What is pay per click advertising?

Pay per click advertising (PPC) or cost per click advertising (CPC) is the method by which search engines monetise their search results. Search engines place relevant ad’s related the search query, in Google (the largest of the search engines these are known as sponsored links.

These PPC ads are sold on an auction basis which can be compared to a simple supply and demand costing matrix – the more clicks or impressions there are the less they cost, the more people that demand the impressions or clicks the more the cost goes up. Advertisers can bid any amount of money to buy that search term. Bid the most and you have a good chance of ranking number 1 or being the first ad displayed at the top or the right of the page.

There are also other facts that determine the ad position, you can’t simply buy the term and bid the most and expect to be at the top of the page, there is also a factor called ad relevance. Ad relevance (Google) is the relevance of the ad and landing page that you are advertising to the search word or keyword that you are buying. Google wants to display only the most relevant ad’s so that its users so that they click more often. The more relevant you are to a term, the higher the ad relevance. The higher the ad relevance the less you have to pay to be top ranking or in a premium position.

Advertisers are charged when a potential custom clicks an ad, this cost is based on the cost per click at the time (any value up to your maximum bid) and charged accordingly. Daily budgets can be set to limit spend so you ca always be in cotrol of your budgets making Pay per click an excellent method for both large and small business to promote themselves in the internet.

For more info about us looking after your Pay per click follow this link Pay per click management

Why is pay per click Advertising efficient?

A correctly run PPC campaign can be an extremely efficient marketing tool.

The main reason for this is that the advertiser is buying terms relevant to their business, these keywords launch the ad and are only displayed when that search term is searched for. For this reason a basic efficiency is achieved simply by displaying ads when potential customers are interested in a broad subject matter.

This subject matter can of course be further refined by adding more words thus increasing the efficiency of the campaign further.

• Vintage Cheese company based in the UK who specialise in rare and vintage cheeses.
• Buying the term – Cheese
• Refined – Vintage Cheese
• Further refined - Vintage Cheese UKFinal refinement – Buy Vintage Cheese UK

As you can see by extending the phrase and adding keywords and making longer tail key-phrases we increase the efficiency of the campaign by selecting search terms that are more relevant, this increased relevance also leads to higher conversion rates. This efficiency can also be applied to bid costs (varying the bid costs on different days at different times), buy testing and utilising more and more efficient ads and groups of keywords and of course the campaign can be targeted regionally, nationally and internationally at high value markets.

These are just a few of the many methods by which to optimise PPC but some of the reasons why this is one of the most accurate and efficient advertising mediums currently available.

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