Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a method of bringing visitors to your website by using an advertisement that you only pay for when someone clicks through to visit your site.
Made popular by Google.com’s AdWords system which allows advertisers to place context sensitive advertisements on the search results of the Google search engine and on other websites that choose to display Google AdWords content in return for income.
Other examples include Facebook Advetising and Yahoo’s owned Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) that also offer sponsored search results on a PPC basis. These two services are the largest PPC systems available however many individual sites also offer similar sponsorship opportunities.
One of the main appeals of PPC is the level of targeting available to advertisers. By placing advertisements that only appear when specific search terms are used or on websites that have a specific type of readership, advertisers can market to a reasonably well matched audience to their business and bring through quality traffic – visitors that are more likely to be interested in what they offer.
Add to this the benefit of only paying for clicks and detailed real-time statistics on advertisement performance, and you have an unparalleled advertising medium.
PPC has consequently become a very popular option to market for both purely online enterprises and traditional bricks-and-mortar (real world) operations wishing to benefit from a better advertising solution.
This has resulted in a decline in the use of older established advertising media such as television and print (magazines/newspapers) that don’t offer the highly trackable and targetable benefits of PPC.
PPC evolved as a better option to CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising that was the original metric used to sell advertising on websites.
CPM charges advertisers for displaying their advert regardless of whether it is clicked or not. While beneficial for branding purposes the often low click-through rates suffered by CPM campaigns in the early days (often due to poor targeting and visitors mentally “screening out” banners) made the enhancements provided by PPC a much more effective option in most cases.
With Google commanding the lion share of the search industry the AdWords system quickly became the most popular method to advertise online and now represents 95% of the income earned by the search giant.
AdWords For Content
From the user point of view PPC advertising is not easy to comes to grips with initially but will reward those marketers that spend the time learning to use the system and optimize their campaigns. Google’s system has been widely touted as ingenious, offering highly customisable campaigns manipulated via a reasonably simple interface. Results can be attained within hours of placing an advertisement and offer businesses of any size an affordable and effective means to promote online.
If you are interested in PPC advertising start by familiarising yourself with the Google AdWords step-by-step guide.
Yaro
That’s it Simon – from now you must read all my articles before they go live!
Very nice, simple explanation of PPC advertising, thanks Yaro!
“Google’s system has been widely taunted as ingenious”
Spot the error. Feel free to delete this comment when you correct the error as well.
🙂
S.
I’m curious how Yahoo Ads are going (the equivalent of google adsense but for the yahoo network).
Thanks for this Yaro. Google Adwords is one of the best things that ever happened to online marketing. In the right hands it is fantastic. And Perry’s course is some of the best info around on it.
Google Adwords is also light years ahead of Yahoo Search because of the superb interface and the level of control. In our marketing tests we’ve found that the ROI from Adwords **ALWAYS** beats Yahoo Search.
Will
Re: Yahoo Ads. I don’t know how much Yahoo is making out of them, but in the tests I’ve done their performance has always been abysmal.
Another great post, Yaro. Lots of people still timid to enter the PPC search engine marketing arena and rightly so, if it’s Google that they want to master.
Perry Marshall’s guide is really the ‘definitive’, to date.
But I would add that newbies would be smart trying some 2nd tier PPC search engines to get their feet wet. Even non-newbies can boost their ROI by doing this. Truly, Google is NOT the only PPC search engine game in town that’s giving advertisers a GREAT outcome for their advertising dollar.
A good read that I could send to my clients who are unfamiliar with PPC.
I have used adbrite and have had very little success on pay per click.Ive pulled away from them and am gravitating toward google.
Most of AW’s stuff is right on the money, but I too haven’t had much success with PPC.
I have tried PPC advertising. It is extremely targeted and it works. It can also get very expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.
fine note
Thanks
Misbah Mumtaz
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