Pay Per Click advertising has been around since 1998, one of the earliest years of when the internet started gaining widespread, worldwide usage for both personal and business usage. By 2009 it’s estimated that $15 billion has been spent to date on Pay Per Click advertising. And that spending is accelerating – FAST. Forrester Research estimates $31 billion will be spent in Pay Per Click advertising in 2014 and by that year Pay Per Click will take up a large portion (21%) of all money spent on advertising in all mediums.
Google is at the forefront of Pay Per Click advertising with their Adwords Pay Per Click program. Their 2008 revenue was about $22 billion, 97% of which was from advertising revenues.
What Is Pay Per Click Advertising?
The simplest way of defining this type of advertising is as follows. First, you make an arrangement for a partner company to host your advertisements online on their site. Whenever someone visits that partner’s site and is interested in ones of your ads they can click it and get brought to a page on your website or other page you specify. You then pay that partner company a certain amount of money for each person who takes this exact action of clicking your ad once.
The amount you pay that partner company per click, when and where your ad displays, how often it displays, and so on are all variables we’ll explore in depth in this e-book.
The Origins And Early Evolution Of Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay Per Click wasn’t around in the early days of the internet. Pay Per Impression was how online advertising started out. An impression is an ad appearing on a user’s screen a single time. Advertisers would pay a pre-determined amount to their ad hosts to have their ads displayed a specific number of times or impressions. The more a company was willing to pay, the more often they could have their ads displayed, and the more sites those ads could be displayed on. The problem with this early internet advertising was that advertisers had their ads displayed on search results pages or pages with content that had little or nothing to do with what was advertised or what their company offered. Consequently, few people clicked these ads, and so advertisers received limited return on investment for their advertisements.
