Paid Search Networks

The utmost aim of any search engine marketing campaign is to get your businesses' website to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Although other types of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) offer great, long-term solutions to maintaining a presence in a search engine, these 'organic' results will decrease rapidly. Being present within the top five results of any keyword search will be the difference between your website receiving a click-through, or not.

Here are the benefits offered by a paid search network, used as a part of a search engine marketing strategy:

• PPC offers the quickest way to get your business to the top – what's more is that a campaign can be set up within an hour and still appear immediately in the sponsored results, at the top of each and every search.
• Tracking the performance of your website will be a lot easier using a paid search network – meaning that you will never have to gamble with taking out adverts that you've paid for in advance through other types of media, without any way to measure how successful they've been. Thanks to using a paid search network, every single ad, keyword and penny that has been spent can be sufficiently tracked, giving you a more accurate ROI (Return on Investment).

With each search engine having their own packages and platforms to enhance a SEM (such as the ability to schedule ads and target them to specific locations, times and on specific websites) means that implementing paid search networks should be an essential part of a SEM for any forward-thinking, modern business.

1. Yahoo! Search Marketing. In 2003, popular 'pay-for-placement' search service GoTo.com was bought by search engine giant Yahoo! and renamed as Yahoo! Search Marketing. With well over 2 billion search queries occurring on the website each month, the addition of a search marketing program gave businesses a great opportunity to advertise to a vast marketplace. Yahoo! Search Marketing provides many of the same features included with Google AdWords, namely geo-targeting, ad testing, campaign budgeting and campaign scheduling.
2. Microsoft Ad Center. Despite being the latest of the three, Microsoft Ad Center has a vast potential audience of around 99 million search users. Launched in May 2006, the program aims to make a search advertising campaign easy to manage,thanks to its simple-to-use in-depth campaign analysis, intelligent targeting based on location, gender or day and access to the very latest in keyword research.
3. Google AdWords. Launched in 2000, Google's advertising platform is the largest and most successful PPC system in terms of market reach and ROI. The contextual advertising that comprises Google AdWords means that businesses only pay for how many clicks their ad receives, or how many times it appears on a page. The various features of the program includes placement targeting, geo-targeting (for specific locations), multiple ad formats and much more.Businesses can also measure the effectiveness of their campaigns through tools such as conversion tracking and Google's own Analytics program, with every aspect of the ad campaign being fully customisable. AdWords was developed to assist eCommerce businesses in marketing their products and services on Google's search engine, as well as its affiliate sites, thanks to the use of a placed text ad that appears whenever someone searches for a keyword, related to the business' services. The ad takes the format of a 'short text ad' that includes a title line, two short descriptive lines and an URL link to a website, or a specific page on the website.