Which side of the line you sit on â the side of success or the side of failure â and how close to the line you sit, depends on a number of factors. Some of those factors are under your control, and some are not, but the intention of this book is to give you a good understanding of those factors and the best chance of landing on the money-making side of the line.
Letâs begin at the beginning. In this chapter, you find out what PPC is all about and why some people swear by it, while others swear at it!
The Days before PPC
Not so long ago, Internet advertising came in a couple of basic flavors. The first was very similar to print advertising. You paid someone to put some kind of advertisement on a Web site â typically whatâs known as a banner ad (you can see an example in Figure 1-1). The ad sat on the site for the specified period â a week, a month, a year â and if you were lucky, people clicked the ad and came to your Web site. You were paying for an ad placement.
| Figure 1-1: Old school . . . the âbanner ad.â | |
Soon, a slight refinement to this model appeared. The main problem with the ad-placement model was that you didnât really know what you were getting for your money. Sure, the ad would sit on the site for, say, a year, but what did that mean? Would a million people see it? Or a thousand? In many cases, all you had to go by was a vague promise from the site owner â âwe get a million visitors a year,â for instance. Does that mean the page on which the ad sat would be seen a million times? Probably not. Worse, the promise might have been something like âwe get a million hits a year.â Whatâs a hit? Ah, you think you know, but you probably donât.
The term hit has come to mean just about nothing. People say hit when they mean visit, and sometimes say hit when they mean hit but hope youâll think they mean visit. Want to know what a hit actually is?
A hit is a Web server request. When someone clicks a link leading to a page, the browser requests the page from the Web server; thatâs the first hit. If the page has five images in it, those images have to be sent to the browser, too. Thatâs five more hits. If the visitor clicks a link and requests another page, thatâs another hit, plus the images or other components inside the page. A hit might even be an error message, when a browser requests a page that no longer exists.
So, the next time someone tells you that his site gets, say, 100,000 hits a month, ask him what that means. Is that 100,000 visitors? Almost certainly not, unless he is misusing the term hits and really meant to say visitors. Does it mean 50,000 visitors? 10,000? Who knows?
Anyway, back to the story. If you put an ad on a site and pay for a month or year, what do you get? Thatâs right, no one knows what you get. So a second mechanism was developed â ads were sold by the ad impression. You would pay for the ad to be displayed a particular num...
