Googles text based advertising system.
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Pay per click or PPC is a method of marketing a web site, product or service online. As the name suggests, pay per click refers to paying only when clicked upon, that is paying for a website only when an online user actually clicks and views the advertisement or site and not merely when the site’s link comes up on the screen. It is used on search engines, where a bidding system is followed. In this system, the user types a keyword or phrase while searching and all the relevant search results containing the keyword are displayed according to their ranks. Along with this, some advertisements containing information related to the keyword appear on the screen. These advertisements, called sponsored links appear adjacent or above the original result. The location of these links is determined by the webmaster or blogger. Now, according to PPC (Pay per click), the advertisers pay only when the advertisement is clicked upon. The advertisers determine the keywords which trigger their advertisements. In content websites, however, a fixed price mechanism is followed instead of a bidding system.
The cost per click or price per click is determined by the popularity of the search engine and the popularity of the keyword or competition for the keyword. The amount the advertisers are willing to shell per click. This may depend upon the popularity of the ad, which is determined by the history of the click rates also called, quality rate. The most popular PPC providers today are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCentre.
Owners of these paid to surf. Sites can advertise their own search portals sending more advertisements and hence money to the affiliates who click more keywords and search results. However, this process is not approved, as many suppose that the webmasters manipulate and force that affiliates to commit click fraud.
Bill Gross, founder of Idealab and Goto.com is said to be the founder of the PPC concept even though Jeffrey Brewer, of Goto.com came up with this concept in 1998. Brewer, an employee of Goto.com which was a 25-employee start-up company, displayed a pay per click search engine proof-of-concept to the Technology, Entertainment, Design, an annual conference with an aim to discuss and promote new ideas worth spreading, in California. Thus, PPC mechanism came as a result of this presentation. In December 1999, Google introduced search engine advertising and by October 2000, it came up with the AdWords system. This let advertisers place advertisements on the Google search engine according to cost-per-thousand impressions. The Pay per click mechanism was introduced by Google in 2002, while Yahoo! presented it in 1998.
There are two major types of PPC campaigns – Keyword match and Content match. Keyword match: Also called sponsored match, these campaigns resulted in the display of advertisements present on the search engine pages. Content match: These campaigns resulted in the display of publisher websites, newsletters and e-mails. Pay per click programs target product or service searches and product comparison sites which are also present.
This type of PPC advertisers bid on keywords which are comprised of words, phrases and even the model number of the products. When a search for a particular product or service is carried out, a list or advertiser links or advertising links appear on the screen along with the original information. The orders of these links are classified on the basis of the amount bid for the given keyword. There are advertising firms which provide the advertisers their services or software to develop keyword strategies. For example, Yahoo! offers a service called Content Match, which distributes the keyword ad to other partner sites that have a distribution agreement with the search engine company.
Product comparison engines are search engines for products and enable the advertisers to provide feeds of their product databases. When a user searches for a particular product, the advertisements appearing alongside are ranked according to which advertisers pay more. Google Product Search does not charge for the listing, but still requires active feed function.
Advertisers need to provide feeds to their service databases and this is facilitated by the search engines. When the user looks for a particular product or service, the advertisements are lined up according to which advertiser pays more. There are some service engines which operate in specific vertical markets.
This enables the publishers to charge the local advertisers on the basis of per-telephone-call for every sales lead or call the publisher. Pay per call engines allows not only local, but advertisers within the country to create advertisements with local telephone numbers.
This is used in e-mail marketing and is similar to pay per call (a business model for advertisement listings in search engines that allows search engines to enable advertisers within the nation to make calls at the local rate). In this, the E-mail marketing campaigns are charged only on successful delivery of the entire e-mail.
In this the advertiser pays a fixed amount only on the completion of some specified action.
This is an internet crime where a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate or legal user of a web browser clicking on an ad in order to create a charge per click without having any real interest in the ad’s link. The advertising companies can suffer immense losses due to this.
Though PPC advertising might seem simple, in order to have a successful PPC advertising campaign, PPC management is necessary.
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