An Empirical Study and Evaluation on the Cost-Effectiveness of Pay-Per-Click e-Marketing

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) e-marketing has recently attracted growing attention. It is particularly critical for the success of Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) because they usually do not have extensive national, regional or global marketing networks. Given the cost, however, the question is: how advertisers are rewarded for paid online advertising and to what extent. In this paper we presents an empirical study aiming to evaluate whether or not active participation in PPC advertising programs would improve the indexing and ranking of a website in the organic search results of the major search engines. In order to do this we propose a systematic methodology for experiment design, data collection and performance analysis. We build comparable benchmarking websites and submit them to different search engines using both paid and unpaid methods. We monitor and collect the crawling activity of the search engine robots and the ranking placement of each of the sites in the search results of the respective search engines. The captured data are then compared and analysed from which findings are drawn and discussed. Finally we outline conclusions and point out future work.