PPC Advertising › introduction 12.1 introduction Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an advertising system where the advertiser only pays for each click on their advert. Hence, pay per click. While the term is most often used to refer to the advertising system offered by search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, PPC adverts are also run on content sites and social networks. PPC advertising continues to evolve, and formats available range from simple text adverts through to Flash banners and even video adverts. PPC advertising revolutionised the online advertising industry, and today, PPC advertising generates 99% of Google’s revenue. Google reported revenues of $8.44 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2010, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. PPC is big business! In this chapter, we’ll focus on PPC advertising on search engines and social networks. PPC adverts on search engines are easy to spot – they’re the results listed as “sponsored links”. They can appear on the top of the results page, usually in a box, and also on the right hand side of the results page. Figure 12.1 PPC adverts appearing in a search for viral marketing. PPC advertising on search engines is keyword based – this means that it is based on the search term that a user enters into a search engine. A search term can have one word, or be made up of many words. Sometimes a multi- word search term is referred to as a “key phrase” or “keyword phrase”. Advertisers target those keywords for which they want to appea