What is PPC? < The Organic SEO

What is PPC?

29 Dec 2006 at 15:26 by Eric Morgan

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of internet marketing. Although it is usually search engine based it is entirely different from SEO.

PPC is simply that, pay-per-click. You sign your website up on a search engine or a larger website and pay for every time someone clicks to your website. You do not pay if someone just sees your ad, they must click on it and load your website on their computer. It also is different from a PPA, Pay Per Aquisition, where you only pay per sale.

Pay per click is an effective means of advertising especially if you have a very high conversion ratio of visitors to sales or leads on your website. If you have a low conversion ratio it will be largely an expense with a negative ROI. Over the last few years as PPC has become more and more popular, especially on Google (Adwords) and Yahoo (Overture), it has become more and more expensive. The price you pay per click depends on your industry, namely how many of your competitors are competing for the keywords and how big your profit margins are. For example someone selling a t-shirt online will be willing to pay less per website visitor than someone selling homes. Although this is a popular form of advertising and does work well for some more website owners are turning to SEO to generate leads and sales and ditching PPC because of its recent exploding popularity.

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Comments

I generally stay away from using PPC due to the rising costs involved. You can find similar (even better) results from targeted SEO instead of a PPC campaign.

A good resource to see what advertisers might expect to pay for keyword phrases can be found at: http://pixelfast.com/overture

Posted by: Christer Edwards at December 30, 2006 06:47 PM

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