Pay Per Click marketing, or PPC marketing, is a form of advertising that involves placing advertisements on search engines, and paying at a set rate whenever a visitor clicks on your advertisement and is linked to your website. The advertisements appear on the results pages of search engines and, depending on the search engine you lsit your ad with, they may even appear on the results pages of other search engines in partnership with yours.
Pay Per Click Advertisements – How Do They Work?
When looking at a page of results from a search engine, it is generally easy to tell the difference between normal search results that are found using the engine’s algorithm or ‘organic’ methods and results that are actually paid advertisements. Paid results typically have the words ‘featured listing’ or ‘sponsored result’ next to them. These advertisements have been registered to certain keywords and will appear whenever a visitor searches for those particular keywords. These Pay Per Click advertisements are usually displayed at the top right-hand corner of the page or at the very top of the search results page.
In order to become involved in PPC advertising, you have to sign up with a PPC program of your choice and design a short advertisement containing some text, images, or videos that provide an accurate description of the products or services available on your site. Your ad should be designed to attract as many potential customers to your site as possible.
When setting up your advertisements, you will also have to decide exactly which keywords you want to use that will trigger the appearance of your ad, and also the amount which you are willing to bid for the position of your ad. The more you bid, the better the position your ad receives, and the more visitors you will attract with it.
Pay Per Click Marketing – How It All Started
The first PPC venture was started by http://GoTo.com, which was later re-branded into the company Overture. Despite the many successes of the PPC model pioneered by GoTo, their Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 1999 did not attract a great amount of interest. Eventually, Yahoo! bought over the company in 2003, putting any further doubts about the company’s business plan in the dirt, and establishing PPC advertising as a permanent part of its business.
Google launched its AdWords campaign in October of 2000, initially using the pay per impression model of keywords advertising. Eventually, once it realized that the pay per click model used by Overture was more successful, Google made pay per click the default advertising model of AdWords as well.
By the end of 2002, the newly rebranded Overture had established partnerships with a wide range of search engines that included MSN, Yahoo!, InfoSpace, AltaVista, and various meta search engines such as Ixquick and MetaCrawler. This impressive distribution network ensured that advertisers got plenty of exposure to Internet users and it was quickly obvious that companies were willing to pay very high prices for this service.
While many other PPC programs were started, it soon became clear that the entire industry was dominated by two players – Overture and AdWords. After acquiring Overture in 2003, Yahoo! eventually rebranded it as Yahoo! Search Marketing and, later, as Panama. Microsoft also got into the game in 2005 with MSN adCenter. While Yahoo! and Google still dominate the market, Microsoft and other startups are quickly catching up.
Why Pay Per Click Advertising?
The continuous growth of the search engine industry has created an enormous market for Pay Per Click and other similar forms of advertising. Most search engines are partnered with some form of PPC advertising, making your potential audience huge.
What Pay Per Click Advertising Can Do For You:
- Target specific geographies and niches
- Have top advertising spots on search results pages without the hassle of SEO
- Immediate results in the form of increased traffic
- Even sites incompatible with search engines and offline stores can be found
- Affordable for both small and large businesses
- Conversion tracking allows instant sales and makes measuring ROI easier
- Plotting visitor pathways becomes more precise
- Campaigns can be activated or deactivated according to your needs and budget limitations
