What is Pay Per Click?

PPC advertising, also known as “Paid Search” or “Search Engine Marketing (SEM)”, is the process of paying for advertising on sites and search engines but the advertiser is not charged unless someone clicks on an ad. Most often (but not always) PPC is an auction where you compete for position against other advertisers.

PPC can allow for much quicker wins in visibility or conversions for advertisers whereas SEO is a long term effort of building a community to help your organic presence. While it can take a long time to rank #1 organically on search engine results pages via SEO, advertisers can use PPC ads to appear above organic or SEO results, seen in red in the image above, within minutes of opening an advertising account.

Advertisers select keywords to bid on, which match to the search queries, or actual words users are searching for. Similar to SEO, content (in ads) and relevancy are significant factors in getting ads to show in the top position. Search engines like Google give each ad a quality score (1-10 basis) based off of numerous factors which they unfortunately won’t elaborate much on. That quality score is then multiplied by your bid to get an overall Ad Rank.  In an auction setting like Google’s, an advertiser only ends up paying just a bit more than the one below them, after all Ad Ranks are evaluated. So the amount an advertiser bids is not necessarily what’s charged upon a click.

Why do advertisers pay for these ads when they can try to rank naturally for free?

• Real-estate on the search engine results pages is at a premium.
• Many users simply click on the first link of the results page, regardless of whether it’s an ad or an organic listing.
• The opportunity to generate conversions can be heightened when ads are prominently displayed.
•  New market segments can be identified, based on what people are searching for, and ads can be shown where an advertiser’s site may not be able to rank naturally.
• Competitors are likely paying for ads or have the opportunity to, potentially winning new business or taking it from others.

Paid search also spans into other websites outside of popular search engine result pages like Google, Bing and Yahoo and types vary from text, to image, to video among others. The most important thing to remember is that ad relevancy to the searcher/web surfer is most important and will ultimately lead to the most efficient PPC campaigns, depending on an advertiser’s goals.

SEO is about getting a website found and ranking high on search engine results pages. It is also often referred to as organic or natural search results, highlighted in blue above. When a searcher decides to click on these results there is no fee charged to that website.

The hard part is optimizing a site so that the search engines recognize it as highly qualified and relevant to the search query. This process can take time, and there’s no concrete answer for how to rank #1. While clicks on these links may be free, it can take an investment of time and money from a business to make the right optimizations to their site to produce the desired results.

It’s also important to remember that search engines are not real-time rankings; they’re an index of sites the engines have visited over time and they may only visit some sites every few days. A SEO manager’s job is to understand what these search engines deem relevant and high quality in order to make savvy and efficient decisions which will increase natural rankings when a site is surveyed or crawled. In order for a website to rank higher, there are two main factors search engines consider: On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-Page factors include everything on your website that help search engines find it. Among many other factors, these elements include:

• Keywords that are relevant to the things people are searching for.
• The site’s architecture.  For example: load time, internal linking structure, title tags, search friendly URLs, and others.
• Content on the pages relevant to the products and users.  Content is KING!

Off-Page factors focuses on getting other sites to include a link/reference back to your website. This is seen as a vote of confidence in the eyes of the engines. Known as “Link Building” for SEOs, this process is best managed by building relationships and generating quality links vs. spamming links across the web. 

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What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

A brief Pay Per Click definition is: PPC is a type of sponsored online advertising that is used on a wide range of websites, including search engines, where the advertiser only pays if a web user clicks on their ad. Hence the title, ‘pay per click.’

When our clients ask us to define Pay Per Click, we tell them that PPC is a very cost-effective means to get their site noticed by their target audience while our other Internet marketing strategies are gradually helping their site achieve their natural ranking potential.

In a way, PPC advertising works like a silent auction. Advertisers place bids on keywords or phrases that they think their target audience would type in a search field when they are looking for specific goods or services. When a web user types a search query into the field of a search engine that matches the advertiser’s keyword list or visits a web page with content that correlates to the keywords or phrases chosen by the advertiser, the PPC ad may be displayed on the page. In search engines, a PPC ad is generally just above or to the right of the search results where they can be easily seen. On other kinds of websites, the ad will be placed in the location that the site designer has determined will be the most advantageous to his site and the advertiser.

To differentiate PPC ads from the natural search results displayed on a page, search engines will often place PPC ads under “Sponsored Ads” or “Sponsored Links” which also makes them easier to notice on a page that is crowded with text and other items competing for a web user’s attention.

Overall, PPC ads are beneficial to advertisers and web users alike. Advertisers get noticed by their target audience and are charged only for the times that their ads are clicked on and web users get to select from sites that may be relevant to the page they are viewing without having to deal with obnoxious banner or pop-up ads that flash and distract.

There are countless pay per click management services out there competing with each other but, without question, the heavyweights in PPC advertising are, in order:

1. Google Adwords
2. Microsoft adCenter

The rates that these outfits charge for a PPC ad vary significantly depending on the popularity of the keyword or phrase. For example, if an advertiser wants a PPC ad targeted for the phrase ‘cottage cheese’, they can get prominent placement for their PPC ad with a very low bid and a low per-click charge. However, for a phrase such as ‘computer’, an advertiser can expect heavy competition for prominent placement and expect to pay premium per-click rates. It all comes down to supply and demand for the keywords and phrases that the advertiser wishes to target.

Pay per click ads also level the playing field like no other form of advertising. A small, web-savvy company can, with a limited budget, outbid much larger companies with enormous advertising budgets and gain the edge they need to get noticed in their market.