PPC 101 – Introduction to Pay Per Click Marketing – Part 1

This post is part of a 2 series blog post about the Basics of Pay Per Click Marketing. In this post I will discuss the basics of PPC and how to prepare for your first campaign. PPC 101 Part 2 will be about practical aspects and touch some slightly more advanced topics. When I first started out in PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing) I knew little about this industry. I had this rough idea that PPC ads were these little yellow text ads on top of Google’s search results. When I searched for something like “buy MacBook Pro in London” I was immediately shown a few ads which were offering exactly what I was looking for. Another thing I knew is that every time I clicked on an ad Google would make money from it. Actually, a whopping 96% of Google’s revenue came from advertising in 2011. As I learned more about PPC I saw that there is much more to it than most people think. Paid Search is a very complex area of marketing, which is also quite competitive. Most retail brands already use PPC in one way or the other – either by themselves or through affiliates. If you have your own website, online shop, plan on starting one, or if you just want to learn the basics of PPC, than the following will be especially interesting for you. Before starting to set-up your first campaign you have to know a few basics, which will help you to understand how the whole process of creating and managing a PPC account really works.

PPC is Not Just About Google

One thing you need to know first: Google is not the only search engine, which provides PPC advertising services. In fact, every single search engine does it! Besides Google AdWords, there is Bing (Microsoft) adCenter, Yandex Direct (Russia) and Baidu Paid Search (China) amongst many others.