The Changing Face Of PPC

04/06/2010

By Rob Weatherhead

PPC, or Pay Per Click marketing, is undergoing huge change, without many people realising it. When I use the phrase PPC I am not necessarily referring to paid search, although this forms part of the pie.

When you speak to a person about PPC, they immediately think of Google. Some may also venture to add Bing and Yahoo into the conversation, although many will not even consider them. But there are a number of PPC channels which are growing away from the world of paid search, which are...

...set to change the future of PPC marketing.

Facebook, for example, is now serving more than 50 billion ads a month, the majority of which are paid for on a CPC basis. My own experiences of Facebook advertising show that it can generate a greater ROI than Google Adwords due to the ability to target individual users by demographics, likes and dislikes. With such a reach, and the control of CPC bidding much like paid search, its revenues continue to grow and I would suggest its spend will be on track to overtake Bing in the not too distant future.

LinkedIn has adopted a similar model, allowing the targeting of users by role, location, industry sector and other profile information. Paid search often struggles to work as effectively in B2B markets so this is another channel which is set to grow.

Then there are the other display advertising networks and exchanges such as Google Placement Network, Adconion and Right Media. As targeting options improve, and with payment only when ads are clicked, these networks are going to start eating into the search engines share.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced in recent weeks that they intend to have completed the merger of their services by 2012, 18 months away... continued on page two >

 

 

Advertisement

Advertisement