Is There A Future In PPC Or Search Engine Advertising?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, March 29, 2008

The most popular form of advertising over the last decade has been Pay-Per-Click or PPC and has generally been dominated by Google through its Adsense program. Yahoo is a more recent player in the search engine advertising market place and while there are many other players trying to attract advertisers, Google still dominates.

Google’s click rate and subsequent revenue from PPC has fallen in recent months again raising the question as to whether or not search engine advertising is a viable form of advertising. This comes in the wake of the introduction of both audio and video as advertising vehicles together with a general downturn in consumer spending.

The jury is still out on these as viable long term replacements for the current forms of advertising. The reality is, most advertisers do not have budgets that would allow them to include either audio or video in their marketing plans. Audio and video will also have several obstacles to overcome before be able to really make an impact.

Pay per click does have its own obstacles that need addressing if it is to continue to dominate. These include click fraud and the low conversion rates with often high per click costs. PPC will always per popular as a traffic generation campaign where advertisers can find low keyword click costs.

Pay per action has been discussed as both an alternative to and as an addition to search engine advertising. Affiliate marketing has been around for many years as a form of pay per action, however the action has always been related to a sale. Pay per action now includes any activity designated by the advertiser including successful telephone calls, newsletter subscriptions and of course sales.

The biggest problem for advertisers when it comes to PPC and search engine advertising is that the balance falls heavily in favor of the publisher. Pay per action swings the pendulum the other way and heavily favors the advertiser. In the meantime the middle men are happily collecting their hefty commissions.

Therein lies the future of most forms of online advertising. What are the middle men, and at present that almost always means Google, going to promote tomorrow. Google have been playing around with Adsense quite a lot over the last 6-12 months and have now introduced video ads. If revenues in the PPC area continue to fall then Google will undoubtedly look to other areas to prop up its income from search engine advertising.

Neither publishers or advertisers seem satisfied with PPC althoug it remains as the major force in online advertising. PPC and search engine advertising will maintain this standing until advertising agencies such as Google can deliver reliable results driven advertising that satisfies both the advertiser and the publisher.

                      Category: Search Marketing                      

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