What is PPC or Pay per click?

• PPC stands for pay per click or pay-per-click.
• Pay per click is an online advertising method.
• PPC is used by companies to advertise products and services on a website or a network of websites.
• Pay per click campaigns seek to increase visits to websites and conduct business transactions.
• Simply put, PPC is paid traffic.
• The most popular PPC platforms are Google Adwords, Bing ads and Facebook ads.

Google Adwords

Google came up with their own PPC platform. It is called “Google Adwords”.  This service benefits all types of organizations. No matter if you are a big corporation, small business, not-for profit, charity, society or blogger; you can benefit from using Google Adwords.

As a short explanation, using Google Adwords allows you to be found by anybody performing a search on Google. Your Google ad will appear in the search results returned by Google to the user.

For instance, a Google user searches for the term: “dentist in Toronto”. Google will then show a results page to the user as follows:

You can clearly see the first four results are advertisements, also known as Google PPC ads. The user will have to scroll down to find non-paid advertisements, also known as organic results as shown in the next image.

Result on the top of the image is an advertisement and the one in the bottom a non-paid result.

Tip:  how to differentiate from advertisements and non-paid results on Google?  Answer: Look for the “Ad” green image: It is located to the left of every paid advertisement.

Google is continually optimizing the presentation of paid ads to increase the likelihood of users clicking on paid results. Currently, Google ads are almost identical to non-paid (organic) results.  This is a great opportunity for organizations because the average internet user may not be able to differentiate ads and paid results, as easy as you can after reading this article.

Still wondering why you should be using Pay per click or paid advertisements?

Pay Per Click Use

Organizations and individuals use Pay per click (PPC) campaigns to increase the chances of transmitting their message across the internet.  The most popular PPC platform is Google Adwords. However there are also Facebook ads, Bing ads, YouTube ads and others.

For example, an organization advertising in Google would select a potential keyword contained in a likely search inquiry by an internet user and enter a bidding system, more like an auction, in order to appear on the first series of Google paid ads.  However, this practice has become much more complicated as competition has increased.  For this reason, many organizations have turned their attention towards professional PPC Management services.

Professional PPC Management

In the most simple form of a pay per click campaign, you would pick a keyword (hoping it is typed in by an internet user), enter your bid, hope your ad appears on the paid results returned to the surfer and hope, even further, that same person clicks on your ad, visits your website and fingers crossed, that same person responds to your ultimate goal; buys something, signs up for a newsletter, bookmarks your site, etc.

Simple right? Very simple… and some people try to accomplish this on their own.  The hit and miss tactic can get quite expensive and time consuming.  If you really want to get your message across the internet, you will need to take a more structured approach.  To avoid the painful learning curve, read more about the advanced techniques we use on our clients campaigns here.