At its core, PPC advertising is a method of purchasing digital pay-per-click (PPC) advertising at auction. Advertisers pay only when someone clicks on an ad (or interacts with it) and don’t pay for an ad.
Cost Per Click (CPC) is the name of a reporting metric used by advertising platforms. CPC means the bid price set by the advertiser (maximum cost-per-click) and the price paid by the advertiser (collectively indicated as the average cost-per-click). Impression-based shopping is called CPM, because ads are bought based on CPM, and advertisers pay when their ads are loaded on the page.
To some extent, PPC has become a shorthand for search contextual advertising, because the purchase of PPC has been popularized by search engines. Since then, this term covers many other types of sites, including Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest and others. Advertisers can now buy display, video, social, and native pay-per-click ads.
In Russia, PPC is usually used to denote contextual advertising on search, namely text ads that appear in search results of search engines such as Google, Yandex.
Each of them has its own platform for buying advertising, with which advertisers can customize and buy text ads and advertisements based on the images that appear on the pages of its search results: Google AdWords, Yandex Direct.
In addition, with AdWords, advertisers can buy ads on the Google Display Network, which consists of millions of websites and publisher apps, as well as YouTube. Yandex Direct has a similar network - YAN (Yandex Advertising Network). Yahoo Gemini allows advertisers to buy native ads on Yahoo properties, such as the Yahoo homepage. Bing Ads simplifies regular ad purchases on Microsoft properties, such as MSN, as well as on external sites and applications on the Microsoft Audience network.
Google AdWords is by far the dominant player in the market and, as a rule, leads the market in developing new tools and features.
Why PPC (Search Engine) Advertising?
Despite the fact that over the years, PPC is becoming more sophisticated, there are two main reasons why companies of any size spend billions of dollars annually on search advertising:
