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What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) 

In this competitive world, effective marketing is the key to any successful business plan. Besides, the help of the print media (newspapers, magazines and journals) and electronic media (television), Internet is a great resource to publicize and promote their products. Today, thousands of companies use this medium to reach out to the vast majority of their customers.

Pay per Click is an online advertising model when the advertisers pay money for each and every ‘click’ delivered to his or her website from a link. The advertisements are served based on keywords and themes. Pay per Click is also known as ‘Cost per Click’ or CPC, ‘Paid inclusion’ ‘Paid Listings’, ‘Pay per Ranking’, ‘Pay per Placement’ and ‘Pay per Position’. This is one of the most powerful marketing tools to promote online marketing. PPC is best suited for small to medium sized businesses and also for the sectors like the hotel and travel industry and consumer goods.

The Pay per Click process thus can be defined as the guaranteed placement of a small advertisement on the search results page for a particular keyword or keywords; the payment is made only when the visitor clicks on the ad and is guided to the advertiser’s website. No amount is paid by the advertiser to appear on the results page.

A Pay per Click or PPC ad on the search engine results page will usually consist of a heading that mentions the name of the website with some brief introduction; this should however not exceed 50 words or characters. It can also contain a concise explanation (not more than 200 words or characters) of the products or services offered. While there are a few PPC search engines that monitor the text which appears in the listings, others are more open to using the advertiser's own text.

With the birth of Pay-per-Click advertising, a whole new industry providing services for PPC advertisers has come up. This has also given rise to a specialized group of consultants who offer an assortment of services ranging from keyword optimization to copywriting and also working towards promoting this (PPC) advertising model ahead of others like banners, pay-per-impressions and pop-ups.

PPC services has given rise to a huge industry that is almost one billion in size, and today with 85% of Internet users using search engines to locate products, the significance of this industry can be very well understood. With the unveiling of Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing or SEM was born. Search Engine Marketing can be simply defined as a legal activity that guides traffic from one search engine to another. Following the steps of Google Adwords was Yahoo Search Marketing that was formerly known as Overture. Today even big names like CNN provide this service to users. 

Hundreds of websites today offer the ‘Pay-per-click’ advertising services for customers online. Some well known and important amongst these are ePilot, eSpotting (presently known as www.miva.com) and Kanoodle. They offer a wide variety of services ranging from keyword optimization, copywriting of the advertisement, tracking tools to measure the success rate and positioning with the search portals.

The methods of operation of these sites are like this – a prospective customer enrolls by paying a registration charge; these charges vary from one company to another. Only after the registration, the customer is permitted to place the advertisements in all the major search portals with which the company has a tie up. The content of the advertisement must be eye catching yet concrete as it needs to hold the attention of the visitor in those few seconds. This is when the role of Search Engine optimizing consultants becomes very important. These professionals help to format an ad with particular attention to the tile and content. They also use their expertise to match that advertisement with website content development that includes the descriptions of the products and services, navigation features, easy buying experience for the buyers and so on. Moreover, these consultants also provide services like tracking down of a customer according to the geographical location and fraud management. Fraud management includes processes like finding out the IP number (that is unique for every user) of the consumer who clicks through the ad and prevents the counting of multi-clicking, if the same user clicks through repeatedly.