It is pretty self-explanatory when you just look at the word “pay-per-click” which is a form of online advertising where the advertiser pays for each click on their ad.
It works in a way that you’d have to put an ad out to Google Adwords, set a specific bid for how much you’re willing to pay for a click.
Let’s assume you’re paying a dollar for your ad to be displayed, when people search and they click on your ad they get paid a dollar through you, that’s why it’s called pay-per-click advertising.
So let’s assume you are paying $1 per click and you received more than 10k impressions without any click, this means you won’t be paying anything for those thousands of impressions.
You will only pay for that 1 click which costs you $1 only.
Your ad can have a billion impressions and you pay $0 once you get a click that’s when you start paying.
There are so many popular PPC advertising channels but the biggest one is Google AdWords. They’re Google Search Displayed ads.
Bing ads are very similar to Google AdWords except that they are without the display side but the same thing with search PPC ads.
Facebook ads and Pinterest ads are also a form of pay-per-click advertising.
Just to show some examples of ads from PPC advertising agency and how it works… Look at these two companies here “HawkSEM” and “Logical Position” along with over 10 other marketing companies which are bidding on this keyword “PPC advertising agency”.
A specific bid has been setup for this keyword. Let’s just say its $20.So when I type in “PPC advertising agency” and click on one of these ads they might pay something like $19 for that individual click.
Of course, this is a pretty expensive industry.
If you go to other industries like football cleats or baseball cleats it’s going to be a lot cheaper for that click.
Maybe the advertiser only spends $1 for that click because baseball cleats cost about $50 to $100 so they’re not going to spend $20 for each click.
Here’s another example:
If I Google search on my mobile phone “I need storage space” there’s going to be an ad that comes up and they have a button here to call the company directly, if I click on that button that also counts as a pay-per-click ad because I’m clicking on this button.
It’s just one-click and they pay you maybe $3 for that individual click.I’m calling them to rent a storage space, so that’s why they did pay-per-click advertising so that they can reach people in real-time when they’re searching for things.
Let’s look at another example from Bing ads which is so very similar to Google AdWords.If I type in “Roth IRA” what I’m going to get, is a bunch of companies that are allowing me to open a Roth IRA through them.
These are companies bidding for this traffic and if I click on Merrill edge and open an account with them,it’s worth whatever they were bidding for that click.
Facebook ad is a little bit different, Facebook charges on a CPM basis which means you’re paying for impressions but at the end of the day with Facebook, you have to set a specific goal whether its clicks or conversions and you essentially get yourself down to a cost per click.
Depending on how well and how good your ad is, with Facebook ads it’s technically not a PPC advertising channel exactly, it’s sort of a CPM advertising channel.
Because you pay for impressions you can set bids for your clicks.It has a similarity with others and we can see it as a PPC advertising channel.
Here an example of a Pinterest ad
If for example I search for “pendant lights” and I found 3 PPC ads on Pinterest which are Birch, Lane, Delacour, Joss, and Mane.
They’re paying no dollars for any of these impressions they’re only paying if I click on the ads.
So that’s exactly what pay per click advertising is. Any form of paid online advertising where the advertiser pays for each click.
Usually, PPC advertising is very relevant very targeted and you should be able to drive results with PPC advertising It’s much better for driving conversions and driving sales whereas other channels and other forms of advertising might be better in terms of branding and creating impressions and also building up your overall company.