Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an advertising method that can be used to promote your website. It increases traffic to your websites.

By placing a PPC ad, you are paying the search engines to bring traffic to your website. You, the advertiser, pay a "cost per click" each time a person clicks on your ad. This cost is determined by the amount you bid for each keyword associated with your ad. You place an ad using the keywords you want to reference to your website, and place a bid on those keywords for placement rank. The higher the bid, the higher rank you can obtain in the search engine for placement of your ad. When a person searches for your keyword, your ad will appear in the search results. Each time your ad is clicked on, you are charged the amount that you bid on for the word being searched.

Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing are the two major PPC programs on the Internet today. Microsoft AdCenter is a recent newcomer to PPC programs.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising has revolutionized advertising on the Internet. With search engines, pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost Per Click (CPC).

When you place your PPC ad campaign with one the search engines, be sure the keywords that you use are the same as the primary keywords used in your website. You also want the keywords to be the same as those in the title of your ad. Use very targeted keywords. Do not bid on every word that you think might relate to your site. While this may attract additional traffic to your site, it will not be the targeted traffic that you want. You want your ad to bring traffic to your site that will convert into a sale. By placing your ad using targeted keywords, you will be bringing potential customers to your site and not visitors. Since you are paying each time someone clicks on your ad, you don't want to pay for visitors.


Pay per click advertising is where an advertiser creates an ad for a product or service that will be presented to a search engine user when the user searches on a specific key word or key word phrase. When you use an search engine, you see the ads when you receive the results of the search. You have noticed that the ads are about the same information that you entered into the search. This is based on the keywords for which the ads are targeted.

The advertiser that puts the ad in the search engine agrees that it will pay a certain amount to the search engine each time the ad is clicked by a user. The order of presentation of the ads on the search engine results page depends on the price that the advertiser agrees to pay and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown for a given search.

PPC advertising is a great way to make money as an affiliate. You identify a company that you want to promote, identify the keywords that searchers will use when searching for the company?s products, and set up a landing web page to receive the click from the search engine. On the landing page, you place ad copy to sell the reader on clicking to the company?s site that you are representing. If the user clicks to the company site and takes the desired action (purchasing a product or completing a lead form), you are paid for the completion of the action. This will be a percent of the sale of a product or a flat payment for a sales lead.

It is also advantageous to place more than one ad campaign for your site. The second ad campaign would contain targeted keywords that were different from the ones used in the first ad campaign. This way, you can run a comparison of the two ad campaigns to see which one works the best and which keywords are being searched for most often. If you find that only a few keywords in each ad campaign are being searched for, you can always take those keywords that are targeted the most and put all those words in one ad campaign. This will save you time in the long run as you will then only have to keep tabs on one ad campaign for your website.

When an search engine presents your ad to a user, it is called an "impression". When a user clicks on the ad, it is called a "click". The search engine develops a ratio called the click through rate (CTR) by dividing the clicks by the impressions. If your CTR remains high enough (this varies by search engine but usually above one percent is sufficient), your ad will continue to run. If it does not perform well, the search engine will inactivate it until you change something about the ad to make it perform better.

Your account with the PPC program will have reports that show you the impressions, the clicks, the CTR. It will also show you your average cost per click, the total cost for the keyword (clicks time average cost), and the average position of the ad in the times it was displayed (first, second, third, etc.).

Pay Per Click are premium listings that give you greater visibility on search engines. Paid search words are generally displayed at the top of the results list or to the right of the list. Campaigns of this type generate a very high response since Internet users can follow a link directly to your companys website.
The search engines are constantly changing their rules and guidelines. Be sure to keep current with all the changes and adjust your ad campaigns accordingly.