Choosing Your PPC Engine

Affiliate network? Check. Niche? Check. Approach or approaches? Check. With all of that out of the way, now you can select your PPC engine – the search engine you want to use to place your ads. There are a number of them out there that you can use. Some of the biggest ones are the most obvious, such as with Google AdWords, but there are also smaller, up-and-coming engines that are worth taking a look at.

The number one Pay Per Click search engine is Google AdWords. It’s indexed over a billion webpages and it is available in over 100 different languages. As far as scope goes, you won’t find bigger than you will with Google. For this reason, if you are brand new to PPC or you can only afford to use one engine right now, even though AdWords is usually the most expensive, this is likely your best bet for giving yourself the most potential for return on your investment. AdWords offers you benefits and tools that will allow you to really buckle down and get your campaigns running like you want, from the ability to edit your ads to the ability to classify them into keyword clusters to the ability to target your ads to specific geographical locations. There is a $5 USD start up fee, but no minimum spending requirement, and they don’t put time limits on you. It’s also quite fast, because after you pay that one-off fee, your first campaign can be up and running within minutes.

Though AdWords does not disclose the specific algorithm it uses (like all Google algorithms) to determine the placement of your ads, it is usually very fair and balanced. It is, like all PPC engines, ranked on the bid price you are willing to pay for your keywords, but it also takes into account the relevance of your ad and it will give precedence to ads with higher click-through rates. That means that with a well-written ad that gets a lot of clicks, you can end up appearing higher up than an ad that is paying more than you are bid-wise but isn’t getting as many clicks. What a deal, no?

The second most popular PPC engine is Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Yahoo! Search Marketing’s main product is something they call Sponsored Search, which reaches over 80% of active Internet users. Sponsored Search provides sponsored listings in many of the Web’s top portals, and these include not only Yahoo! itself but MSN, Excite, Altavista, CNN and many others. Another very interesting feature Yahoo! Search Marketing offers is Content Match.

Your ads have the potential to appear not only on search engine results pages, but within articles, emails, and newsletters, depending on whether or not the content matches. This means that, say, if your ad deals with books like we talked about before, it could appear along with an article on CNN.com about publishing. Yahoo! Search Marketing offers two plans, the SelfServe plan and the FastTrack plan. SelfServe is free, but you do not get all of the support and extra benefits that the FastTrack plan offers, like a detailed review of your website that will produce keyword and search term suggestions from their experts. If you have about $200 USD to burn and you are a beginner, the FastTrack plan will provide you with invaluable, individualized help and training in making your PPC campaigns work, but you can still construct excellent campaigns on your own using the SelfServe plan if your budget doesn’t permit the paid plan.

Those are the big guns when it comes to PPC engines, but there are others that you should also take a look at if and when your budget permits, like MIVA and MSN AdCenter. They are smaller, but the MSN AdCenter engine in particular is growing quickly and is getting good buzz for its good returns, and MIVA has always enjoyed good reviews from its users.

When you are comparing the pros and cons of each engine in order to choose the right one for you, be sure to take into account the minimum cost per click that each engine requires you to pay (also called the bid). For Google AdWords, it is a mere penny, but you will usually end up paying more than that. For Yahoo! Search Marketing, it is $0.10. That may not sound like a lot at the get-go, but remember that you will be paying each time someone clicks on your ad, whether or not it converts into a sale. If you are working on a limited budget, you want to go with the PPC engine that is going to offer you the most bang for your buck, as it were.