What Actually is Pay Per Click Marketing?

Pay per click marketing also known as search engine marketing, appears at the very top and right side of a search engine results page (SERP). Search engine marketing services work by associating your ad with a keyword or phrase related to your product or service. Any time that keyword is used in a search, your PPC advertisement will be shown on the search results page. You only pay for the advertising when a customer actually clicks the link to visit your website.

The cost charged for each click depends on popularity of the keyword, the search engines assessment of how descriptive the PPC ad and keyword are to your website, and how frequently your ad is clicked as against your competitors ads. While PPC advertising shows up most often in search engine results, pay per click results may also appear on different advertising networks and various websites across the Internet.

Pay per click marketing has grown tremendously over the past 5-6 years. Google generates the vast majority of their revenue from the per click model and you can see how they continue to grow. Advertising in the "sponsored listings" will put your website at the top of the search results for whatever phrase you want to rank for. But this comes at a high price per click in many situations. Over the years, the cost has risen and Google and Yahoo have figured out how to really squeeze the most out of their advertisers. With the keyword bidding system they use, advertisers must compete for positioning to get the clicks they want.

Many affiliate marketers are able to use PPC effectively to drive traffic to their landing sites or pages to pre-sell the visitor before directing them the merchants website. This also has gotten progressively more difficult to do with a positive ROI attached. But savvy affiliates are still able to make it work for themselves. Good keyword research is necessary to uncover niche phrases that other affiliates or the merchant themselves are not utilizing. As long as the merchant is paying out enough per lead or per sale to make the affiliate a little profit they will continue.

Finally, pay per click marketing is exactly what it sounds like. You advertise to your target market by identifying the keywords and search terms your prospective customers are typing into search engines and then bidding a price per click to have your ad show up in the search engine results pages.