Pay per click or PPC in the advertising industry is how most of the online campaigns are being managed today, especially through Google ads. For advertisers, when it comes to the question ‘what is pay per click?’, means that this is a revolutionary model since until now businesses had to “shoot blind”, investing money in campaigns results that couldn’t be measured with certainty. PPC is a concept that will help understand the meaning of digital marketing.
PPC with details
As we mentioned above, PPC is a model of digital advertising in which the advertiser pays an amount (fixed or determined by auction) each time a user clicks on one of their ads to visit their website.
The idea of a pay per click campaign is to “buy visits” to a specific site, usually with the idea of enticing the users to have a certain action such as to register or buy a product.
Although PPC is a very common option, it is not the only possible payment model for online campaigns. Therefore, it should be distinguished from others such as:
- PPM (payment per thousands): the advertiser pays a fixed amount for every thousand impressions, that is, each time the advertisement is shown a thousand times to the users. Keep in mind that with this model you wouldn’t know how much you are going to pay for each visit, since it is possible that these thousand impressions could generate many clicks, few or none.
- PPA (payment for acquisition): the advertiser pays for each time the user performs a certain action, for example, downloading an application. Therefore, the link between cost and objectives is even more obvious than in the case of the PPC.
Advantages of knowing what is pay per click
- You only pay for the visits you receive. In other advertising systems, the advertiser pays a fee for showing the ad but does not have the guarantee that it is generating results. On the other hand, with pay per click, there is a direct link between cost and visits.
- You have a lot of information about the performance of the ad. The pay per click platforms offers the advertiser complete information about what is happening with the ad, including the number of impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversions.
- Good optimization possibilities. With all this data, it is very easy to know if an ad is working or not and modify the course in real time. In fact, the most advisable strategy is to create several variants of each ad and compare them to each other to see which ones work best. This way, you can improve the ad to have better results every time.
- The ads only reach the right audience. Thanks to the multiple segmentation options, we do not waste a single click, since only the users that interest us will see the ad. This improves the results of the announcement since a user that is part of the target audience is more likely to click. As you have seen, the higher the percentage of clicks, the lower the cost of the ad.
- You can control your budget accurately. PPC systems allow you to set a maximum budget per day, and in some, you can start with just one dollar. This means that they can be adapted to advertisers of all sizes and that you can control in advance how much you are going to spend on each campaign.
- You can decide where and at what times your ad will be shown. You can show your ads on many different platforms and locations and select the ones that interest you the most. Some sites allow you to choose the days and times when your ads will be shown.
- You will achieve more positioning and visibility. Thanks to PPC, you can show your ads on some of the most visited sites by users, such as search engines, social networks or the most famous web portals.
You can find more about PPC and its advantages by visiting our Synapse Ads blog. This and other related topics are being constantly addressed in order to improve your digital marketing strategy. We also offer the Keyword Mixer, which is a tool that will help you find the best matches of keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
