How does Product pay-per-click (PPC) programs work
You can think of product pay-per-click programs as online comparison shopping engines or price comparison engines. A product PPC program focuses specifically on products, so you bid on place- ment for your product advertisements.
The requirements for using a product PPC program are a little different from keyword PPC programs, however. With a product PPC, you must provide a feed-think of it as a regularly updated pricelist for your products-to the search engine. Then, when users search for a product your links are given prominence, depending on the amount you have bid for placement. However, users can freely display those product listings returned by the search engine in the order or price from lowest to highest if that is their preference. This means that your product may get good placement initially, but if it’s not the lowest-priced product in that category, it’s not guaranteed that your placement results will stay in front of potential visitors.
Some of these product PPC programs include Shopping.com, NexTag, Pricegrabber, and Shopzilla.
NOTE
Although product PPC programs are popular for controlling the placement of your product listings, there are some services, like Google Base, that allow you to list your products in their search engine for free. These product PPC programs still require a product feed, however, to keep product listings current.
Implementing a product feed for your products isn’t terribly difficult, although, depending on the number of products you have, it can be time-consuming. Most of the different product PPC pro- grams have different requirements for the product attributes that must be included in the product feed. For example, the basic information included for all products are an item title, the direct link for the item, and a brief description of the item.
Some of the additional attributes that you may need to include in your product PPC listings include:
■ title
■ description
■ image_link
■ product_type
■ upc
■ price
■ mpn
(Manufacturer’s Part Number)
■ isbn
■ id
Some product PPC programs will require XML-formatted feeds;
however, most will allow text delimited Excel files (simple CSV files). This
means you can create your product lists in an Excel spreadsheet, and then save
that spreadsheet as text delimited by selecting File Save As and ensuring the
file type selected is text delimited.
Service
pay-per-click programs
When users search for a service of any type, such as travel
reservations, they are likely to use search engines related specifically to
that type of service. For example, a user searching for the best price for
hotel reservations in Orlando, Florida, might go to TripAdvisor.com.
Advertisers, in this case hotel chains, can choose to pay for their rank in the
search results using a service PPC program.
Service PPC programs are similar to product PPC programs
with the only difference being the type of product or service that is offered.
Product PPC programs are more focused on e-commerce prod- ucts, whereas service
PPC programs are focused on businesses that have a specific service to offer.
Service PPC programs also require an RSS feed, and even some
of the same attribute listings as prod- uct PPC programs. Some of the service
PPC programs you might be familiar with are SideStep.com and TripAdvisor.com.
In addition, however, many product PPC programs have expanded to include
services. One such vendor is NexTag.
TIP
In addition to the three categories of PPC programs
discussed in this text, there is an additional one. Pay-per-call is a type of
keyword advertising in which search results include a phone number. Each time a
call is connected through that phone number, the company that owns the number
is charged for the advertising, just as if it were paying for a traditional
pay- per-click service.