Pay Per Click, or PPC Advertising can be a very quick way to drive targeted search engine traffic to your website. Basically, the PPC model involves choosing an PPC search engine, such as Google Adwords, starting an account, and start receiving traffic to your website. Simple enough, right? Yes, and no.

Although you can quickly setup a PPC account and start receiving traffic to your website, if you don’t know the basics of how PPC programs work, at the very least, you may find yourself amongst the many who spend a lot of money, get no results, and end up jaded, and convinced that paid search marketing is a rip off or doesn’t work at all.

Actually, PPC advertising can be a very lucrative and successful online marketing tool if used and managed correctly. I can’t tell you that there is an exact method to creating and managing a PPC campaign, but there are absolutely guidelines that should be followed to help to ensure a successful Pay Per Click campaign.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a form of Search Engine Marketing in which you bid on selected keywords, create ads that will be shown on the search engine, and then you pay only for the actual clicks on the ad. PPC advertising is also known as “paid search”.

There is a difference between a paid search campaign, or PPC, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can learn more about SEO in other posts, but. Basically SEO involves optimizing your website for “natural” or “organic” results in the search engines, which you do not pay for when users click on your listings, while PPC results appear in the “Sponsored Results” sections of search engines. Here is an example, in Google of the difference between paid and organic search engine results:

Google Search Results - PPC vs Organic

The green portion in this graphic represents the areas where Paid Search Results (PPC) appear in Google’s search results, while the blue portion represents the organic listings.

If you are considering starting a PPC campaign, it is a very wise idea to learn as much about it as you can or hire a Search Engine Marketing Professional to manage your PPC campaign to ensure your marketing dollars are spent most effectively.