Drive qualified traffic to your website by turning to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. Regardless of which network you use, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN adCenter, the basics of PPC are pretty straightforward. Advertisers bid against one another and the "quality" of the landing page is taken into consideration as well.

These ads are placed in an area separate from the natural search results, also referred to as "organic results." When a visitor clicks on a PPC ad, the advertiser pays the fee associated with their bid.

For many, PPC provides a fast way for website owners to drive qualified traffic from the major search engines. Many marketing managers have grown weary of trying to keep up with the constant changes in the search engine algorithms. Using PPC marketing allows for higher profits as they do not need to invest in expensive search engine optimization which often does not produce healthy ROI.

The Underlying Issues of PPC for Profit
On the surface, PPC is the ideal marketing strategy with the ability to decide your target market and setting your budget limitations. This control has made PPC a very advantageous form of marketing.

Diminishing PPC Returns
In tough economic times, online advertising needs to be highly relevant and cost-effective. As PPC search engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing continue to expand their networks to remain ahead of their competition, PPC becomes more about expanding the network market share and less about the advertisers gaining targeted traffic.

If you are selling premium meat products, you probably would not direct your advertising efforts toward vegetarian organizations. Your product is being exposed to a large number of people, but if there is no interest in the product, you are wasting your efforts and money. Using the "negative keyword" option, you can exclude a certain segment from seeing your ads. PPC marketing has grown up and you can even pinpoint a certain ZIP code.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Content Match
This program was designed to be a source for generating targeted leads by displaying Yahoo!'s listings to Internet users searching for and viewing related content on the pages of Yahoo!'s partners.

Pay-Per-Click Fraud
Does anyone really know who’s clicking who? How much are you willing to pay to have your top online competitor look at your site? PPC fraud occurs when an advertiser receives invalid clicks on their paid listings by individuals who have no intention of purchasing.

If one of your competitors were to visit your site just once a day, every day, for the keywords you are bidding on, you could end up paying hundreds of dollars for nothing. What’s worse, with the large number of affiliates most PPC distributors have, they are making it even easier for click fraud to occur. By displaying your PPC ads on “tens of thousands” of sites, PPC distributors have created a network where tracking click-throughs is next to impossible.

If the goal of Pay-Per-Click search engines is to bring lucrative, targeted traffic to your site, what are these PPC search engines doing to prevent abuse that needlessly drive up your costs and reduce your ROI? Unfortunately, as many companies have found, little or nothing. The horror stories of PPC fraud are almost as prevalent on the Web as the stories touting the great advances PPC companies have made in preventing PPC fraud (I’ll let you speculate for yourself which articles the advertisers are writing and which ones PPC distributors are promoting).

Despite the ominous stories of uncontrolled click fraud and abuse, many companies do not consider the possibility of PPC fraud until it happens to them. Unfortunately, as many businesses can attest to, this can be a very costly oversight.

Increased Competition
As more and more online businesses turn to PPC marketing, the actuality of market saturation becomes a distinct and looming probability. With this increased competition, advertisers are being forced to spend more and more money to remain competitive on the PPC engines.

Now instead of competing with 2 or 3 companies and paying .30 or .40 cents for a competitive listing, advertisers are competing with 20 or 30 companies and paying 3.00 or 4.00 for a competitive listing. For many companies, this increased competition, cost and consequential diminishing returns have forced them to look to other advertising opportunities to remain competitive in the online market.

The smart marketers of today use PPC to test markets, test keywords and test landing pages in order to understand user behavior better. Turn to PPC, and our recommendation, Yahoo! Search Marketing, to test your market.