What is PPC Advertising?

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is advertising, usually text, on a page where you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. The page on which your ad appears will be one of two types.

The first type of page upon which your PPC adverts can appear is a webpage called a SERP, which is a "Search Engine Results Page". This is a webpage which people see after they do a keyword search or keyword phrase ("keyphrase") search on a search engine. If someone searches for "gainesville florida real estate" on Google they will see a page that looks something like the screenshot below. The paid search results are a form of PPC adverts called "Google AdWords".

AdWords is Google's main source of revenue. This screenshot shows a type of AdWords advertising known as AdWords Search Network advertising.

The adverts along the top and in the right side column, the "paid search results", are the PPC adverts. The AdWords ads that Google chooses to display here are chosen based two criteria:

1. The amount of money the advertiser is willing to pay for a click, done through bidding on keywords and keyphrases, competing with other advertisers.
2. The "quality" of the ad and the webpage the ad links to as determined by Google. Quality is determine by relevance and click-through rate (CTR). More on this in future posts.

Note: Typically around 90% of clicks on a SERP are on the organic links, not paid ones. But the quality of traffic produced by PPC ad clicks is better, i.e., yields higher conversion of website traffic into leads and sales. Also, you can drive traffic to your website much more quickly by paying for ad space on a SERP. Waiting for a link to your site to appear in the organic search results can take months, and may never happen at all, no matter how hard you work at it.

The second type of webpage upon which your PPC adverts can appear, if you so choose, is non-SERP webpages that are imbedded with adverts related (usually) to the content on the page. This is known as "contextual PPC advertising". The biggest network displaying contextual PPC adverts is the Google AdSense Publisher Network. You will see these pages all over the Internet--webpages, emails, and e-newsletters that have blocks of advertising labeled "Ads by Google" or "Sponsored Links". In the example below the AdSense adverts appear in the column to the right.

Three PPC networks dominate the Web:

1. Google AdWords
2. Yahoo Search Marketing
3. Microsoft adCenter (Bing)

In the next post I'll cover Google AdWords in more detail.