Pay Per Click Vs. Desktop Ad Impressions
The bell rings and pay per click steps into the ring, his opponent? Desktop Ad Impressions. The old champ finally has an opponent worthy of a dual for the belt. Pay Per Click advertising has been the choice of many start-ups and mega corps for years, its targeted traffic giving business owners valuable qualified traffic right to their doorsteps. Affiliate marketers have used it to promote their products and services, Non-Profits have used them as a source of obtaining new contributors and pretty much every E-Commerce website around uses Pay Per Click to bring in customers searching for their products. There aren’t many competitors that can compete with the targeted traffic that Pay Per Click advertising can bring in. However, there is a contender who is worthy of the belt and may slowly start to win over more advertisers for a few reasons that will probably be fairly evident.
To understand Desktop Ad Impressions you need only look at your toolbar. Most toolbars have a search field incorporated into it where you can type in a search query. With Desktop Ad Impressions your website literally pops up in front of the searcher when they search a keyword that you have optimized on. You are only charged for that visitor when they click on your website and stay for more than 30 seconds. Unlike PPC where your ad and 5 to 10 of your competitor’s ads are displayed with text links, your website is the only site that pops up. This alone eliminates the chances of click fraud which has plagued PPC advertisers since its advent. There are over 80 million computers that have the software needed to display these ads and they are all Opt-In which means that all 80 million users have elected to use Desktop Ad Impressions.
Desktop Ad Impressions run in prices from .12 cents per visitor for smaller budgets to just .5 cents per visitor for bulk buys. A typical PPC Campaign is going to run anywhere from $1.50 if you’re lucky to over $6 per visitor if your selling a popular product or service. As you can see Desktop Ad Impressions offer a considerable price advantage over PPC.
So what’s the downside? Well Desktop Ad Impressions can be cost prohibitive to smaller budgets. Typically an average minimum buy in can cost upwards of $1200 for 10,000 visitors. Of course the same amount of visitors on PPC would cost you a minimum of $10,500 so the Cost/Savings benefit is on the side of Desktop Ad Impressions. Pay Per Click however offers companies with as little as $5 the ability to drive at least a little traffic to their site. Another downside of Desktop Ad Impressions is the ramp up time it takes to start a campaign. (Minimum of one week to two weeks) You also have to generate a massive amount of related keywords you want to optimize on so your ads play out quicker.
In the final estimation, it is my recommendation that Desktop Ad Impressions are by far the superior choice if you have the budget to support the start up costs and ramp up time it takes to use this advertising tool. In the long run your cost per sale will be much lower and the amount of qualified traffic your site will receive will have the power to transform your company into a money making machine, after all getting the traffic to your site is half the battle.
Chris Kines