PPC or Sponsored Results

PPC or Sponsered Results - How does it work?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Sponsored listings are used in order to help establish a website on a search engine's result pages when the common generic listings are not providing top positioning. By paying a PPC provider a fee it is possible to have a listing within the top few results given by a search engine. For this reason, PPC is a nice solution when a website is starting to establish a relationship with these search engines, which has developed into a sometimes long term project. But like everything, there is more to the process than just paying a fee.

There are dozens of people advertising for the PPC phrase "LA Dentist" and Google is only going to display a few of these at any given time. Who is eliminated when not everyone can be displayed? Google looks at several factors. 1) Google is going to display those that have a bigger budget. They are looking at making as big a profit as possible, so Google is going to display the adds that bring in the most money for them. 2) When the higher paying PPC clients exhaust their budget then they are dropped from the list and the lesser budget advertisements get a chance. 3) Google is also worried about relevance. They will choose to display adds that have been clicked on more often. To Google, clicks prove relevance. If a site or an add is picked by a wide margin more than another then it must truly be about that searched for subject. 4) Another factor is randomization. If you were to rely simply on the above factors then a newly added PPC add with a smaller budget would never appear, especially when there are dozens or more deep pocket PPC clients to compete with. In LA you can expect many, many dozens of competing clients. So, a small percentage of adds are displayed randomly, or once in a while, to give them a chance for occasional click through. When they are clicked on a few times then factor 3 above promotes their rate of display. 5) History; the longer an add has been running the greater the relevance granted.