What is pay-per-click (PPC)?
Pay-per-click is a way of buying advertising where showing the ad is free and the click is what costs money. It is best known from paid search: when someone searches on Google or Bing, the sponsored results at the top of the page are PPC ads, placed by advertisers who bid on the words in that search. The same model runs on social platforms, shopping ads, marketplaces such as Amazon and many display networks.
PPC is the model; cost per click, or CPC, is the price. People also use PPC loosely to mean paid search as a whole, as in a PPC specialist or a PPC budget. The model works because a click is a signal of intent the advertiser can put a value on, which makes its price easy to weigh against a sale.
Why it matters
Why PPC matters
It puts ads in front of people at the moment they are looking. Someone who searches for a product, a service or a problem has already declared an interest, and PPC lets a business answer that interest directly, often within minutes of launching a campaign. Because the advertiser pays only for clicks and can track what those clicks do, PPC is one of the most measurable and controllable ways to spend money on advertising.
It is also a fast teacher. Search terms reveal how customers describe what they want, and the performance of different ads shows which messages persuade them, lessons that feed back into the website, the product and the brand.
In practice
How PPC works in practice
- 01
An advertiser chooses keywords or audiences, writes ads, and sets bids and a budget. Each time a relevant search happens, the platform runs an auction among the advertisers in it, weighing bids against quality signals such as expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. The winners are shown, and each pays when their ad is clicked, typically a little more than it needed to beat the next competitor.
- 02
Running a PPC account well is ongoing work: organizing keywords into tight groups, adding negative keywords to block irrelevant searches, testing ad copy, sending each group to the page that best answers it, tracking conversions properly and adjusting bids or automated targets as results arrive. Most accounts now rely on the platforms' automated bidding, which makes clean conversion data the most important input of all.
Watch out
What people get wrong about PPC
Thinking it is a tap you turn on. PPC brings visitors; it does not make them buy. If the landing page is slow, vague or disconnected from the ad, the clicks are paid for and wasted. The other mistake is bidding on your own brand name and calling the results a triumph. Branded search clicks are cheap and convert well because those people were already looking for you. Judge PPC on what it adds, not on what it collects. A third is treating the ads as an afterthought: in a page of near-identical sponsored results, the one with a sharper line and a clearer offer wins the click for less.
