Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per Click (PPC) in the Google advertising programme is a system devised by Google for showing text ads on a web site. Google was the inventor of this online advertising system and now dominates the online advertising market. Prior to Google Adwords and Adsense, the main method of marketing a website was with Banners and other individually placed text ads on accommodating websites where arrangements with various webmasters had to be instigated on a case-by-case basis between themselves.
Googles system was the first real way that text advertising on webpages and websites was able to be done automatically and since then Google has become the dominant search engine on the internet today with 61% market share.
Since Google devised the system to show text ads or as it is correctly known, contextual advertising, there have been and still are numerous other search engines offering contextual advertising like Yahoo and their paid search and also Bing offers paid search results but no one comes close to Googles Market share so we will stick to discussing their programme for this article.
Adwords is where advertisers advertise and adsense is where those publishers get paid for showing those adwords ads.
All contextual advertising online now works the same way. An advertiser picks their keywords, writes up an ad, gives it to a website search engine and that ad gets shown on a publishers website whenever someone asks for those keywords. It's a simple system for advertisers and publishers alike that works remarkably well.
Now if you were to advertise with one of these search engine networks, you would have to pay money to them every time someone clicked on one of your ads. When you took out the ad with whichever programme provider you decided to use, you would have had to say how much you were prepared to pay per click and probably how much you were prepared to spend each day or on each advertising campaign. As an advertiser, it is very important that you get this right because if you don't, you could be paying the account off long into the future.
All these advertisers need web sites on which to show their ads, so this is where the publishers come into play. A publisher is a web master or website owner who designs and publishes a website. They need a way to monetise it and make it make a return on their investment (R.O.I )
Websites are usually built with a purpose, but if there are ways to make more money from a website, naturally there are many willing webmasters prepared to show other ads as well as their own goods and services. This then becomes what in business is called "a value ad" to their business. For the sake of clarity here in this case 'a value ad' means an added value to their business.
The publisher/webmaster places a piece of code given to them by the PPC search engine provider on their website so this code will then insert relevant ads based on what the subject matter is in your website. So if I had a website about "poor little Widgets" I would see ads from advertisers advertising anything to do with "widgets" and the closer their ad matches the content of my page and if I as a publisher show their ad "above the fold" then I can expect to receive a nice payment when someone clicks on that ad.
The online advertising world has opened up in the past two years and now give Publishers a choice of whether to show contextual ads, video ads, image ads or a mixture of all types. The contextual ad is still the most common and no doubt you are quite used to seeing the "Ads by Google" inserted somewhere into websites as you have surfed the 'net.
Pay Per Click Affiliates are those webmasters/publishers who monetise their websites with advertising that they get paid for whenever someone clicks on one of the ads.
