Pay Per Click or PPC as it is more commonly known is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay for each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. Essentially, it is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to drive them to your site organically (non-paid).
There are various, different types of Pay Per Click advertising models with the most common type being the paid search ad as an example Google Adwords. These are ads that appear when people search for things online using a search engine like Google – especially when they are performing commercial searches, meaning that they are looking for something to buy. This could be anything from a search on a mobile for a place to eat, to a local service, to a gift for someone or a higher end item like a car. All of these types of searches will trigger a pay-per-click ad.
With pay-per-click advertising, the business running the ad is only charged when the user actually does click on the ad, hence the term ‘pay per click’ or ‘PPC’. You set up your campaigns by writing ad copy and selecting relevant keywords and choosing a suitable landing page on your site
Various other forms of Pay Per Click advertising can include display advertising and remarketing.
There are 8 different types of pay per click ads
- Search ads
- Display ads
- Social ads
- Remarketing ads
- Google shopping
- Local service ads
- Gmail sponsored promotions
- Instream ads – Youtube
So How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?
In order, for the pay per click ads to appear alongside the search results as example on Google, advertisers cannot just simply pay more than their competitors to ensure that their ads appear more prominently and frequently than their competitor’s ads. Instead, ads are subject to what is known as an Ad Auction. This is an entirely automated process that Google and other search engines use to determine the relevance and validity of advertisements that appear on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
How Keywords Work in Pay-Per-Click Advertising
As the name implies, the Ad Auction is used to select the ads that will appear on your pages and determine how much you will earn from those ads. In a traditional auction, interested bidders will state the maximum price they are willing to pay to buy a specific item. This means that advertisers must bid on the terms they want to activate or to display their ads. These terms are known as keywords. Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is all about. In terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), they are the words and the phrases that people type into their search engines when looking for content. This is also known as also ‘search queries’.
Need help with your PPC campaign?
A well-managed PPC campaign can immediately generate traffic, which leads to extra conversions. The traffic will be of high quality because the user has entered a term very closely related to what you offer. We aim to attract visitors who have a problem or need, that your company can solve.
Contact our team and see how we can help you.
