Pay per click or PPC as it also known is a form of performance based marketing as the advertiser only pays money if someone clicks on their ad.

Pay per click (PPC) ads usually consist of only a couple of short lines that are link to another website, which is commonly known as a landing page. A landing page may be selling a goods/ services or just giving information.

As pay per click (PPC) are limited in space and they must be attention grabbing and incorporate the AIDA marketing principles.

Pay per click (PPC) is extremely targeted, advertisers can specify exactly when their advertisements appear. The advertiser can have their advertisements shown based on a user location, the keyword(s) that the user has typed in to the search engine, the device that the user is using and many other factors.

There are many Pay per click (PPC) providers such as Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing, MSN AdCenter and Miva. Each of the providers has different systems for setting up and displaying pay per click (PPC) ads. PPC ads may be displayed on the right hand side or at the top when a search is conducted via a search engine or appear on web pages which have chosen to carry pay per click ads.

The position of where a pay per click (PPC) ads appears depends on a variety of factors, one of the most important ones is the amount of money that the advertiser is willing to pay as well as the competition for the particular keyword.

Pay per click (PPC) ads can appear within 15 minutes of being setup which allows for fast implementation of ideas, the only downside is that each click costs money. All the clicks are tracked down to keyword level which means you can see exactly which keywords have been clicked on and so return on investment can be calculated on a individual keyword basis.

Many businesses and individuals use PPC as their sole method of traffic generation and have been very successful using just PPC, the key to using PPC to produce long term profits is tracking and tweaking.

Pay per click ads also allow the advertiser flexibility to send users to a landing page of their choice which can be changed at any time this extremely useful to see if one landing page will convert better then another one. The ads that are displayed can also be varied to find out the best performing ad.

Overall pay per click (PPC) is an excellent tool for performing rapid testing and it can also be used to build a long term online business. There are lots of PPC techniques and strategies that allow advertisers to make huge profits and beat their competition.