Pay per click advertising is a solid option for search engine marketing

With the world of advertising and marketing diversifying and changing largely due to the Internet, pay per click advertising (PPC) will crop up as a solid option for a business to market its goods and services.

What is pay per click advertising?

Pay per click advertising is also known as paid search advertising that uses cost per click (CPC) to direct visitors to an online page. Alternatively, substitute the word “advertising” with “marketing”, and the term refers to the same concept, which is an Internet or online marketing model that places an advertisement to drive traffic to a website. The company that advertises pays money to the website owner or publisher whenever the ad is clicked. In short, pay per click advertising is how much is spent to get an ad clicked by the prospective buyer or consumer.

Pay per click advertising has been around in the U.S. as early as 1996. In the 21^st century, pay per click advertising becomes significant. It is paid through a flat rate or can be bid-based. The flat rate is fixed, whereas the bid-based pay per click advertising is more competitive, and entails having an interested advertiser offer a higher payment than the others.

Pay per click advertising is sometimes compared alongside another Internet advertising method: search engine optimization (SEO). The goal of both is to make your product more visible to consumers and to make consumers become interested enough in your product and, thus, be converted from a lead to a sale.

Most popular pay per click advertising platforms

The four most popular pay per click advertising platforms are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Bing Network, Facebook and Advertising.com

Google AdWords is overwhelmingly preferred by pay per click advertisers because Google is the most used search engine, reportedly taking two-thirds of the market. Because of its dominance, Google AdWord’s rate is higher than for the other platforms. Yet, in the last quarter of 2014, Google reported that AdWords’ pay per click advertising profit had dropped slightly from the same time in 2013. This was surprising because profits had been steadily increasing before that period.

Yahoo! Bing Network naturally relies on the combined Yahoo and Bing search engines that still lag behind Google. Pricing is correspondingly lower.

Facebook has one billion users, so an advertiser would tend to think that pay per click on this social media site would be a good idea. However, most FB users do not go on it to look for products or services, so pay per click advertising would not necessarily be successful on FB. Well, at least not yet.

Finally, Advertising.com is a division of AOL and consists of sponsored listings. A pay per click advertiser could choose among a wide array of websites that it wants to appear in. Among the available websites is ABC and some major news websites like ESPN (the sports channel) and Huffington Post.