08 Dec 09 What is PPC advertising?

Written by: bikram

PPC advertising stands for pay per Click advertising. It is a popular form of promotion on the Internet. Marketer uses this advertising tool to spread the word about its product and services. Like SEO (search engine optimization) PPC also depends upon keywords, but unlike SEO, the traffic that a PPC campaign brings is not organic. It is paid-for traffic, which can both be good and bad depending upon the goal of the website.

PPC advertising companies do not charge the advertisers based on page view or advertisement display, as the name implied, it is charged based on the clicks advertisement receives from the visitors. The more users will click the ad the more advertisers will have to pay to the PPC companies. The revenue is further divided between the publisher where the ad was clicked and PPC companies. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Adcenter, Ad brite, etc., are the major player in the market.

PPC adverts appear as a sponsored links in the SERP (search engine result pages). These as are generally placed on top of organic result as well as on the left side of the SERP. Marketers have to buy a keyword or set of keywords to make the advertisement appears in the search result or on publishers’ website that has enrolled in the program run by the PPC companies.

The success of campaign depends upon the following five things:

How tightly focused the keyword is.
How prominent the listing is
How well optimized the landing page is. (A landing page is the page on the other side of the advertisement link placed in the advert.
How well the PPC campaign has been created, and
How much deal one got in buying the keywords for the campaign

Bidding for the most attractive keywords and getting the juiciest position in the search engine is at the core any PPC campaign.

3 Steps of a PPC campaign

Step 1: The advertiser bid on the relevant keywords

Step 2: The advert is published. The location and frequency of the ad is determined by the search engine depending upon the price paid by the advertiser for the keywords.

Step 3: The advertiser pays the PPC companies as soon as someone clicks. The advertiser has to pay only for the valid clicks. Money charged for the invalid clicks are credited back to its account. If it does not happen, the advertiser can ask for the refund.