Pay Per Click Advertising, also known as PPC or Paid Ads, are adverts created by you that appear usually on search engines when a potential customer searches for a keyword you have selected. If that customer clicks through to your website, by clicking on that ad, you pay an amount as defined by you and the search engine.

Where do the ads appear?

These adverts appear above the organic search engine results, and are labelled with an “Ad” marker. Your ads position is based on an auction, with rules defined by each search engine.

The rules defined by each search engine, mean it’s not a straight ‘whoever bids most gains the top position’ type of auction. The search engines take a lot of other factors into consideration to ensure they show the best, most relevant ads to the searcher, and provide the searcher (who is their customer too) with the best search experience. 

Only the search engines know the exact formula they use to determine your positioning (or Ad Rank) in the auction, but three of the big deciding factors (for Google, Bing, AOL and Yahoo) are –

1. Your Cost per Click (or CPC) – what you are you willing to pay when your ad is clicked
2. Your Ad Relevance at the time of the auction – including relevance to searcher’s location and other searcher signals
3. Your ads performance – for example, expected and historical click-through rate, landing page experience

Will PPC work for you?

PPC advertising won’t work for everyone. For competitive industries and sectors, the CPC’s you are expected to pay for the top spots can get really high, and if the return isn’t more than this, it’s not going to be profitable for you. For those that have a slightly more niche product or service, or who know their product or service is proven to be better than the competition it could be worth a test. 

Please remember, that as with all paid advertising, you aren’t guaranteed any sales. If you are thinking of testing PPC ads on Google Ads or Bing Ads, make sure you have a clear idea of the money you are willing to spend on the ads, and what kind of return you want to achieve. PPC ads will need to be continually optimised, so if you are thinking of running them, make sure you have the time you will need to invest properly in their success (or to outsource to an agency/freelancer).

When done properly they can help make your business even more successful, but to invest in them properly and to get a good return, they need to be done right, with a lot of care and attention.