Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, as the phrase expresses, is an advertising system where you Pay only when your advertisement is clicked on delivering a visitor to your website. PPC systems operate like an auction. You place a bid for the search term you want to be listed for, your ad is displayed by the search engine ranked in their sponsored results based upon how your bid ranks amongst all bids for that search term. If your bid is the highest, your ad will be listed in the top position. if your bid is the 5th highest in the 5th position and so on. The exception to this standard auction format is Google Adwords. Google factors in the amount of clicks your ad generates (and associated total revenue). With Google Adwords, if your ad generates the highest total revenue for Google, your ad will rank 1st regardless of the actual bid you place.

With PPC advertising you can determine your maximum bid and you set your daily budget. As an example if you bid $2.00 per click and the next highest bidder bids $1.50 you will only have to pay $1.51 per click. One cent higher than the next lower bid. You essentially have $.50 insurance that you’ll maintain the top position.

In this example if you set your budget to $10/day you receive a maximum of 6 clicks each day, after 6 clicks your ad will no longer be shown. Besides cost this is the major difference between PPC and Organic search, if your website ranks highly in the organic search it always appears, all day, every day.

Pay Per Click advertising may be right for your particular product or service. If the current bid levels for your target search terms are conducive to a positive ROI, then PPC advertising may be your best choice.

There are many PPC ad programs of which Google Adwords is the most popular. Adwords appear on Google, AOL and a few other engines plus on the entire network of websites that display Google Adsense ads.

Contact us to find out if PPC advertising is right for your website and learn about our PPC advertising management programs.

Highest Percentage of Advertisers Choose the Internet – read the report here.

Learn more about Pay Per Click advertising in this New York Times article “Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords” from October 14, 2009