Online Marketing

Okay, this is an article directed at newbies, not for experienced Internet marketers. I will just explain the very basics of Pay Per Click (PPC) so those who have the inclination to join the market will get a glimpse of what it actually is. Pay Per Click, is just that — when someone clicks on an advertisement by a company, the company pays the advertisement’s publisher.

A company who engages in Pay Per Click advertising could choose (or bid on) which sites their advertisements would appear in. Basically, they ensure that that ads appear on potentially interested markets. The advertisements appear on web sites of publishers as “Sponsored Ads” or under “Ads Sponsored by…” You’ve probably seen a lot of Pay Per Clicks in action around the Internet. The biggest Pay Per Click networks being Google for Adsense and Yahoo! For Publisher Network. There are many other PPC networks including Bidvertiser, Chitika, Quigo, AdBrite, and a lot more.

Web masters could then sign up for these services and serve advertisements on their web sites. When they sign up for a PPC network’s services, they’re given access to codes which they can put on their sites to generate the ads. These web masters are known as publishers. Companies could then bid for a slot in the web sites’ advertisement panel. They bid, of course, based on keywords available on the site to ensure that their ads would appear on relevant web sites. That’s not always true though as some advertisers also choose to use the long-tail strategy and bid on keywords not necessarily 100% relevant to the goods or services they offer.

The biggest problem PPC campaigns face is click fraud. Most usually, this happens when publishers buy traffic for autoclicks or autosurfs. PPC networks like Google, however, constantly ban publishers who take this route.

Filed under: pay per click