Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Pay per click search engines has become an integrated part of search engine optimization. They are all based on the auction principle. You make a bid for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, and the amount decide the ranking.



Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

By searching,there are hundreds of pay per click search engines,but the most popular are Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Depending on the search engine, prices per click is between US$0.01 and US$0.50. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Abuse of the pay per click model can result in click fraud.



Parties Involved

In this area, a publisher is a webmaster that displays ads from the advertiser.In order to bring together advertisers and publishers,a number of advertising networks where established. they are often search engines, who already had many advertisers as clients, who they could link up with other publishers. The advertising network collects the money from the advertisers, and passes a portion onto the publisher.

Google is an example of this. Often these combined search engines and advertising networks,are referred to simply as PPC engines.

Categories

PPC engines can be categorized in "Keyword", "Product", "Service" engines. However, a number of companies may fall in two or more categories. More models are continually evolving. Currently, pay per click programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for sites that display the ads. Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the ad itself.

- Keyword PPCs

Advertisers using these bid on keywords, which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of bidding. Keywords, or search terms, are the very heart of pay per click advertising.

There are hundreds of Keyword pay per click search engines. Notable PPC Keyword search engines include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture Services), Microsoft adCenter, LookSmart, Miva (formerly FindWhat), Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves), 7Search, Kanoodle, and Baidu.

- Product PPCs

Product engines engines are also called Product comparison engines or Price comparison engines. Product engines let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases and when users search for a product, the links to the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy.

BizRate.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, and Shopping.com,are noteworthy PPC Product search engines from hundreds of them.

- Service PPCs

Service engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases and when users search for a service offering links to advertisers for that particular service appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their results by price or other methods. Some Product PPCs have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in specific verticals.

Some of the PPC services include NexTag, SideStep, and TripAdvisor.

- Pay per call

Similar to pay per click, pay per call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate. The term "pay per call" is sometimes confused with "click to call". Click-to-call, along with call tracking, is a technology that enables the ?pay-per-call? business model.

Pay-per-call is not just restricted to local advertisers. Many of the pay-per-call search engines allows advertisers with a national presence to create ads with local telephone numbers.