Medical sales recruitment and PPC advertising

Nowadays almost every business has to have a web-site to set out its good and services, its adverts, its terms and conditions, etc. etc. Web sites can be relatively cheap to create and manage. But the big problem lies in drawing them to the attention of potential customers. And Medical sales recruitment agencies are no exception.

The Internet search engines, particularly google, have a major role to play in channelling potential customers onto web-sites. For example, if the words "medical sales" are typed into the google search box, then google will return a list of relevant web-site addresses). One further click on one of these addresses then takes the searcher to a medical sales web-site.

In principle the google results list is presented in rank order, with the most relevant first. The intention being that the web-sites that best match the search criteria should occupy the positions at the top of the list. This is very "fair" and is very much what one would expect.

However, those top positions in the list can be very valuable
commercially. For example, a medical sales recruitment agency with its web site at the top of the list might get ten times as many "visitors" (that's potential customers) as another medical sales recruitment agency a bit further down the list.

For this reason the top positions are highly sought after. Many companies spend a great deal of money trying to make their web-sites "the biggest and the best" and trying to design them in ways that will attract high google assessments. But if all that fails, then there is another way for our medical sales recruitment agency to attract customers. Looking more closely at the google results page one finds that it presents more than one list.

The list on the LHS of the screen is the actual search results list, the so-called "organic listing" of sites that best match the search words. But then there is a second list on the RHS of the screen. This second list is in fact a list of paid advertisements, and in addition there may also be a short list of up to three paid adverts at the top of the screen. These paid adverts tend to be referred to as "sponsored listings", and they are usually separated from the organic listing by coloured bars or backgrounds.

The payment for these sponsored listings adverts is not a fixed charge like the payment for newspaper adverts. Google levies a charge each time someone clicks on the address in the advert and thus goes to the advertiser's web-site. Its called Pay-Per-Click (PPC). In other words the advertiser (in our case the medical sales recruitment agency) is paying directly for the numbers of potential customers they get.
But that's just the beginning of this whole new advertising system.

Since the numbers of "clicks" depend very much on the position in the sponsored listing, the top positions are most sought after. As a result google is able to market these to the highest bidder.
At first sight this might seem to carry a financial risk for our Medical sales recruitment agency. Once the advert is on the web a potentially unlimited number of people might click on it and bring financial ruin to the agency that then has to pay a fee for each click. But, fortunately, any such PPC advertiser is able to set a maximum budget, and there are measures available to minimise the risk of malicious people abusing the system.