Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

An online advertising campaign that a company pays for only when users interact with the ads. Instead of paying for your ads to simply show up on a publisher’s website, you pay for user clicks. Pay-per-click (PPC) refers to this type of campaign. Cost per click (CPC) refers to the actual cost: the campaign fee divided by the number of clicks equals the cost per click. For example, if you pay $1,000 for a campaign that receives 50,000 clicks, your CPC is $0.02.

Example

An example of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is when a company bids on keywords related to their business, and their ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for those keywords. The company only pays when users click on their ads, not just for the ad placement itself. For instance, if a user searches for “best running shoes” and clicks on an ad for a shoe company, that click generates a cost for the company running the PPC campaign.