| Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites,
especially search engines. Pay per click advertisements are usually text
ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount.
Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost Per Click or CPC.
The most popular pay-per-click search engines are Google AdWords and Yahoo! Overture, followed by Findwhat, Shopping.com, NexTag, Bizrate and Pricegrabber. Depending on the search
engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular
engines. Abuse of the pay per click model can result in click fraud.
PPC engines can be categorized in "Keyword" engines and "Product" engines.
Keyword PPCs
Advertisers using these bid on "keywords", which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user
searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of bidding.
The top PPC Keyword search engines are:
Product PPCs
"Product" engines let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases and when users search for a product, the links to
the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the
user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy. These engines are also called Product comparison
engines or Price comparison engines.
The top PPC Keyword search engines are:
- BizRate
- NexTag
- PriceGrabber
- Pricescan
- Pricewatch
- PriceLeap
- Shopping.com
Service PPCs
"Service" engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases and when users search for a service offering links
to advertisers for that particular product appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their
results by price or other methods. Some Product PPCs have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in
specific verticals.
Examples:
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