Pay per click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content sites, such as blogs, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser's keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.
Although many PPC providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model. Cost per click (CPC), varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword.
The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.[1]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Determining Cost Per Click
o 1.1 Flat-Rate PPC
o 1.2 Bid-Based PPC
* 2 History
* 3 See also
o 3.1 Notable PPC-based search engines
o 3.2 Related concepts
* 4 References
* 5 External links
[edit] Determining Cost Per Click
There are two primary models for determining cost per click: flat-rate and bid-based. In both cases the advertiser must consider the potential value of a click from a given source. This value is based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, and what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. As with other forms of advertising targeting is key, and factors that often play into PPC campaigns include the target's interest (often defined by a search term they have entered into a search engine, or the content of a page that they are browsing), intent (e.g. to purchase or not), location (for geo targeting), and the day and time that they are browsing.
[edit] Flat-Rate PPC
In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In many cases the publisher has a rate card that lists the CPC within different areas of their website or network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more valuable visitors having a higher CPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors. However, in many cases advertisers can negotiate lower rates, especially when commiting to a long-term or high-value contract.
The flat-rate model is particularly common to comparison shopping engines, which typically publish rate cards.[2]. However, these rates are sometimes minimums and advertisers can pay more for greater visibility. These sites are usually neatly compartmentalized into product or service categories, which allows for a high degree of targeting by advertisers. In many cases, the entire core content of these sites is paid ads.
[edit] Bid-Based PPC
In the bid-based model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. All bids for the keyword that target the searcher's geo-location, the day and time of the search, etc. are then compared and the winner determined. In situations where there are multiple ad spots, a common occurance on SERPs, there can be multiple winners whose positions on the page are influenced by the amount each has bid. The ad with the highest bid generally shows up first, though additional factors such as ad quality and relevance can sometimes come into play (see Quality Score).
In addition to ad spots on SERPs, the major advertising networks allow for contextual ads to be placed on the properties of 3rd-parties with whom they have partnered. These publishers sign up to host ads on behalf of the network. In return, they receive a portion of the ad revenue that the network generates, which can be anywhere from 50% to over 80% of the gross revenue paid by advertisers. These properties are often referred to as a content network and the ads on them as contextual ads due to the fact that the ad spots are associated with keywords based on the context of the page on which they are found. In general, ads on content networks have a much lower click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR) than ads found on SERPs and consequently are less highly valued. Content network properties can include websites, newsletters, and e-mails.[3]
Advertisers pay for each click they receive, with the actual amount paid based on the amount bid. It is common practice amongst auction hosts to charge a winning bidder just slightly more (e.g. one penny) than the next highest bidder or the actual amount bid, whichever is lower[4]. This avoids situations where bidders are constantly adjusting their bids by very small amounts to see if they can still win the auction while paying just a little bit less per click.
To maximize success and achieve scale, automated bid management systems can be deployed. These systems can be used directly by the advertiser, though they are more commonly used by advertising agencies that offer PPC bid management as a service. These tools generally allow for bid management at scale, with thousands or even millions of PPC bids controlled by a highly automated system. The system generally sets each bid based on the goal that has been set for it, such as maximize profit, maximize traffic at breakeven, and so forth. The system is usually tied into the advertiser's website and fed the results of each click, which then allows it to set bids. The effectiveness of these systems is directly related to the quality and quantity of the performance data that it has to work with - low-traffic ads can lead to a scarcity of data problem that renders many bid management tools useless at worst, or inefficient at best.
[edit] History
In February 1998 Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com, a 25-employee startup company (later Overture, now part of Yahoo!), presented a pay per click search engine proof-of-concept to the TED conference in California.[5] This presentation and the events that followed created the PPC advertising system. Credit for the concept of the PPC model is generally given to Idealab and Goto.com founder, Bill Gross.
Google started search engine advertising in December 1999. It was not until October 2000 before the AdWords system was introduced, allowing advertisers to create text ads for placement on the Google search engine. However, PPC was only introduced in 2002; until then, advertisements were charged at cost-per-thousand impressions. Yahoo! advertisements have always been PPC-based since their introduction in 1998.
For a more in-depth presentation of PPC's history, see Fain and Pedersen (2006).[6]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notable PPC-based search engines
* Ask.com
* Baidu.com
* Business.com
* Google (Google AdWords)
* Looksmart
* MSN/Live Search (Microsoft adCenter)
* Yahoo! (Yahoo! Search Marketing)
[edit] Related concepts
* Ad serving
* Click-through rate
* Compensation methods
* Conversion (marketing)
* Cost per action
* Cost per click
* Cost per impression
* Cost per mille
* Cost per thousand
* Pay for placement
* Pay per call
* Performance-based advertising
* Cost per engagement
[edit] References
1. ^ How do you prevent invalid clicks and impressions? Google AdSense Help Center, Accessed January 9 2008
2. ^ Shopping.com Merchant Enrollment Shopping.com, Accessed June 12 2007
3. ^ Website Traffic Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) Yahoo Inc., Accessed June 12 2007
4. ^ AdWords Discounter Google AdWords Help, Accessed February 23 2009
5. ^ Overture and Google: Internet Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Auctions, London Business School, Accessed June 12 2007
6. ^ [1] Fain, D. C. and Pedersen, J. O. 2006. Sponsored Search: A Brief History. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 32(2), 12-13.
[edit] External links
Welcome AOL Journals Users
Welcome AOL Journals Users!
As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its AOL Journals service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple migration tool to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We'd like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!
We've been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you're a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you're already a Blogger user but you want to see what's new, check out our features page. Over in our user group you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to follow. If you're still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs at Blogs of Note.
Below are some more resources for new Journals users. Welcome again!
* Take a Tour
* Help Resources
* User Group
Blogger.com - more like a big truck, less like a series of tubes
Blogger.com - more like a big truck, less like a series of tubes
Here at Blogger we’re always working to make the site and your blogs faster and more reliable. We want you to think of us as a big truck: able to handle anything you can dump on us.
Tuesday’s election was a good chance to see just how big a truck Blogger actually is, and we’re happy to report that Blogger-hosted blogs, for the most part, held up under the record-setting traffic.
That being said, there were definitely some hiccups (potholes?) along the way. Our favorite political and polling analysis blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, received an order of magnitude more visitors than the next most visited blog. They also received more than 50 times as many comments as the next most commented-on blog. Unfortunately, this traffic caused some publishing delays for Nate and Sean as well as some intermittent slowness on their site.
After we got word of the trouble, we were able to shift some resources around to keep things running fairly smoothly for the rest of the night. Now that traffic has calmed down, our engineers are hard at work tuning and improving Blogger based on the experience.
We’d like to thank bloggers, commenters, and readers for participating in one of the biggest blogging events ever. Your voices validate what we do, and every day we look forward to making Blogger faster and better for you.
Reactions: easily engage your readers
Reactions: easily engage your readers
One of our goals at Blogger is to make it easy for authors to get feedback on their content; we believe that authors are driven in part by the reactions and criticisms offered by their readers, and that these interactions enhance the quality of blog content. In support of this effort, we're launching Reactions, simple annotations chosen by authors and given by readers.
With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts.
Photo by Kevin Steele
To enable Reactions, log in to your dashboard, go to Layout > Page Elements and click the Edit link in the Blog Posts element to open the blog post configuration tool. Then, check the box next to Reactions, edit your reactions as a comma-separated list, and click Save.
Reactions works with Layouts templates, though if your template is heavily customized, you may have to reset your widget templates for Reactions to appear. If you have a Classic template you will need to switch to Layouts to use Reactions.
Of course, Reactions isn't the only way to gather great feedback from readers; we also recently launched the Embedded Comment Form. With both Reactions and better commenting, we aim to make it easier for you to get the response and adoration you deserve.
Try Reactions now! We hope your reaction is <3
iLike: Add a soundtrack to your blog
iLike: Add a soundtrack to your blog
Sometimes we stumble across gadgets that are just too cool to keep to ourselves. And such is the case with the slick iLike gadget, which should be a real treat for all of you Blogger audiophiles out there.
iLike brings music to your blog by letting you embed and share playlists that you make yourself. Using their simple interface, you can organize and arrange your tunes, then seamlessly integrate them into your blog's sidebar.
To get started, head on over to the playlist editor and build up your list of tunes from the iLike database. When you are finished, simply click the orange 'Done!' button at the bottom of the page, and you will be taken to a preview of what your playlist will look like on Blogger.
If everything looks good, click the orange 'Add to Blogger' button to go to Blogger's Import Page Element Page (if not already signed in you will be prompted to do so.) Then choose the blog which you want to have the playlist, and click 'Add Widget.'
The iLike gadget will now show up in your blog's page elements editor for you to arrange as you wish. Pretty cool, eh?
Keep in mind though that playlist editor feature of iLike is still technically in beta, so the usual caveats apply. However, if you are feeling extra entrepreneurial you could help out the iLike dev team by answering their quick survey.
Your blog, your data
Your blog, your data
Today’s release features a brand new graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground: Import and Export for Blogger blogs.
The import/export feature opens up a whole new range of portability for your blogs, as well as allows for a few new options in the blog creation process. To get you started, we've rounded up a handful of ideas that can be done with importing and exporting:
* Merge two or more blogs into one. Have a few scattered blogs and want to get a fresh start? Now you can combine comments and posts from multiple blogs into a brand new blog.
* Move individual posts from blog to blog. Cross-publish your posts on multiple blogs, or transfer large batches of posts from one blog to another with a single click.
* Back up your blog to your own storage. It's never a bad idea to create backup copies of your own content, and now you can easily export an archival copy of your blog to your hard drive with a simple tool.
* Move your blog somewhere else. Our standard Atom XML export format will open up new blogging channels between providers, and let you take your content with you should you decide to move somewhere else. And of course, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.
You can access Import and Export from the Blog Tools section on the Settings | Basic tab.
We have also added new importing options to the blog creation process:
For some more detailed info on all of the things you can do with Import and Export, please check out our accompanying help article.
A couple caveats
* Currently we only support importing Blogger blogs. We don't yet support importing from WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or any other blogging platforms.
* Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
* If you have enabled a content warning for your blog, then you will have to remove it before your blog can be exported.