Pay Per Click (PPC) Explained

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) is an advertising model mostly used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites or blogs. Advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. In the past it was common to bill advertisers on a Cost-Per-Thousand  (CPM) Impressions basis. PPC advertisers only pay when their ad is clicked on, no matter how many impressions the PPC ad gets. PPC advertisements usually direct users to a specific landing page on the advertiser’s website to improve user experience and product sales.
 
PPC Pricemodel
 
Advertisers bid on keywords they believe their target market would type in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service. The price for each click is influenced by competitor bids, competition for keywords and a search engines’ proprietary quality measurement of the advertiser`s ad and the quality of the landing page content. Google calls this measurement "Quality Score". The approximate prices and amount of competitors for one keyword can be seen in the Google Keyword Tool.
 
Delivery Of PPC Ads
 
When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called a "Sponsored link" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster chooses on a content page. Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense, Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo! Publisher Network and MIVA attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.
 
There are hundreds of Pay Per Click Search Engines you can buy traffic from and the number increases dramatically. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this and are constantly working on improving the quality of clicks in their PPC programs.