What is Pay Per Click

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on search engines by website Advertisers to promote their company's website thereby enabling the company to potentially get customers in the fastest possible time.

Advertisers bid on "keywords" which they believe their potential customers are looking related to the Advertiser's products or services.

For example, if an advertiser sells widgets, the Advertiser would bid on the keyword "widgets" and other keyword phrases with the word widgets in them such as "red widgets, green widgets, blue widgets etc" hoping a user would type those words in their search, then see the Advertisers ad, click on it and buy.

These ads are usually called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" or other such name are are legally supposed to be clearly defined as such when displayed. They usually appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic search results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

Generally speaking, the more popular the search "keyword" or "keyword phrase", the more you pay to be at the top of search results.

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006.

In 2006, MSN started their own in-house PPC service called MSN adCenter. The only other PPC search engine with any real impact is called MIVA which is an amalgamation of FindWhat.com and eSpotting.co.uk in FEB 2004.

Click Fraud

This PPC advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although recently Google, Yahoo, MSN and some other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

Warning:
Any PPC company which claims to have "Dozens, Hundreds or more" search engines showing their search results and yet fail to display these search engines either on their website or when you request this information should be treated as fraudlent.

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