Brought to you by: Stove Popper. The concept of Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising defines a marketing promotion model that is in wide use with search engines and advertising networks. Advertisers pay the site that displays their ads only when one of these gets clicked on, hence the name of the model. All business owners promoting products or services online choose key phrases or keywords that define and address a target market. When someone researches for one of these keywords, websites will display not only page content but relevant ads too. Sometimes one may use the terms of sponsored ads or sponsored links and in fact imply PPC advertising.

The largest network operators providing the PPC advertising background are Yahoo!Search Marketing, Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter.

The packages are sometimes similar in terms of price, but high differences appear because of the level of demand for keywords. The creation of PPC advertising campaigns can be conducted in several ways, and while some web developers work independently, others hire professionals. Thus, there are two types of campaigns falling in different categories: content match and sponsored match.

Thus PPC advertising focusing on content develops campaigns that use the business web site or other pages together with newsletters and e-mails to target more relevant visitors and thus generate profit.

The sponsored match variant on the other hand shows the ad on the result pages in search engines. Thus, the advertiser earns money when the click on the ads results in a transaction, while the displayer, whether website or search engine makes profit with every click on the ads regardless of profitability or relevancy to the advertiser.

The problem with PPC advertising is that it represents a model that has often been subject to click fraud. This means that dishonest people often click on ads just to ruin the competition by increasing the pay-per-click total costs and thus make business unprofitable. Another illegal case is when the websiter advertising online orders the fraudulent clicking on the ads to receive more money. Google and the other search engines have taken all sorts of measures against such abuses, and now, the systems are capable to detect illegal clicking automatically. Nevertheless, the system is not perfect and there are lots to do to improve it 100%.