What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising? Pay-per-click advertising is a form of digital marketing, originally developed as a method of creating revenue for search engines. Along with organic (non-paid) search results, paid ads make up a second list of results. Ads appear alongside the organic (non-paid) results on a search engine results page (SERP), companies paying to their links displayed in this sponsored section. You can think of it as buying visits to your site instead of earning those visits organically through search engine optimization (SEO). As the name suggests, businesses running the PPC ads are only charged when a user clicks on their ad. There numerous PPC ads, the most common being search engine advertising, as explained above. Google ads are by far the most popular, Bing coming in a distant second. Google ads are the main subject of this article. Other types of PPC advertising include display advertising (banner ads) and remarketing where people see an ad because they previously interacted with your company. With display ads, the owner of a webpage allows businesses to advertise on their website. Also referred to as contextual advertising, keywords in the content of the webpage trigger what ads visitors are shown.