Pay per click is a very simple concept. Businesses design adverts that they want to have shown on other peoples websites, but rather than paying when the advert is shown, they only pay when someone actually clicks on the advert. Pay per click advertising is a rapidly growing advertising channel with more and more companies getting involved all the time. The beauty of pay per click advertising is that costs are much more controllable because you are not paying just for your advert to be shown, you are only paying when someone has enough interest to click on your advert.



In traditional advertising, media owners are much less concerned by the performance of adverts. If a magazine carries an advert it has no idea how many people are interested in the product. If however, an online magazine carries an internet pay per click advert it is very concerned about performance, because if nobody clicks on the advert, the advertiser is not charged, and the publisher gets no payment.

Pay per click advertising works in lots of different ways, but there are two major types. Channel based pay per click services look at the subject of a website and place it in a category, for example a website about recipes would be placed in a cookery category. All the adverts shown on that site would therefore be related to cooking. The other type of pay per click advertising is keyword based. Keyword based advertising looks at the words on a specific page of a website and chooses adverts that match those keywords. Each system has its own pros and cons, and in practice using a combination of pay per click services is often the best solution.

When setting up a pay per click campaign the importance of the advert text cannot be overstated. The first thing to do is to study competitors pay per click adverts. Look at the language they use and think which ones would encourage you to click. Always consider what part of the text motivates the user to click on the advert. In practice that last line should include what is referred to as a call to action. This line should induce the viewer to click on the advert. With pay per click advertising, getting the text right can make all the difference.

Tom is writing for Netklix about pay per click advertising.