Learn about the history of PPC...

The Pay Per Click revolution, also referred to as Cost Per Click (CPC), first started in 1998 by a company called Goto.com, which was owned by Overture. Overture was later bought by Yahoo! who re-branded this service Yahoo! Search Marketing. Later in 2000 Google launched their PPC service called Google AdWords.

The idea behind Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is that any company, big or small, can decide their search engine rankings for a certain keyword themselves. This is regulated by how much the company is willing to pay/bid for the keyword in question.

Back in the late nineties the search engines algorithms weren't as advanced as today which meant they were sometime having difficulties finding relevant content for each search. This led to huge sites ruled this world while the smaller sites were struggling to been seen. This has now been improved so smaller "one man bands" can compete with large multi-national companies.

For the past couple of years more people has shown an interested in bidding for keywords, which has led to an increase in costs and competitiveness. This has led to less serious companies employing click fraud tactics were someone will click on competitor’s ads in order to drain their PPC budget quicker.

The latest addition to the PPC market is Microsoft adCenter. This is Microsoft's in-house product which will compete with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google's AdWords service.