What is pay per click advertising (PPC)?

Pay Per Click advertising has many pseudonyms, PPC, search engine advertising, SEA, paid search advertising - but they all refer to the same thing. PPC is a type of online marketing available on the popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google where the advertiser only pays if their ad is clicked and a visitor arrives at their website.

The PPC ads appear alongside and above the organic search results on the search engine results pages. Major Pay Per Click advertising platforms are based on a bidding per keyword model. The advertiser simply decides which keyword phrases they would like to trigger their ads and chooses a maximum price they would be willing to pay if a visitor clicked their ad once triggered by the selected keyword.

Many different advertisers are often bidding on the same keyword and hence the bidding model is used to determine the position where the advertiser's ad will display. Google, the largest PPC advertising channel (Google AdWords) displays a maximum of 11 ads per page. The most commonly seen arrangement of ads is three ads above the organic search results with a further 8 ads down the right hand side with position 1 being at the very top and position 11 being at the bottom of the right hand side.

The cost per click is determined by many different factors:

• Number of competitors bidding for that word
• Position of the ads in the search result (from 1 to 11)
• The quality of the ad and relevance to the keyword
• The quality of the website that users will finally end up on
• The relevance of the website that users will end up on to the keyword and the ad
• The click through rate of the ad (how many people click the ad compared to how many times the ad is displayed)

In most cases the top position in the paid results is the most expensive; however other factors as listed above can mean that the highest bidder will not necessarily take the top position.

Pay Per Click advertising is available to anybody with a website or a landing page and is a highly targeted digital marketing channel. PPC advertising allows you to target users who are actively searching for keywords associated with your product, service of business and then only makes you pay if someone actually visits your website.

PPC advertising also allows for detailed reporting and analytics so you can tell exactly how many people clicked your ads, what it costs and how much revenue you made. This makes it super easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI). You can set your daily or monthly budgets so that you know exactly what you are going to spend on a day-to-day basis. Which makes keeping track of your advertising costs simple.

Finally, PPC advertising allows for almost immediate results. A campaign can be drafted, posted and live within a few hours - meaning that clicks and revenue and can generated in as little as a day.

Find out how you can squeeze the most out of your PPC budget with the help of Netregistry and our certified Google AdWords professionals. Learn more by clicking here or call 1300 638 734 to speak to one of our Account Managers.