Pay per click is a process where directories will charge you a (usually small) amount each time someone clicks through from their site to yours.

Beware, though, pay-per-click can be the latest Internet rip-off.

Yell.com

Yell.com will cold call you with all sorts of promises of huge amounts of traffic that will be directed to your site for advertising with them by way of a banner.

The truth is that Yell.com will charge you £20+VAT or more per click (this is what they will tell you if you know the right questions to ask). Yell.com will serve banners on pages that have nothing to do with your business. There is no proof that Yell.com have displayed your banner at all. You have no control over how Yell.com displays your banner making targetted advertising impossible.

Yell.com is really only suitable for huge businesses with almost unlimited advertising budgets that never track their return on advertising spend.

Google & Yahoo!

Google and Yahoo! pay-per-click are much better options if you have decided that you are prepared to pay to get someone to have a look at your site. They will charge you pennies for each click-through, the advertising can be as targetted as you like and you can set a budget in advance.

Both Google and Yahoo! display your advertisement only to people who are looking for what you are offering. You will have some idea how much each click-through will cost and you can decide if you want to go ahead. Both have extensive online tools to report on how your ad campaign is performing and allow you to put a cap on the amount you are willing to spend each month.

Google's editorial guidelines are, however, very opaque. They will reject a campaign but not tell you why. Getting a Google pay-per-click campaign on line can take several weeks. Yahoo! have, in our experience, been much easier and quicker.

Both Google and Yahoo! offer a service that will not force you spend money when you are not getting the results. You are free to change your campaign, pause it or stop it whenever you want.

Conclusion

We would always advise that you do not even consider using Yell.com as the results are marginal and the costs are astronomical.

Even Google and Yahoo! pay-per-click are really only useful to get a lot of traffic to your brand new site before it has become established on the web. We would only advise running a modest pay-per-click campaign during the first month or so that a site is live or if you are running a particular sales drive.

If you would still like to try pay-per-click advertising, we can help you get started with a targetted campaign to drive traffic to your site using Google or Yahoo! Please contact us from the left menu.