Pay per view

Traditional advertising is pay per view: you pay for a newspaper or TV ad based on the promise that a certain number of people will see it. They might also ignore it completely so you get nothing for your money.

Pay per click

Pay per click (PPC) mostly means that someone goes to Google, searches for something, sees you in the results list – and clicks to your website.

With pay per click advertising you pay only if someone clicks to your website. So you can be sure of getting something for your money: a visit to your website by someone with at least a passing interest in your product.

A guarantee that you will get something for your money (and the option to start with a really low budget) have helped PPC go mainstream.

PPC is not however a success for everyone. The price you pay per click is set by an auction-style process. The more people want to get clicks from a particular search term, the higher the per click price will be.

Just a little competition can very quickly drive click prices sky high.

And conversion rated from click to purchase can be very low, so the "something" you get does not contribute much to your bottom line.

For some organisations PPC can be (and is) a great success. Much of this depends on effective choice of key words, but the real decider of financial result is what happens to a prospect when they click to your site.

Do they find what they want? Do they continue into the site – and go on to purchase?

This is the are we call Website Engagement Optimisation (SEO is part of it, but WEO goes much further).

PPC versus organic search results and intrinsic worth

When people use a search engine such as Google most of the results they see are not paid for (though the PPC results are listed at the top).

Getting to the top of a search without paying per click is primarily a reflection of the real value of the website to the person making the search.

If Google judge that your website is a good website to meet the needs of the search, they will put it near the top of the search results. Google call this an organic search result.

Organic search results reflect the intrinsic value of the site to the person making the search. A site with high intrinsic value will over time move to the top of the organic search results (just below the PPC results).

"Over time" can be sped up by SEO and WEO.

In fact, good SEO can get you a ranking a little higher than your site's intrinsic worth actually deserves, but achieving and maintaining this advantage will be costly. Our advice is always to invest first in intrinsic worth: give searchers what they want, before you resort to trickery.

Often the best marketing answer is a mix of PPC and SEO/WEO. Over time the PPC investment can often be scaled back as strong organics results take over.

Call Glide for a detailed analysis of what can work best for you.

Download our brochure on SEO and WEO