What is PPC? How PPC Works?

PPC Stands for "Pay Per Click," and is used in online advertising. PPC advertisements generate revenue for Web publishers each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Banner ads, Flash ads, and textual ads can all be used to generate pay per click revenue for publishers. 

Many search engines also use the pay per click model, showing sponsored results along with other relevant results for searches. PPC is an attractive model for advertisers because they only have to pay for actual traffic generated by their ads.

With PPC, you’re not paying for a promise, and you’re not paying to load an ad onto a page. You’re paying for an actual result, a click. With PPC, you don’t pay if nobody sees your ad, and you don’t even pay if someone does see it but doesn’t click. You pay only when someone clicks your ad. In the business, people talk about buying clicks because that’s just what they are doing. You’re paying a PPC company each time someone clicks a link pointing to your Web site.

Some PPC companies have taken to referring to each click as a lead, but that’s just hype. A lead in sales-talk is someone who has expressed an interest in your product or service. No sales professional would regard the visitor, at this click stage, as having expressed enough interest to have risen to the level of being a sales lead. Nonetheless, you are paying for a particular action. Someone sees your ad, clicks the ad, and views your site. Certainly, now and then, people won’t arrive at your site - they may click and then cancel before your page fully loads. But generally speaking, a click is the same as a visit. 

Here’s how PPC works:

1. The advertiser joins a search engine’s PPC program and “loads” the account with some money — say, $50 (though some companies’ PPC budgets are in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars a month).

2. The advertiser creates a small text ad (in some cases, PPC can include images).

3. The advertiser specifies with which keywords the ad should be associated.

4. The advertiser specifies how much he’s willing to pay each time someone clicks on the ad.

5. Later, someone arrives at the search engine, enters one of the keywords or keyword phrases specified, and clicks the Search button.

6. The search engine finds the matching ads and places them on the results page.

7. If the searcher clicks the ad, he is taken to the advertiser’s Web site, and the advertiser is charged for the click.