In the offline days long before the World Wide Web and PPC (Pay per click) ads came along, publishers as well as radio and TV stations experimented with something called PPO (pay per order) and PPR (pay per response) or PPL (pay per lead) advertising. As the names suggest, these were ads where the advertisers either paid per lead generated or order generated. But the truth is that these ads never really took off and were never widely accepted.

So what happened in the case of online PPC (pay per click) ads? What caused these kind of advertisements to become so wildly popular as they are today?

Google Launched The PPC Revolution
To answer some of these questions it is useful to go back in time a little and trace the origin of the popularity of PPC ads. There is the amazing story of well known search engine giant Google which has experienced phenomenal growth within such a short time of existence.

The Google fairy tale is still a fascinating read even today. Started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still students at Stanford, for a long time this venture grew tremendously in popularity and usage and was very widely used and yet had not found a way to generate revenue. It was obvious that charging a fee for the use of their revolutionary search engine was not the right model. That search for a way to generate revenues ended when Google was already receiving millions of visitors daily and the company just found a convenient and non-intrusive way to display advertising.

It is clear that the founders of Google realized quite early on in the game, what many others have not seen to date. That is the fact that although the Internet is widely seen as an improvement of the Television, this is not true and the web is actually an adavanced telephone more than anything else. This is easily proved by the fact that TV and the web are in fact two very different mediums. TV can accommodate a lot of advertising comfortably, but advertising on the web is usually viewed as a nuisance and intrusion into people's privacy. This is the main reason why PPC ads took off quickly even when a similar concept offline never really proved attractive to most publishers and advertisers alike.

Google looked for a way to carry advertising online to its' huge audience without intruding and came up with the idea of displaying only relevant advertisements based on searches on its' popular search engine. The idea was simple but extremely powerful and meant that somebody using keywords to search for information would end up with the organic results of their search on one side and on the other relevant advertisements on the same subject.

The next problem they had to solve was the fact that based on the huge audience they had, they would be justified in charging very high advertising rates. However the market accustomed to cheap online advertising was unlikely to accept those ad rates.

And that is how PPC ads came into use at Google. By charging only for click throughs to the site, advertisers were very happy to pay huge sums as long as it was for actual visits to their sites from people who had clicked on the Google PPC ads because they will usually have been able to generate an even larger sum of money from orders placed by a percentage of the visitors who arrived at their sites.

The rest as they say, is history. The Google PPC concept rapidly grew in popularity and is today by far, the most popular form of advertising on the web.

Others Join The PPC Party
As you read this, there are numerous other online companies and sites that offer PPC ads. They make lots of sense because advertisers can easily measure their response and sales revenue against what they have spent on advertising.

Today there are a number of interesting search programs that include PPC advertising and are well worth taking a look at because they are capable of providing the perfect solution for many online marketing and advertising problems.


Terry Detty, 42, enjoys his time away from work and getting out for a breath of fresh air occasionally. When working he mainly focuses on internet marketing, internet marketing software and email marketing.