Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is an Internet marketing formula used to price online advertisements. In PPC programs the online advertisers will pay Internet Publishers the agreed upon PPC rate when an ad is clicked on, regardless if a sale is made or not. Considered to be a vital part of any Internet promotion campaign, pay per click services let advertisers create customized ads that appear every time a search engine query is made. With its various benefits, many marketing experts consider it as the most effective form of online advertisement today. Pay per click companies only count the times when a user clicks on the ad and visits that website. This is very different than other advertising schemes where they charge every time ad is displayed. This cost-effective way is a great method from start start-ups to multinational companies.
Companies that offer pay per click services match ads with what users want. If someone searches for "iPads" on Google, the pay per click company displays ads related to the query. This means that those who will see those ads are the people already interested in those products and services.
Among PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model. The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and others have implemented automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.
Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.
