| By :
Bobby Buys
Many companies use the cost-per-click (CPC) model of online advertising (sometimes also called pay-per-click or PPC). The advantages are clear. You get sophisticated tools to measure the effects of your advertising campaigns and unprecedented flexibility. There are no contracts hanging above your head. You set up the campaigns, decide how much you want to spend on them, change their content, and run them for as long as you want to. You can pause them or even delete them whenever you want to. In short, you as an advertiser are in control, free to do what your fancy decrees. Or are you? Like any other activity, the CPC advertising campaigns have their own logic and rules, usually called "best practices", and advertisers break them at own peril. If adhered to, those best practices will noticeably limit an advertiser's freedom. The ground rule in the best practices book of the CPC network operators is: if you are not in, you lose out; if you opt out after having been in, you lose even more. Advertising though the network becomes your life-line to the all-important internet audience, or at least that is what the providers tell you. The majority of online advertisers believe them, even though most of them probably get more internet traffic through the organic search, without having to pay anything. Somebody searches for any of the keywords your site is famous for, clicks on our link in the search engine results page (SERP) - and voila, you have a new visitor and a potential new customer, at no charge whatsoever. Apart from the fee in time and effort it took to make your site attractive to both visitors and search engines. So, why not concentrate on making your site ever better, without spending money on cost-per-click ads? Because: If they do not buy that spot in the "sponsored links" section (to be found in the right hand column or in the first row of the main body of the SERP), their competition will, and that is something most companies would rather not have. Since advertise we must, it is much cheaper to go the CPC way than to advertise directly on some high-traffic sites. Without naming any names, suffice it to say that you can select to have your CPC text or image ads appear on a site that is part of the provider's network - and pay considerably less than when buying advertising space directly from the very same site. And finally, even though the majority of internet users do not even "see" the sponsored ads in the right hand side of a SERP, those who do usually perceive links that appear both in the organic search and in the advertisers' section as more credible.
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