Pay Per Placement –
What Is It?

Website Promotion

Website promotion consists of all the things you can do to increase the number of potential clients who know about and visit your web site. Some of those search engine promotion activities include:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Pay Per Placement
Placing your web site on business cards, brochures and other printed materials
Placing your web site in ads and press releases
Placing your web site address on vehicles
Featured your web site in emails
And so on . . .

Much of the rest of RankMagic.com focuses on SEO (search engine optimization). But Pay Per Placement is another website promotion tactic that can help your website to appear prominently in the search engines and you should understand what it is and when it's appropriate.

Search Engine Marketing through
Pay Per Placement

Pay per placement of often called "pay per click" or PPC advertising because the most common form involves paying a certain fixed amount for every time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your web site as a result. Another version is available on a "pay per view" basis, where you pay a certain amount every time your ad is displayed to someone, whether they click through to your site or not. Both SEO and Pay Per Placement can play effective parts in your search engine marketing strategy. Pay per Placement listings are often called "sponsored search engine results", and are contrasted with "organic search engine results" which are the non-sponsored listings.

Often (but not always) SEO has a larger initial (up-front) cost because all of the effort to optimize your website happens before the results are actualized.
On the other hand, results from this form of search engine marketing persist for a long time, potentially years, after that work has been completed.
Pay Per Placement ads generate traffic to your web site for only as long as you continue to pay for them. Stop paying for the clicks or views and your new visitors dry up.
Pay Per Placement can give you a "quick fix". And that may be just what your search engine marketing campaign needs. You may be able to start generating visitors in as little as 48 hours with pay per click services like Overture, Google, Ah-Ha and FindWhat, while results from SEO generally take a couple of months or more to materialize.

A valuable perspective on SEO (which optimizes your web site for the "crawler results" or normal search results) versus pay per placement as a website promotion strategy comes from Market Position Monthly:

While consumers find paid results acceptable for finding certain kinds of information, it fails to provide the best and most comprehensive results for many queries. Consumers continue to perceive sponsored results as commercial advertisements, clicking on the main search results a greater percentage of the time. This happens even though the sponsored results appear first. It's not only the perception that these results are basically commercial advertisements, but also the fact that they are not as targeted as crawler-based results. Crawler-based results try to serve up the best matches to a query regardless of how much money the vendor may be willing to spend.

This has received support from a research study published in December, 2003 by WebAdvantage. Their Business Users Search Engine Survey concluded:

85% of the audience thinks they click on sponsored links less than 40% of all their searches.
In most cases members of the business community rely on organic search results, not using paid search listings.
Paid listings do not always yield the most relevant results - 78% of all respondents feel that they find the information that they are looking for less than 40% of the time through sponsored links.

With that in mind, Rank Magic often recommends that our clients only consider a Pay Per Placement search engine marketing approach on an interim basis while their SEO campaign is being completed. Once you're receiving high numbers of new visitors to your site at effectively no incremental cost through the normal search engine results, you may want to scale back or discontinue your pay per placement program. (Caveat: individual circumstances vary and we don't make a blanket recommendation for all companies and all web sites. Your individual needs must be considered.)

If you're considering using a Pay Per Placement service, Rank Magic is the place to start.