Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

E-marketing is my business so it probably comes as no surprise that I use the term “pay-per-click advertising” fairly often. What is surprising – to me anyway – is the frequency with which I get silence, blank stares or – my personal favorite – “what’s paperclip advertising?” as a response.

This isn’t a slam against anyone not understanding pay-per-click advertising. If anything, I’m outing myself for being guilty of using jargon, that’s not the point of this article. The point is: A lot of people don’t know what pay-per-click advertising is. Some of them are reading this blog.

So I’m going to take the time to talk about it. Mainly so I’ll have a place to send someone the next time they ask me what paperclip advertising is. I don’t know how to make it interesting so I’ll make it short.

If you’re reading this bog, chances are good you’ve used a search engine plenty of times yourself. You type a phrase into a box, click Search, and wait a few seconds for the results page to appear.

What you may not realize is the results page shows you two different types of listings.

The listings in the center of the page are organic (also called natural and / or non-paid) listings. These are descriptions of web pages the search engine thinks are relevant to your search term, and the order of the listing is based on a complex and well-guarded algorithm known in its entirety to very few.

The listings in the right column and sometimes at the top of the search results page are actually paid listings – often called sponsored links. The advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks on the link. This is “pay-per-click advertising”.

You also see pay-per-click ads on websites and blogs – often below or above a heading that says “Ads by Google”. These can be text ads much like you see on a search engine:

Or display ads like this one:

And that is pay-per-click advertising. Thank you for sticking with me.

Oh. Pay-per-click advertising is also called PPC advertising. Don’t let it fool you.