Marketing on the WebI’ve been working on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns since 2005 so of course, I think everyone else knows and understands what a PPC campaign is.
The reason it is called Pay Per Click is that you pay for showing your ads on a per click basis. Your ad may show dozens of times, but you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. There is a bit more to it than this, but let’s not complicate it for those new to this. The PPC billing model is often used in digital advertising campaigns to show ads within the search results of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo (search marketing) and on publishers’ websites that participate in Display Advertising (aka content advertising) where your ads show alongside articles, blog posts, etc.
This is a really good video introduction to Google’s Advertising program (AdWords) and how it works.
In addition to PPC, there are other billing models, such as Cost Per Mil (CPM) where you pay based on cost per thousand views and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) where you pay based on the cost to achieve a sale. But again let’s not explore those here.