What PPC means
Pay-per-click advertising puts your ad in front of people — on Google search, social feeds, or other sites — and you pay only when someone clicks. On search, you bid on keywords; the auction weighs your bid and your ad's quality to decide placement and price. That second part trips people up. A higher bid doesn't guarantee the top spot, because Google ranks you on Ad Rank, which folds in a Quality Score built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing-page experience. So a sharper ad with a faster, on-topic page can outrank a competitor paying more — and pay less per click doing it. The appeal is speed and control: traffic starts the day you turn it on, and stops the day you pause.
Where PPC runs
Search ads (Google, Microsoft) capture people actively looking. Paid social (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn) reaches people by interest and behaviour before they're searching. Shopping ads show products directly, with image and price in the result. There's also display and YouTube for reach and retargeting, where you're paying to stay in front of people who already know you. Each channel suits a different goal, and most serious programs use more than one — but combining them badly just spreads a thin budget thinner. Match the channel to where your buyer actually is in their decision, not to which platform a rep pitched you last.
The numbers that actually matter
Cost per click is the metric everyone fixates on, and it's the wrong one to lead with. What you care about is cost per acquisition — what a customer costs — and return on ad spend, the revenue each dollar brings back. A campaign with expensive clicks and a 4× return beats one with cheap clicks that convert no one. To see any of this you need conversion tracking wired up correctly, which is where a surprising number of accounts fall apart: they optimise toward clicks because that's all they measure. My blunt take — until conversion tracking is trustworthy, every other PPC decision is a guess wearing a suit.
Why most PPC underperforms
The clicks are easy; the conversion is hard. Money leaks through broad-match keywords with no negative-keyword list, a single landing page for every ad, and campaigns nobody has touched since launch. New accounts also tend to judge results in week one — but the algorithm needs conversion data to learn, and a fortnight of patience often beats a fortnight of panicked edits. The teams that win pair tight account structure with conversion work, because a click you don't convert is just spend with extra steps.