Pay per click or PPC advertising is a method of online advertising where customers are directed to your website via an advert. You get charged per click for the advert and you generally have to bid for a position in the advertising space.
Each click can cost anything from 1pence through to several pounds. The actual cost is calculated by many factors such as the keywords (words or phrases people would use in the search engine to get to your advert) you want to use, the wording of your advert, the landing page (your webpage the advert is linked to) and many others.
Perhaps the best example of pay-per-click advertising is Google's PPC advertising called Google AdWords. In the screengrab of a Google search results page below, the PPC results have a red box around them.
Successful PPC is made up of these main factors:
1. Bidding the correct amount for each search term or keyword so that your advert is shown and clicked on
2. Bidding on a sufficiently large number of relevant search phrases
3. Constructing the campaign so it is very targeted and therefore not wasting the clicks.
4. Providing very relevant information for the searchers who click on your text ads, in other words optimising your landing page.
5. Constant monitoring and reviewing for optimum exposure and ROI
Identity recommends that a modest PPC is used at site launch to drive traffic to the client’s website. This can facilitate indexing by Google and potentially increase page rank for the site.
