The origination of Pay Per Click Advertising dates back to February of 1998 when Goto.com employee Jeffrey Brewer introduced the concept. The start-up company consisted of 25 employees and later became known as “Overture” which is now a part of Yahoo. However, the credit for its inception has been given to Bill Gross, the founder of Goto.com and “Idealab.” Additionally, the concept of search engine advertising was implemented by Google in December of 1999, but it wasn’t until October of 2000 when Google introduced AdWords, which sparked the rise of PPC advertising.
If you’ve heard of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) but don’t really understand the concept, then read on. Basically it’s precisely what the phrase says; whenever, anyone clicks on an advertisement, somebody has to pay. But how does this PPC stuff help a website?
PPC advertising is a very potent promotional tool employed by many online marketers. That’s because it is an extremely flexible and efficient way of Internet advertising which can be used to target a large number of customers worldwide. You will find PPC used nearly everywhere online. Every time a search is done at one of the large search engines like Google, you will see observable examples of PPC advertising. Search results marked with terms like “Sponsored Results” will be displayed. This type of ad has a short narrative and a hyperlink to the sponsor’s website. You will usually find these ads located at the top or on the right-hand side of the screen.
Comprehending the method of how PPC works is fairly easy. The user performs a search by typing a search term into the search engine box which will return both organic and sponsored PPC results. When you click on any of the sponsored ads, you’ll be redirected to the appropriate page of the advertiser’s site. As a result, the sponsor must pay the search engine a small fee.
The PPC ads that are shown are always directly related to the keywords you entered. This means marketers can direct their ad at certain groups of users who are looking for specific services or merchandise. Consequently, PPC marketers expend a large amount of their time considering and choosing keyword phrases for which their ads should show. The ones who are ready to invest the highest fee per click will receive the greatest exposure for their advertisements. But, the advertisement display order doesn’t only depend on cost per click the advertisers is willing to pay. There are several other things, like ad relevance and click-thru rate that all these PPC positioning systems consider.