Chapter 7. Pay-For-Placement

Pay-For-Placement ( PFP ) programs allow you to outbid competing advertisers to attain higher keyword positions . It's an ongoing auction where your competitors , not the search engines, set the going keyword rate. This paid placement program is easy and affordable for small businesses to start driving traffic to their web sites almost immediately. But both entrepreneurs and corporate advertisers need to be aware of the challenges to manage their campaigns effectively.

As an example of PFP, I ran a search for "pet supplies " in FindWhat.com (shown in Figure 7.1). You can see the per-click fee each advertiser is willing to pay for its position. FindWhat.com advertisers open an account online for $25 using a credit card, and start bidding on keywords (FindWhat.com's minimum bid is $.05 per click). An advertiser's account is debited when someone clicks the ad listing. Of course, for competitive terms, the fees will be much higher than the minimum required. Keyword tools, as discussed in Part I, "Planning a Successful Strategy," help you find less competitive phrases that are still mere pennies per click.

Figure 7.1. FindWhat.com is a PFP search engine that allows advertisers to outbid each other for specified keyword positions. Bids are based on per-click fees set by competing advertisers.