Search Engine Marketing Blog

Pay for Placement

The old saying that goes “you get what you pay for” has been applied to the field of marketing and public relations with the web marketing strategy called “pay for position” or “pay for placement”. In practice, the pay for placement concept is similar to the pay per click concept. Operationally, under a pay per click campaign, the advertiser pays for the number of times a potential customer clicks on a paid advertisement containing significant keywords chosen by the advertiser. The pay for placement strategy uses the same concept of paying for clicks, but the advertiser pays for a high-ranking placement on the sponsored links list that typically appears to the right of or above the search results.

The most successful of the pay for placement search engines was Overture, eventually acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Overture’s original successful strategy was to order search results according to the amount paid by the respective advertiser for placement. Under the Yahoo model, the search results are presented separately with the sponsored links appearing beside the relevant search results.

Pay for placement marketing is different from pay for inclusion tactics. You may choose to pay for including a web page in order to get it indexed sooner, to include web pages deeper in the web site that may not have been index otherwise, or because your content on a web page changes more often that normally indexed by the search engine spiders. These pay for inclusion techniques while helpful for the specific purpose do NOT make any representations about the placement of the ads, which they sell.

Pay for placement ads on the other hand provide a commitment that your specific ads keywords will allow you a specific ranking or placement among the sponsored links which typically appear beside the search results. Almost all search engines in use today feature some type of pay for placement arrangement in addition to the unpaid results.

The advantages of a pay for placement campaign is that you are can set limits for the amount you are willing to pay to be in a particular position amongst your competitors. You are essentially participating in an online auction for advertising space. The more you are willing to pay for a particular keyword or phrase, the higher the position you will hold when search engine results are returned and your ad appears on the page results.

The expertise involved is in choosing your keywords wisely, building your website content around your chosen keywords and making sure the web pages which appear in the paid links are related to the keywords queried. Pay for placement campaigns require fairly consistent monitoring and updating if they are to be successful. If you want a web marketing campaign where you set and forget, probably this is not the strategy for you. Alternatively you could hire an Internet marketing expert to run such a campaign for you.

As with any other marketing strategy, there is no guarantee that a first place search engine placement will result in increased market share, or even in increased traffic to your site, only that your advertisement will be seen more often when your particular search words are typed in by a potential customer.