Definition of PPC Advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a form of advertising in which payment to publishers (website owners), is based on the number of clicks that are made on a given advertisement. You are likely to hear it also being referred to as Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. There are several angles from which you can look at PPC advertising. Here are a couple of them;
- PPC Advertising from a Publisher’s Point of View
If you are a website owner, PPC advertising offers one of the best ways through which you can monetize your site. We have previously written a number of articles in which we talk about some of the site monetization strategies that you can use to generate revenue during the course of the current year.
Google AdSense
Google AdSense is one of the companies that are usually mentioned whenever publishers talk about Pay Per Click Advertising. AdSense represents one of the best ways through which you can monetize your website. It pretty much dominates the market, as far as PPC ads are concerned.
AdSense Alternatives
The thing, however, is that AdSense is known for being somewhat temperamental. Stories abound of people who have been kicked out after violating one of the company’s many laws or the other. There are a number of reasons why you may find yourself at the wrong end of the AdSense Juggernaut.
An AdSense Ban is, however, not the end of the world. There are a lot of AdSense alternatives out there, many of which we have previously reviewed on this very blog. Your returns will likely take a huge knock should you go for the alternatives, but its still better than nothing.
How Does PPC Advertising work for Publishers
Getting PPC advertisements on your blog is simple enough from a publisher’s point of view. All that you need to do is sign up for an AdSense or AdSense Alternative account. Afterwards, you paste the code that you are given onto the area where you wish to have the ads displayed.
That’s it. Ads will now be displayed on your website and you get paid every time that someone clicks on the advertisement.
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Estimates indicate that you actually need a thousand visitors to your blog to earn a single dollar through the AdSense program. And, as we note in this article, once you begin to get more than a thousand visitors, there are ways that are better than AdSense, of turning the traffic into income.
- PPC Advertising from an Advertiser’s Point of View
From an advertiser’s point of view, PPC advertising is a great way through which you can get the word out about your brand, products and services. One of the things that you will discover as a business owner is that getting Organic Search traffic is a notoriously difficult undertaking. That is particularly the case if you are just setting out.
It takes time for your blog or website to begin to generate the kinds of traffic that make it a meaningful contributor to your bottom line. That is despite the fact that you may have done everything right, including by fulfilling all the murky requirements of Search Engine Optimization and by running vibrant Social Media awareness campaigns.
Google AdWords
Where publishers use Google AdSense to get PPC advertisements displayed on their sites, businesses use Google AdWords to get their advertisements displayed on Google Search and through the AdSense program. In other words, the Google AdSense program is how the advertisements that are created through AdWords are delivered to target audiences.
Google relies on keywords to get relevant advertisements displayed on relevant search results or on relevant websites. It allows you to set a budget for your advertising campaign, and you pay for each click that is made on your ad.
Paid Search
Paid Search gives you a certain degree of control over the flow of traffic to your site. Using ad placement agencies such as Google AdSense, Chitika and Viglink, you can bid to have your ads placed at the top of Search results for particular keywords. You also get the ability to get the word out about your brand, products and services when your ads are placed on relevant sites across the World Wide Web.
You can run the campaign yourself
The good news is that it is possible for you as an advertiser to run a CPC campaign on your own. Getting started is only a matter of signing up with any of the Ad Placement services that we have mentioned above. Once that is done, you can bid to have your ads shown whenever certain keyword searches are made.
PPC Agencies
Running a PPC campaign on your own can, however, be time consuming and difficult. That is one of the reasons why there are companies out there to whom you can assign this task. Hiring a PPC agency comes with a number of advantages, not least of which are the savings in terms of time that you make.
Unless you have a dedicated team in-house that has the requisite skills, you will soon discover that running your own PPC can be time consuming. There are a number of things that need to be done, from keyword research and creating your advertisements.
Although all these are definitely doable tasks, it is usually better for you to leave the running of CPC advertising campaigns in the capable hands of professionals.
A Final Note
This article has uniquely looked at PPC advertising from both the standpoint of a publisher and that of an advertiser. There is, of course, a third angle; that of an Ad Placement service such as Google AdSense. However, that is a story for another day.
Needless to say here that CPC advertising is a type of advertising where website owners are paid according to the number of clicks that are made on advertisements that are placed on their sites. There are a wide range of Ad Placement services out there that you can use to get ads on your site. However, the best known is Google AdSense.
From a business’s point of view, Pay Per Click advertising allows you circumvent the rudiments of organic traffic, by putting out paid ads that allow you to turn the trickle of traffic to your site into a tide. One of the best known PPC ad programs is Google’s AdWords. This program allows you to create your advertisements and set a budget for your campaign. Money is deducted from your account each time that your ad is clicked on.
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