Pay Per Click or PPC for short is a form of Online marketing that focuses on increasing a websites sponsored search engine results. At the to top of the search engine results there is a section for the sponsored results listings, highlighted with a pastel coloured background, separating the sponsored links from the natural search engine results.  A PPC specialist will build a clients PPC campaign, which will detail ad campaigns, keywords, daily budget amounts and more. A well built PPC campaign will rank highly within the sponsored results, the daily budget of the campaign must also outbid their competitors budgets. Each time a pay per click ad is clicked upon within the search engine, the website owners pay the search engine a set amount each click.

PPC can be a very positive form of Online marketing, although at the same time it can also be very expensive, when compared to other forms of Online marketing such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Even so, because PPC creates instant results, it may be wise to start with a PPC campaign while your sites keywords are gaining ranking through SEO.  Gradually reducing the PPC campaign as the natural search engine traffic for your website increases reducing the paid search traffic flow.

For pay per click to be effective it needs to be built correctly from the foundations, the ads must be exciting promoting click through traffic. It is important to build a PPC campaign right from the very beginning, introducing sub sections that reflect each product/service area within a site. For example if you are an Online fabric store, you will have a section for fabric, which will include all the items under this range, a separate section for haberdashery and so forth. If for what ever reason you no longer stock “Silk Fabric” you can simply pause or delete this category within the PPC campaign.

Managing a PPC campaign requires a structured marketing mind, you must be able to write interesting adverts that promote your site. A pay per click campaign should also be monitored on a regular basis. For instance if a particular ad gains a lot of click through impressions, although only a small conversion rate, you may want to consider lowering the budget on this particular group, and perhaps adapting the keywords making them more specific to the products/service being advertised.

To conclude Pay Per Click is a strong form of online marketing, although I would not rely on PPC for a long term – Personally I would build a site to be well search engine optimised and increase a sites natural search engine listings.  Pay Per Click is a good short term method for increasing the traffic to a site.