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An Introduction to Pay Per Click Advertising
By: Garron Thompson
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Pay per click advertising is a means of online advertising whereby you pay each time a prospect clicks on your advert.
It is typified by Google Adwords, but Yahoo Search Marketing have their equivalent, as do many other of the minor search engines and web directories. Irrespective of the system you use, there are certain aspects of PPC advertising in general that you should be aware of.
Before we discuss that, however, let's have a quick look at where pay per click adverts are found.
If you use your browser to carry out a search for information on any topic, you will get a search engine results page (SERP). Let's take Google as an example. On the left hand side of the page you will find ten results that Google have determined to be the most relevant to your search term, or keyword. These results are taken from the individual web pages of all the websites that are on the World Wide Web and registered with the Domain Name System (DNS).
However, if you then look to right hand side of the results page you will see up to eight adverts under the heading Sponsored Links'.
These are the pay per click (or PPC) adverts. In the case of Google they are called Adwords. When you register with the Adwords system you are allowed to design your own advert within certain constraints of the number of lines and the number of characters allowed per line. You then decide for which keywords you want your pay per click advert displayed.
That means that if a search engine user (in this case Google, but it could be any that you are using) uses the keyword your pay per click advert is displayed for, then your ad could appear on the results page.
Which page it appears on, and how high it appears on that page, depends on how much you have bid for that keyword. The more you are willing to pay for each click, the higher in the SERP you will appear. Some clicks can cost tens of dollars while others cost a few cents.
The more popular the keyword, then the more you will pay in pay per click advertising. Thus, it will cost you more for a high ppc listing for the keyword tennis shoes, than it would for Adidas tennis shoes.
It is very easy to lose money using pay per click advertising if you don't understand how the technique works, but it is also easy to make lots of money if you do understand.
Listen up for a minute or two and find out how to be in the latter category.
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