Pay per click, or PPC advertising, is one of the most effective ways to market your business online. This Internet marketing model is used to drive traffic to a client’s website and the advertiser pays the publisher an agreed amount when the ad is clicked on by a user. With PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, making it a very cost-effective way to get exposure to potential customers.
Because PPC ads appear at the top of search engine results and are blasted across social media platforms, they are also highly visible and have the potential to reach a large number of people. In addition, PPC ads allow you to finely target your audience based on various criteria such as keyword searches and interests, allowing you to connect with potential customers who are already interested in what you have to offer.
Early Pay Per Click
It all began way back in 1996, when Yahoo and Lycos were the main search engines (Google had yet to be born) and a company called Planet Oasis launched the very first pay per click platform. The concept was simple – a home page with more than 200 banners. When a user clicked on the graphic, they are taken to the company’s landing page. No one knew that this would lead to a pay per click management service that is as big as it is today.
First Planet Oasis Clients
There were some huge names in the list of organisations that advertised on the Planet Oasis website:
- Time Warner
- Warner Bros
- New York Times
- Yahoo
These companies paid $10,000 each to have their logo/link on the home page, while smaller logos were also available at $3,000.
The Concept
Sponsors did not react well to a ‘pay per click’ basis, instead preferring fixed-fee. Despite there being benefits for the sponsor if they only pay the advertiser for every click, the initial introduction was not well received. Today, agencies work with WordPress website development services to give the advertiser a strong response.
Open Text
This company introduced a new PPC concept that allowed sponsors to bid for keywords and the advertisers continued to show displeasure at the pay per click principle, yet the concept was born and slowly but surely, pay per click became established.
In 1997, Google.com was registered and Planet Oasis had more than 400 companies using their website. As time passed, advertisers began to see the benefits of PPC and things took off.
Goto.com
While Planet Oasis strived forward, a new player, goto.com, arrived on the scene and they used a bidding model where advertisers competed with price for the banner space. This worked well for both advertiser and publisher. Prime space was going for $1 a click and soon, more companies moved into the PPC model.
Year 2000
By this time, Google’s search engine was getting 18 million uses a day, and at that point, Google decided to monetise its search engine. Google Adwords was born and within a few months, they had 350 advertisers on their books, which was the start of Google’s dominance in the field.
2004 Google Are Top Of The Tree
The company had 85% of all searches, and this was the year when Google faced Yahoo in the law courts, which ended in Google giving Yahoo $290 million in shares. Despite that setback, Google were running the show and reached that $1 billion of advertising revenue; in just 6 years, Google had wiped the floor with the competition.
Fast forward to today, and you have PPC agencies that are dedicated to managing their clients’ PPC campaigns, with Google Adwords being a major player.