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PPC (pay per click). Oh, what a feeling…

Google once again revolutionized search engines by initiating PPC advertising in 2003.

The way it works is simple. You bid on keywords, and based upon how much you bid you are willing to pay for each click, your ad is seen more prevalently in the results.

You only pay if someone clicks your ad and visits your site. The first true performance based advertising, and can be applied worldwide or just in your neighborhood, or any and everywhere in between. Amazing.

Even as others adopted this methodology. Google redid it’s structure so that the relevance of your ad, the page you would be sending visitors to in relation to the keyword you were bidding on, and the track record your ad had with past visitors, would be as important as, if not more important than, your bid price for that keyword.

This means if Google determines that your ad is the most relevant, and your landing page quality is the best or near the best, your ad will be shown higher than other—-even though they might be spending more per click. They way they assign this rank to each set of ads and pages is called Quality Score. Again, they are all about the end user and the quality of their results, even the sponsored results. Also the relevance of your ad is ultimately determined by your click-through rate, the percentage of people who see your ad divided by the number of those who actually click on it.

PPC can be very very effective and has taken billions of dollars in ad revenue from traditional media, because it offers 100 percent accountability, and the ads can be edited in the blink of an eye and/or turned on and off like a switch.

Now, because SEO is complex and can be expensive, people are opting for the immediate gratification of ppc marketing. But, as the number of advertisers rise, so do the bid prices across the board.

Not to mention, but advertising correctly on Google’s Adwords system is complex and remember they have a lot of ‘quality’ criteria that could make or break you.

So Google instituted a program to train people how to use their advertising effectively and it is called the Adwords Professional program, and is quite extensive. Also, as the market is the ultimate indicator of competence in any endeavor, you cant even be elegable for the program unless you manage someone else’s advertising campaigns and budget for a minimum spend of over 1000 dollars for over 90 days, on top of taking and passing their Professional Certification Exam.

Other PPC networks.

Don’t the other search engines have Pay Per Click Advertising?

Yes, and with much different levels of traffic and cost than Google’s. And here’s a kicker: Google has a program called “Adsense” that lets website owners publish Google sponsored links along side of the site content, and shares the generated revenue with the site owner if a user clicks an ad! As people caught wind of this they started churning out non-legible, computer generated websites meant only to appeal to search engine spiders and as the number of sites they owned grew, so did their Adsense checks. People were making a killing with this and making their ’spam’ sites to only serve ads. Google cracked down and if they caught you doing it, they would take your Adsense account from you.

In Google advertising, the network of individual websites that would display Google’s ads is called the ‘Content Network’, as the advertiser is actually advertising within website content as opposed to search results.

When Google started this, there was no distinction between what a user paid for a click that came from the search results or a content ad. Even though a new advertiser could opt out at anytime of the content network, the default setting was to be included. Since Google Adwords advertising was complex to begin with, the vast majority would never know they even could opt out.

As a result, some very dubious webmasters would join the Adsense network, build millions of sites very quickly using high tech computer programs, and then have other computer programs (bots) pretend to be users and click on the ads, thus generating a literal money machine for the spammer.

Google then hired lots and lots of human editors to go through it’s index and weed out the spam, and it also started allowing users to make a different bid for the ads in the Content Network than it did for the Search Network, or the reuslts that would be shown on Google’s results and/or the results shown on the other search engines that license Google’s algorithm.

This seriously changed the game for alot of folks.

PPC Arbitrage

Remember how we said their were many other ppc networks with varying traffic and bids for the same keywords as would be served by Google?

Well, after Google slapped down on Adsense spammers who would use natural Search Engine rankings to fuel their traffic, these people decided they would just buy their traffic from one search engine and ’sell’ the traffic to a higher paying search engine and pocket the results.

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