Pay per click (PPC) is a key channel responsible in the last 5 years for the lion share of the tremendous increase in spend within online marketing. Now widely used by all sorts of companies PPC allows Direct response exposure to search engine users

 

PPC works by providing an internet (search engine presence) to advertisers by placing advertising based on search engine results pages. Pay per click advertising are triggered by the search terms that users input as search queries, on the results pages of search engine list of relevant adverts ranked in order of relevancy and based on auction model are then placed in front of a user providing them the opportunity to click on them and be linked directly through to the target website.

Pay per click ‘does what it says on the tin’ essentially an advertiser pays every time a user or potential customer pays on your advert on search engine results pages. This is all tracked and recorded by the key search engines that provide pay per click services. As you would imagine Google’s PPC solution is the most popular in the market place and as the majority of internet users in the USA and UK prefer to use Google as a search engine the take up of the Google adwords PPC advertising system is the highest and most developed in the marketplace.

The main UK based search engines (ranked in order) offering pay per click advertising are:

•    Google UK (link)
•    Yahoo UK (link)
•    MSN (link)
•    Miva
•    Mirago
•    Webfinder

The essence of pay per click lies in relevancy, the reason this advertising model is so popular is based on the effectiveness of the results that it yields for advertisers. Everything is traceable, measurable and controllable, meaning that if you’ve got a budget of £10,000 a day or £10 a day keyword campaigns can drive traffic or hits - volume to your website in a controllable and effective manner.