What is PPC and how is it Good for Your Business?

In the world of murky internet marketing there is one popular method of advertising and this method is PPC. This short acronym stands for Pay-Per-Click and it’s very effective for websites looking to bring in customers.

What is Pay-Per-Click?

PPC is a certain style of internet advertising. Businesses get websites to display their ads. In exchange they offer to pay the site owner a set amount for the number of times the ads are clicked. These are also referred to as click-throughs. The ads usually contain a link to the business’s own website or products they are trying to sell. The more click-throughs they have the more visitors to that business gets and the more times the host website gets paid.

This all makes the process extremely attractive to host websites and advertisers alike. Advertisers only pay for the number of people who actually see their site or product. While the host sites can earn lots of money by getting lots of people to click-through and it’s up 24 hours a day earning them advertising revenue.

What is PPC on Google?

There is another way of utilizing Pay-Per-Click to bring in site visitors. That’s paying for search terms or specific keywords that will bring up text ads along with page results on search engines. Think about those text ads placed on either side of the results page when you search for a website on Yahoo or Google.

Instead of paying a set fee for place of these ads, site owners will bid on the keywords with which they want to associate their ads. This can make the most popular keywords also very expensive when a bidding war starts. On the other, less popular or highly specialized keywords can be very cheap.

Target Audience Anyone?

PPC can help you focus on your ideal target audience, because it can be targeted to certain keyword search terms even those highly specialized ones.

When someone interested in a topic related to your website or business searches it on the web or checks out a related website, your ad will pop up. Right off the bat, you know only the people likely to utilize your business services will be seeing the ad. This effectively maximizes the return on investment for your advertising budget.

Click through rates are notoriously low. Even an ad with a rate of just 2% of click throughs after being presented to site visitors is considered quite successful. Isn’t better to pay for those people to saw your ad and clicked on it? Instead of paying a flat fee for ad space that may not be bringing in the visitors your site needs.