Pay Per Click or PPC is a type of search marketing where advertisers pay every time their ad is clicked by an internet user. Users will see PPC ads on every search engine results page, often across the top or the right column. All of this space is up for grabs by bidding on what people type into the search engine also known as Keywords. At first glance PPC advertising seems extremely simple, and at first glance, it is. All of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) allow anyone to sign up for accounts and bid and buy keywords.
Several of our clients, at one time managed their own PPC accounts but turned them over to us because when you get into it the following concepts can be rather difficult to get right:
Bid Management: Knowing how much to buy keywords for, on what engines and when to run the ads.
Keyword Research: Which keywords to buy, which keywords trigger a success event, (for example someone buying a product on a website) and knowing which keywords to eliminate.
Copy Writing: What do you write in your ads? Often there very tight limitations to what an advertiser can write. Google limits its ads to 95 characters including spaces; also there are strict limitations on what can be said, also know as editorial guidelines.
This is just scratching the surface of what PPC is and what it takes to run an effective campaign. The internet is a living, breathing, thing and PPC campaigns need to be constantly adjusted, tested, and optimized to get the highest return.
