A Primer on Pay-Per-Click Advertising

You ask Google to put your ad alongside search engine results when users search for a certain keyword. Google asks you how much it gets paid for every click of the ad. That’s pay-per-click.

Also known as cost-per-click, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an effective marketing strategy for getting ahead of the competition. In search results, you get first-page priority when you pay for the ad spaces located on top and to the right of the results. Search engines will stop hosting the ads if you run out of funding to pay them per click.

As a casual Internet user, you may think that you don’t click on those ads. If that was the case, then Google would’ve been long bankrupt since it derives up to 98 percent of its yearly revenue from those ads. Being the most prominent search engine on the Internet, it’s safe to say that at least some are clicking on those ads.

PPC is a cheeky tactic, to say the least. Whether or not users intend on clicking the ad, a click is still a click. However, the business can benefit from PPC marketing as much as Google does.

For starters, PPC yields faster results than SEO. Whereas you have to create quality content (which takes time) in SEO, you simply bid for the ad space and be on your way using PPC. This also works for keywords that have trouble ranking because they’re overshadowed by popular ones.