A Beginners Guide to PPC

PPC stands for Pay Per Click – it is an advertising and marketing strategy unique to the internet, and leverages the power and ubiquity of the most popular Search Engines, like Google, Ask, Yahoo etc.

Basically the idea of PPC advertising is this. You as the advertiser “bid” on the value you place on a given “keyword”. For example if you have a website selling “Used Books” – you would select that as a keyword phrase for a PPC ad campaign and bid a certain amount that you would be willing to pay for every time someone clicks on your ad.

That is where the “Pay Per Click” comes in. Every time someone types “Used Books” into a search engine – your ad would come up as a “Sponsored Link” on top of or as a sidebar to the main page of search results.

You pay the amount you bid on your ad, for each time someone clicks on your link, and only when they click on your link. Where you come up on the list of sponsored links, depends on the amount of your bid on that search phrase – the more you are willing to pay “per click” the higher up on the list you appear.

Google AdWords is the granddaddy of PPC, and is still the most popular venue for PPC advertising. Yahoo Search Marketing is close behind, with MSN adCenter also gaining in popularity.

Depending on the words and the search engines involved, the cost per click can be anywhere from a minimum of .01 per click to .50 per click to maximums as high as 40.00 – 50.00 per click for personal loans and high-ticket items like luxury cars or vacation homes.

PPC Search driven keywords or phrases can be as generic as “Home Mortgages” or as specific as the model number of an actual product. In addition “Product PPC’s where all suppliers of a given product may have paid different rates for that products key phrase, and therefore will show up in different orders on the search page – will often also let the user sort the ads by the price at which the advertisers offer the actual sale of the product.

Another note about PPC - Beware of Click Fraud. This is a very real problem where unscrupulous competitors or ad agencies will use software known as “click bots” to artificially inflate the click throughs by simulating the actions of real viewers to line the advertisers pockets, or deplete a competitors advertising budget with illegitimate clicks.