The best places to advertise on the web

This is a brief review of some of the most popular and effective Pay-per-click advertising platforms on the internet.

Google AdWords:

Google AdWords is the largest and most widely circulated Pay-per-click advertising platform.
For newbies, the interface of AdWords management panel is a bit confusing. This is the reason why

AdWords provides a basic version of their management interface. You can migrate to the expert version anytime, for free.

Due to the large number of advertisers, there is a lot of competition for popular keywords. That makes AdWords a bit more expensive than other advertising networks. Advertising on AdWords cost per click starts from $0.05 per click and may go up to a hundred dollars for highly competitive keywords.

Google search result pages and content network are the most common places where AdWords ads are displayed.

Content network is composed of websites where ads are displayed through AdSense ads.

There are many made-for-advertisement websites that participate in the AdSense program, this results in very poor quality traffic if you opt to advertise on the content network.

The results of advertising on Google search are much better and lead to good conversion rate.

Regions to avoid:

There are some regions where click fraud is most common. India and China top the list of regions with most click fraud in AdSense.
AdWords advertisers should avoid advertising in these countries at all costs, otherwise it may lead to very poor conversion rate.

AdWords website

Yahoo Search Marketing:

Yahoo is the second largest search engine after Google, so they are comparable to Google in terms of Ad traffic. But there are a limited number of websites (publishers) where your ads will be displayed.

When you advertise on Yahoo Search Marketing, most of the visitors come from search ads, the rest come from websites participating in Yahoo's advertising program for website publishers (Yahoo Publisher's Network).

This results in improved quality visitors and higher sales rate as compared to AdWords.

The cost per click for ads is comparable to AdWords, but the major let down for advertisers is the the $35 sign-up fee which is a lot more expensive as compared to Google AdWords's sign-up fee of $5.

Majority of visitors from Yahoo Search Marketing are from USA, so you must have a product that you are willing to sell or ship to USA based customers.

The future of Yahoo's advertising programs is not clear as they are not accepting any publishers into their Publisher's Network. This may be an indication that they are in the process of winding up their advertising business.

Yahoo Search Marketing website

Microsoft adCenter:

With $5 sign up, MSN Adcenter is comparable to AdWords in terms of pricing. But it is far behind AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing when it comes to traffic.
If you advertise on Adcenter, it is most probable that you will get only a fraction of traffic that you are getting for a particular keyword from Google and Yahoo.
Adcenter displays your ads in a selected few quality websites and MSN search results.
MSN also provides a tool to measure number of searches per month for your keywords. It is surprising that for those keywords that are searched millions of times in a month on Google, in MSN they are searched for just a few hundred times.
For example, if you use Google's Keyword Tool to search the number of searches for "Web Design", it will show its number as 2 million plus. While on MSN keyword search tool, it only shows a few hundred searches for "Web Design" in a whole month. that's a huge difference!

Microsoft Adcenter website

Facebook Advertising:

Facebook Advertising is also a very good low cost advertising network which brings in a good amount of traffic.

Facebook being a social networking website, is a bit different than traditional advertisers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Users on Facebook are categorized by their age, gender, location and interests. So you can advertise to people having interest in a particular field.
facebook advertising can also be used to create a fan base for your business to keep a regular contact with your potential customers. For example, you can create a business page on Facebook and advertise it. People having an interest in your business or products will have an option of becoming a fan of your business page. If they become a fan, you can contact them whenever you have a new product or special offer.

The worst thing anpout Facebook advertising is their payment method. If your credit card fails on their site, it can never be used on their site again as it gets banned permanently.

Facebook Advertising link