Pay for placement, or P4P, is an
Internet advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
model in which
advertisements
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
appear along with relevant search results from a
Web search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
. Under this model, advertisers bid for the right to present an advertisement with specific search terms (i.e.,
keywords) in an open
auction
An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...
. When one of these keywords is entered into the search engine, the results of the auction on that keyword are presented, with higher-ranking bids appearing more prominently on the page.
When P4P was first introduced, controversy arose because seventy percent of
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
users were unaware that search results could be skewed as a result of such agreements, which in some cases led to legal action.
Pay per click marketing is a subset of
search engine marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine op ...
. It is not a form of SEO as SEO refers to practices which are intended to improve your organic search results.
Pay per click marketing can be done through ad networks such as Google Adwords or by paying for placement on a specific site. The pricing structure of most pay per click marketing is built upon an auction model that takes keyword competition into consideration to determine the cost per click (cpc) or the cost per impression. (CPI).
See also
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Pay per action
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Pay per click
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.
Pay-per-click is usually ...
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PayPerPost
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Favored placement Favored placement (also known as preferred placement) is the practice of preferentially listing search engine results for given sites. It is also known as pay for placement, but this term usually refers to advertisements that appear along with rele ...
References
Online advertising methods
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