Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 1. Grasping PPC Methods

In This Chapter

• Getting to know pay per click

• Understanding search engines and relevancy

• Deciding whether PPC is right for you

Pay per click (PPC) — also known as cost per click (CPC) — is a type of paid advertising, such as paid search, sponsored listings, sponsored links, and partner ads. In a PPC model, the advertiser pays the site that hosts the ad space only if a user clicks its ads and goes through to the destination URL or landing page — the location on the Internet where the person who clicked the ad ends up.

In this chapter, you discover how pay per click works and find tips to help you decide whether you need to add PPC to your Web marketing strategy.

Seeing How Pay Per Click Works

PPC ads are often used in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, generally along the top and right sides of the pages that contain search results. These ads don't appear unless someone performs a search in that engine, and the ads that do appear are those that the engine deems most relevant to the user's search results (see "Knowing How Search Engines Determine Relevancy," later in this chapter). This way, someone who searches for a baseball glove (see Figure 1-1) isn't shown ads for shoes.

To get the advertiser's ads to show up alongside relevant searches on a search engine, the search engine walks the advertiser through the following steps during PPC account creation. Each search engine's process is a little different, but here are the most basic steps you should ...