Search Engine Marketing
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on Websites, advertising networks, and search engines.
Advertisers bid on 'keywords' that they believe their target market (people who would be interested in their offer) may
type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red wigs, they would bid on the keyword 'red wigs', hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and interact. These ads are called 'sponsored links' or 'sponsored ads' and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays
only when the user clicks on the ad.
Pay Per Click search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are search sites that return the results of a search based opon how much the advertiser bids for placement. The one that bid the most gets its offering to appear first in the results list. The second highest appears second, and so on. After all paid advertisers are displayed, all the other results appear just like regular search engines. If the user clicks on a paid advertiser's offering to go to its Website, the pay per click search engine charges the advertiser's account for the bid amount.
While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. In the spring of 2006, MSN started beta testing their own in-house service, MSN AdCenter. In recent years agencies have also arisen to facilitate the use of pay per click advertising, such as Latitude White in the UK, leading to refinements in the PPC keywords matching system.
Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at £0.01p and have no maximum. These prices can reach up to £18+ per click for services such as unsecured personal loans. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although recently Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.
