Also known as: Cost Per Click (CPC), Pay Per Click (PPC) is a format of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Now that we’ve got the abbreviations out of the way, lets explain what it is.
PPC is a form of advertising your website on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When you do a search in Google, for example, you may see "Ad" or "Sponsored Results". Those are Pay Per Click ads that businesses pay Google to display. They are called Pay-Per-Click, because those companies don’t pay for the ads to show up, but they do pay a certain amount when someone clicks on them.
These ads can be a great, fast way to reach the target audience you’re looking to attract to your business. However, it also could be expensive, depending on your market and competition. The ROI on SEO vs PPC is usually much higher, however, PPC is a great add-on to an SEO campaign and a great way to test the market and their response before investing into search engine optimization.
Pros:- Pay-per-click is a great way to quickly get targeted visitors to your website. It can easily be started, stopped, paused, and adjusted. The budget for PPC is also flexible - you decide how much you want to spend.
- Pay Per Click guarantees traffic from very specific key terms. You are guaranteed to get exactly what you pay for, clicks from specific keywords.
- Through GeoTargeting, you can market to a closely-targeted market, as specific as marketing to those within a 10-mile radius from your business.
- It’s not the most cost effective solution. It's online advertising. Depending on your competition, you could be paying as little as 5 cents for every visitor or as much as $10, or even more.
- Only about 20% of people click on sponsored results, the rest use the organic area, as they know it produces more relevant results.
- Capturing a significant amount of traffic for a single competitive keyword can cost thousands of dollars per day, for a single keyword, on Google alone.
