One of the most effective methods of marketing your business online is using one of the many pay per click advertising programs such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Advertising, or Microsoft AdCenter. With these programs, your advert is displayed on the search engine results page for a query that you specify, and then users have the choice of clicking through to your website for more information or to make a purchase.

An example of this might be a florist who agrees to pay $1 each time someone who searches for flowers using Google clicks on their advert. Each time a user makes the click, the advertiser pays up, meaning that they only get traffic to their website that is interested in the product.

Of course, there are several drawbacks to this method of advertising. For example, there are cases where people who have no intention of buying a service click on the advert, which then costs money for no benefit. Another problem comes from the website itself. If it is poorly designed, or does not work hard enough to convert the prospect into a sale, then the money spent on advertising is wasted. A third drawback comes if the customer is not quite ready to buy, in which case the advertiser may have to pay several times for the same user as they return.

Perhaps the best alternative to Pay-Per-Click advertising is Click-To-Call. Using this particular model, every time a user clicks on an advert, they are connected to the advertiser over the phone. This can be achieved using a VOIP service like SkyPe, and is also available on mobile phone networks, in which case the phone is diverted from the web onto a voice call when an advert is selected.

The advantages of click to call are enormous. You are able to answer the questions of the buyer and convert them into a sale more effectively than a website, can avoid the problems of click fraud that are opened up by the pay per click model, because every call connects, and because you are able to take over the client’s attention completely, you are less likely to lose them to a competitor than if they are allowed to surf the web. All of this makes your conversion rate potentially much higher with Click-To-Call rather than Pay-Per-Click.

The newest click-to-call provider, Radiux () offers unlimited inbound calls for one flat fee and might be the best solution for budget conscious business owners.

Conclusion: for most businesses click-to-call IS the better solution over pay-per-click, although you might want to keep your pay-per-click campaign for a while in addition to your new pay-per-call solution.