Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.
It’s easiest to understand what CPC is when you compare it to the other 2 popular advertising models.
- Cost per thousand (CPM), where M is the roman numeral of 1000. When used in advertising it relates to the cost per thousand page impressions (displays). Every time a user views a web page with that ad, regardless of whether or not he notices or interacts with the ad. This type of advertising is useful for branding purposes, when a website visit or action is less important than inserting a corporate image into as many visitors as possible.
- Cost per action (CPA), sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement. The advertiser pays independent of ad impressions or ad clicks. Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred.
Cost per click advertising is a safe model for advertisers, since they only pay for ads that effectively bring visitors to their web page. Once at the destination, the visitor can interact with the web site owner in any way, such as e-mail or phone, to complete the sale.
CPC is important to JobShuk because we encourage as many buyers and vendors to communicate in any way possible, so we wouldn’t dream of suppressing business contact information (a technique used to safeguard CPA-supported websites). Nevertheless, we intend to safeguard advertisers from paying for ads which may not be noticed (which occurs when paying CPM).
JobShuk occasionally runs campaigns on other websites, buying large quantities of ad impressions, and using our home-grown technology to rotate those ads on a cost per click basis. This is a great opportunity to buy small quantities of ads on big sites to fit your budget, while getting a reasonable amount of exposure and paying only for interested parties.
(Portions of this page taken from Wikipedia)