Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has fast become one of the most used advertising methods in internet marketing (iMarketing) today. The popularity has developed due to the strength, power, and cost flexibility that PPC advertising proposes to an internet marketer.
Overview of PPC
PPC advertising services can be described as an online advertising technique in which a marketer places an advertisement and pays a specific amount each time that a visitor clicks on the advertisement. Offered in both text and image formats, PPC ads can be simply set-up, customized, and revised by some marketer with even basic computer and internet skills.
The internet huge, Google.com, was built upon the PPC advertising concept and today generates its income through small, sidebar advertisements on its search pages. Each search result page generally consists of natural search results and paid advertisements (PPC ads) that are located along the right-hand side of the page.
Every PPC advertisement consists of an ad title, ad text, and a clickable web link. The placement of each ad is ordered according to the search engine company. Some search engines rank ads only on Cost-Per-Click (CPC) value (from highest to lowest). Others use complex, multi-criteria optimization algorithms to calculate a ranking of each ad.
Ads are triggered only when specific keywords are searched for by a user. Keyword-based search allows for further customizing by advertisers. In general, advertisers would like to find least competitive keywords to assure maximum ad exposure at the lowest possible cost. The other end of the variety involves bidding on highly competitive keywords. This condition requires a much higher CPC to be specified in order to still achieve an acceptable ad placement.
