-spell words, meaning that there is a wide range of possible search terms.

3. Facebook

Facebook is now the world’s most popular website, with 540 million unique visitors last month alone. Facebook now has its own PPC platform, which allows you to target users by location, interest, age and other demographic information. This type of advertising works best when running highly targeted ads made up of an image and text. Since users prefer to stay within the Facebook site, ads need to be highly compelling in order to entice viewers to click. Some of the most successful Facebook campaigns so far have been for food (Gonuts for Donuts), travel (Visit Britain) and mobile phones (Nokia).

4. YouTube

In a relatively short period of time, YouTube has quickly become the second most visited site in the world after Facebook, with 490 million unique visitors last month. It is also the Internet’s second biggest search engine in its own right, and allows advertisers to target and engage with huge numbers of people who already interacting with the content. YouTube allows advertisers to target specific videos, channels and verticals, run overlay ads on videos, and even run ads within videos.

5. Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks is a feature for search-based ads that lets you include up to 10 additional links to deeper content on your site beyond the main landing page. They are strictly speaking just another aspect of search however, they involve thinking about the search process in a different way. They enable smart companies to maximise their brand presence on Google, and to maximise the amount of valuable screen real-estate taken up by a particular brand. Used together with SEO, well designed Sitelinks can fill the whole top half of the results page with your brand! Over the last year, some search costs and CPCs have been rising, while the costs of other forms of Pay Per Click advertising, like mobile and Facebook, have stayed low. Can you afford not to explore the other features that PPC advertising offers?

About the author

Ian Howie CTO and Co-Founder of specialist search agency 1upDigital, enables brands to power their online business through search. Starting out as a journalist he discovered search marketing back in 1997. He now focuses on consulting, delivering strategic analytic insight for businesses, and is a frequent 'guest' of Google and Microsoft. Ian blogs on econsultancy, contributes regularly to a number of publications and has also authored a book on Google AdWords for a client http://www.wordtracker.com/ebooks/ppc-book/.

Ian will be speaking on this subject at the Affiliates4U Expo in London, on the 12th–13thOctober 2010.

You can also download our Case Study, which describes how 1upDigital use Google’s Content Network to increase conversions.

About 1upDigital

1upDigital is a specialist search agency that enables brands to power their online business through search. Their services provide in-depth knowledge in PPC, analytics implementation, video analytics, creative campaign testing, Google Adwords, Web Optimisation, ongoing conversion optimisation and comprehensive search training.

http://www.1updigital.com/