Pay Per Click (PPC)
Sponsored Search, Paid for Search, Pay Per Click or PPC, whatever you call it, it is the same thing.
Pay per click is online advertising where searchers are directed to a website after clicking on an advertisement within a search engine.
How does it work?
Pay Per Click is underlined by relevancy. This is the association between:
Keyword -> Ad copy -> Landing page
What this means is:
Keyword: The term that is searched
Ad copy: The advertisement in the search results
Landing page: The specific page the searcher ends up on after they have clicked the ad copy
As an example
You search for “women’s shoe sale“. You see a list of advertisements with one talking about “women’s shoes on sale“. You decide to click on this ad since it is relevant to what you are looking for and find yourself arriving on a page selling women’s shoes.
If you get the relevancy of your Pay Per Click account correct then you will be attributed a high quality score.
What is Quality Score?
This is a value that the search engines give you based on the level of relevancy of your Pay Per Click account. The higher the relevancy, the higher the quality score
Why do I need a high quality score?
Pay Per Click is an auction model, the search engines will charge you a “Cost Per Click”. This means, every time your ad copy is clicked on, you will incur a charge.
The amount you are charged is based on:
Quality score X Bid Price = Cost Per Click
In this equation, the higher your quality score, the cheaper your traffic will be.