What Is Pay Per Click (ppc)?

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an adverting model that involves placement of ads on search

engines or other websites with the advertiser only being charged when a visitor to the website/search engine clicks on one of their ads. Whilst PPC was originally conceived by Yell its widespread adoption has been catapulted into its current position by Googles Adwords advertising platform. A system that has evolved considerably and accounts for the majority of Googles $25 billion valuation.

PPC Advantages The Magic Moment

Search engine PPC advertising differs from traditional advertising formats such as magazine, TV or radio advertising in that a highly relevant advert is displayed to users that are actively searching for a particular product or service. This of course significantly increases the likelihood of the visitor converting into a customer. Traditional advertising formats lack the control and accuracy of PPC advertising which at best enable an advertiser to roughly identify a demographic that may or may not be interested in their product.

Whilst traditional advertising formats are potent methods for increasing brand exposure levels they arent always particularly effective at quickly increasing revenues and In a time of recession companies are favouring advertising channels that quickly and directly impact their bottoms lines. Therefore, its not surprising that many companies are allocating a larger percentage of their budgets to PPC advertising and associated services.

PPC Accountability

In addition to PPCs ability to capture a visitors attention at the point in time when they are actively looking for your product or service PPC is also 100% measurable. Advertisers are able to accurately track the amount they have spent and compare this directly to revenues generated by PPC visitors. This in turn enables advertisers to accurately calculate the return on investment from their PPC advertising campaigns.

Advertisers also have complete control over when their ads are displayed. Modern PPC interfaces enable advertisers to fine tune their accounts, they are able to select specific regions and times of day, networks on which ads are displayed and as data is collected eliminate phrases that dont generate a positive ROI.

PPC The Future

Googles revenues continue to grow, largely as a result of increased PPC advertising spends. However, in order to maintain this momentum the PPC services companies including Google are continually adding online real estate to their advertising portfolios to enable them to provide more advertising slots. For example, YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the planet, second only to Google main search engines and provides a considerable amount of advertising slots to its owners Google. Other owners of high exposure sites such as Bing, Yahoo and Facebook are also cashing in on this advertising format and offering PPC advertising services.

But, like all things, the online advertising market is changing. As a result of increasing click costs advertisers are looking for more efficient payment models and many are favouring CPA (cost per action) models which differs from PPC in that advertisers are only charged when a visitor performs a desirable on-site action such as submitting an enquiry form or ordering a product.

Whichever format is adopted, the online advertising market continues to grow and is likely to do so for many years.

by: Chris Poulton

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