Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC, is a form of online marketing strategy that involves visitors being pointed to the marketer's website after clicking on an advertisement, and the marketer pays for each visitor on a per-click basis. The actual payment rates are usually determined through a bidding process with the advertisers bidding higher for the keywords that they deem as more important. Advertisers maintain an inventory of the keywords on which they want to be visible in the search results and keep updating their bids for this inventory set so as to maximize the ROI on PPC expenditure.
Perhaps the best known example of PPC advertising is that of Google AdWords. Advertisers who utilize PPC services through Google AdWords have their ads listed with the Google SERPs. A common way of getting a high volume relevant traffic to a website involves running pay per click campaigns for the relevant keywords. These pay per click campaigns are generally managed by online marketing firms offering PPC services and can be run on several platforms like Google AdWords, Yahoo search marketing, MSN adCenter etc. At present Google AdWords is the biggest PPC platform with partnership with millions of websites that offer their web real estate for advertisements through Google AdWords.
Running a successful PPC campaign consists of several challenging activities viz. identification of relevant keywords, devising an optimal bidding strategy for the pay per click campaign and tracking and monitoring the campaign. A competent PPC service provider takes into account the unique requirements of each client in terms of the keywords, competition as well as the budgetary considerations before tailoring a PPC campaign suitable for the client. When properly managed with the support of capable PPC services, a targeted campaign can be very productive for online businesses.