A quick introduction to Pay Per Click

Most website operators will want to benefit from visitor traffic that originates from search engines. Getting that traffic means getting the website to appear in search results. There are two ways to achieve this:

1. by earning the right to be there by achieving a good search engine ranking.
2. by paying to be there.

Search results that come from a good search engine ranking are known as organic search results. Search results that come from paid adverts are known as Pay Per Click (PPC) search results.

Pay Per Click in action

Suppose I search for restaurants in Windsor on Google. The first page of results looks like this:

There are two kinds of search result here: organic and Pay Per Click (PPC):

How does Pay Per Click work?

Pay Per Click works like this:

• advertisers place bids for specific search terms such as restaurants in Windsor.
• When someone searches for restaurants in Windsor, the adverts with the highest bids are displayed.
• The advertiser is charged when the searcher clicks on the advert.

Why would I use Pay Per Click?

Suppose I were a restaurant owner in Windsor. I've would love people to be able to find my website by searching for restaurants in Windsor. Let's look at the organic results for this search term more closely:

The news is not good: all of these results - and those of the send page of results - are from "directory" websites. Directory websites tend to have a lot of information, and also tend to attract a reasonable number of links from other websites. These factors help them to rank well on search engines.

Although it is possible to compete with these directory websites in organic search results, it takes time and effort: all of the activities that fall under the umbrella of "search engine optimisation."

Looking at the again at the PPC results:

This is more encouraging:

• It's important not to be too put off by the sight of "major players" in the PPC list: companies like Expedia spend a lot of money on PPC, but they will spread that money over a thousands of adverts: their bids for individual search terms may be very low.
• The great news is this particular case is that there are only two PPC results. Had I signed up for Google's Pay Per Click service (they call their PPC service AdWords), I could have found my way onto this page quite easily (i.e., for a very low bid).

Organic and PPC Compared and Contrasted

Organic and PPC have the same starting point: the selection of keywords (the words and phrases that people search for) that we can successfully compete for.

• For organic, we use the keyword research to optimise page content, develop incoming links... and do all the activities that come under the banner heading of "search engine optimisation."
• For PPC, we use the keyword research to bid for search terms.

So far, we're talked about getting onto the search results page. The next task is to get people to click though to your website.

• Organic results have a much greater chance of being clicked. A fair percentage of searchers never click the PPC results.
• For PPC ads, the key skill is the developing and testing of ad copy so that (the right) people are persuaded to click.

And the winner is...

Ah... if only it were that easy! Which is better will depend on each situation; many websites use a combination of both to great effect.

Most websites will benefit from developing strong organic results over a period of time. For websites in the early stages of development (i.e., yet to be ranked by the search engines), PPC can be good for immediate results. PPC can also be great for very targeted (or short-term) campaigns.