What is Pay-Per-Click?

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a form of search engine advertising. In pay-per-click search engine advertising, you write your own website listing and you decide how much you want to pay for it to appear.

How it works:

· You choose the search terms you think are most relevant to your website by bidding on them.

· Write your ad using these terms.

· Your website listing will appear whenever someone uses a search term you've chosen.

· The more you bid, the higher your website listing will appear on the list.

· You pay the amount you bid whenever someone clicks your listing, but ONLY when someone clicks your listing.

You can find PPC or "sponsored listings" on most major search engines. They often appear above or alongside traditional search results. Google and MSN title them "sponsored links." Yahoo titles them "sponsored results." They all work pretty much the same way.

The amount deducted from the advertiser is determined by auction. The more popular a word is, and the more traffic that particular word generates and the higher advertisers must bid for the PPC cost. Currently the costs range from around .10 cents per click for a word with a smaller market and upwards of $5 per click for mega-popular words like "online gambling."

You can also find Google-sponsored PPC ads on websites that have signed up with the Google AdSense program. With Google AdSense, Google analyses the web pages of websites that sign up for the program and provides them with relevant ads to place on their websites. The ads automatically change whenever the Webmaster changes the content of the page.

The ads in the Google AdSense program are provided by the websites who have bid on Google PPC search engine placement. They pay their PPC bid whenever someone clicks on the ad. The websites who agree to display Google AdSense ads as affiliates earn money when people click the ads.

What are the Benefits of a PPC Campaign?

• Increases the amount of traffic to your website and its consistency.
• Helps sell your products and services with a high enough profit margin to offset the costs.
• Easy to set up- even for the computer illetrate

What are my Options for PPC Advertising?

While there may be hundreds of different PPC services, the two biggest ones are Google Adwords and the Yahoo/Overture search service. Alternatively, there are smaller PPC services, such as Findology, Bidvertiser, and SearchFeed that have different variations on what is typically offered.