About Pay Per Click Advertising

History

A small company that would later become part of Yahoo! first introduced pay per click advertising in 1998. Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing still remain on top in the pay per click advertising market. Other pay per click-based search engines include Ask and Looksmart. Pay per click is a cheap way of advertising, but the results are not always favorable. Traffic is almost guaranteed, but a purchase or other desired action is not.

Search Engines

Search engines commonly use bidding as their form of pay per click advertising. An advertiser will submit its advertisement along with a list of keywords. An advertiser will then choose an amount, usually in cents, that he is willing to pay per click. Most times these types of advertisements are going to appear at the top, or side, of the search results as a sponsored link or sponsored advertisement.

Content Sites

Advertisers also have taken a huge interest in placing advertisements on content websites. These types of sites normally charge a flat fee per click and do not utilize a bidding system like the search engines. The fee is charged per each unique click. A unique click is one click per user, and therefore eliminates overpaying for clicks that may be generated from the same user clicking multiple times.

Cost

The cost per click varies immensely for different websites and different search engines. Many times the cost per click will be dependent on the amount of information on the topic already sponsored in the search engine listings. Content websites normally charge a flat fee based on your advertisement size, content and placement. They may charge more for high traffic page placement, but typically the fees are not as costly as search engine sponsored listings.

Incentive-based Paid to Click

Paid to click incentive sites offer cheap advertising for those looking to market their product or service through pay per click advertising. The problem for the advertiser is that the end user who is clicking on their link is normally only clicking to gain the incentive. Most paid to click websites offer a fraction of a penny per each unique click to their members. The advertiser decides how often a user can be compensated for a click.