Paid Search Advertising

The popularity of internet made it an essential tool for people to communicate and search for information. Within only four year from 2000 to 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has increase by 444.8% (Internet World Stats, 2010). In addition, searching information is always among the top reasons for people to using internet. To take advantage of this trend, many companies in information technology industries have introduce their search engine. Among these companies, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are the top three players. In order to monetize the search engines, paid search has been a good choice for these companies.

One of the benefits that paid search offers to its customers is providing a shortest way to reach their customers all over the world. Traditional advertising media such as TV or newspapers have limited coverage. Hence, if company need to advertise in many countries, it has to sign contract with many companies in many countries. On contrary, when a paid search advertisement is activated, it can display to target customers everywhere in the world.

Another benefit that paid search offers to its customers is making advertising more selective. For the internet users, because only the advertisements that match the key words are appears they can see only advertisement that more ore less related to what they are looking for. For the companies, by matching the key words this way, their advertisements will show to selected internet users.

Among the benefits that paid search can offer, enabling companies to pay for result is the strongest appeal. Paid search charges companies upon the real traffic to their websites, not the time they appear on the search result. This means companies pay only when their advertisements are seen or read. Meanwhile, other advertising media cannot offer this benefit.

For TV advertising, companies have to pay for the airtime in which their advertisements are broadcast. In this case, the charges are fixed on the length of the advertisement no matter how many people can see the advertisements. For advertising on publications such as newspapers and magazines, the charges are fixed on the size, position of their advertisements and the number of copies no matter how many people read these advertisements. Similarly, advertising by placing banners on web pages (banner placing) charge companies upon the position and the size of the banner no matter how many visitors give them a glance. As such, enabling companies pay for the results is evidently the most competitive advantage of paid search.

The introduction of paid search can be considered a great evolution in the era of internet marketing. Amongst the advantages that paid search has over other advertising media, enabling companies to pay for the results proves to be the most compelling feature that helped the growth of paid search. It is very likely that paid search will continues its expansion to dominate advertising marker in near future.

Reference:

Internet World Stats (2010). World Internet Users and Population Stats. Internet Usage Statistics. Retrieved from http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Learn about AdWords (n.d.). Google AdWords. Retrieved from https://www.google.com