What Is Pay Per Click (PPC)?

Having spoken to clients about online marketing, it appears that web designers are still using acronyms (e.g. PPC) without explaining what they mean or using examples. As you will see from the screen shot below, there is PPC in the SERP… make sense?! No? If someone came up to you and said they had “PPC in their SERP”, you’d probably tell them to go to the Doctors! PPC stands for Pay Per Click and SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page… so nothing too complicated; but what does that mean in the real world?

Using the example below, the search results with the orange back ground and down the right hand side are Pay Per Click results. This means they are paying to be there, but only when a user browsing the internet clicks on the link does the company actually pay. Pay Per Click can work very well, because you are paying for people to visit your site when they type something relevant into the search engine and click on your site.

Using the example Pay Per Click key phrase of ‘building surveyors’; to be in the top position you would pay on average £4.50 every time someone clicked on your link with an estimated 43 clicks a day. This would be a daily cost of £193.50 for 43 people to visit your site.

This is when ROI (Return On Investment) comes into play, if out of those 43 clicks you sell enough of your products and services to make a profit of over £200.00 then you are making a return on your investment (all be it a small one in this case); however, if you were making a profit of £2,000.00 out of those 43 clicks, you’d make nearly 1000% ROI!

Pay Per Click is best looked at with real examples within your business sector and your own companies products and services. Within each business sector there will be some keywords and phrases that are expensive, and others that are cheaper. We will happily run through some examples on ways PPC can work best for your business, please feel free to contact us to discuss in better detail.