What is PPC?
PPC is pay-per-click advertising — you place an ad and pay only when someone clicks it, rather than paying for it to be shown.
PPC is pay-per-click advertising — you place an ad and pay only when someone clicks it, rather than paying for it to be shown.
Pay-per-click is the dominant model for search advertising and is widely used on social platforms too. Advertisers bid on keywords or audiences, the platform runs an auction each time an ad could be shown, and the winner pays when the ad is clicked. What you pay depends on your bid, on the competition, and on how relevant the platform judges your ad and landing page to be.
That last factor is why PPC is not simply an auction for the highest bidder. Platforms score relevance because a poor ad that nobody clicks makes them less money than a good one at a lower bid — which means improving the ad and the page it points to can lower what you pay per click as well as raise your position.
For a local business the important structural decisions are geographic and intent-based rather than about bidding. Targeting a realistic service area and separating urgent searches from considered ones typically move cost per booked job more than any bid strategy.
PPC is the only marketing channel that produces traffic on the day it is switched on, which makes it the right tool when you need work now and the wrong one as the only thing you do — the moment you stop paying, it stops entirely.
Judging it on cost per click. A cheap click from someone forty minutes outside your service area costs more than an expensive one from a customer who books.
PPC is part of paid advertising
Understanding the term is the easy half. The service page describes what the work actually involves, and the free assessment says whether it is the thing your business should be spending on next — which is frequently a different question.
Things that come up alongside it
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