Pay Per Click, or popularly also known as PPC, is a type of marketing campaign in which online ads are shown to customers through a search engine or website to bring traffic. When your ad is clicked, you pay the website or search engine from where your ad is clicked.

From the last two decades, PPC is widely used by many best digital marketing agency to generate leads and sales. Over the years, the PPC has changed a lot.

Let’s see the evolution of PPC from 1996 as a content marketing tool.

1996-1997

 

The first official version of PPC was launched in July 1996 by Planet Oasis on a desktop application. Later, PPC advertising started growing, and businesses began investing in it.

In 1997, about 400 brands joined CPC advertising with a cost of $0.005 to $0.25 per click.

1998-1999

In 1998 GoTo.com introduced a more comfortable bid system for online advertising. In this system, the advertiser has to bid for search positions.

Next year GoTo.com restructured its method to enable advertisers to select the real-time bids for particular keywords.

2000

On 23rd October 2000, Google launched the Google Adwords tool designed for advertisers to monitor their advertising campaigns. Then, Google used CPM as the billing method.

2001

In 2001 GoTo.com changed its name to Overture. Later, Overture, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines had a partnership and earned an ad revenue of $288 million.

2003-2004

In 2003 Google acquired Semantics, and Yahoo purchased Overture for $1.63 million. Later, this year Google launched AdSense in which advertisers can place ads on other websites and webmasters.

In 2004 Google become the largest search engine with a market share of 80% and annual revenue of around $3billion.

2005

In 2005, Google started improving its services to prevent fraud clicks and Introduced Google Analytics to help advertisers.

2006-2007

In 2006 Google acquired YouTube in $1.65 billion, and Facebook partnered with Microsoft ad center and started showing ads to the customers.

Next year Facebook improved their ad system, which allowed advertisers to target customers based on their interests and demographics. The same year Google launched Adwords Express.

2008-2009

In 2008 Google launched TV ads and Google Chrome. By this time, Firefox and Internet Explorer had dominated as search engines, but soon people started using Google Chrome because of its popularity. Also, this year they allowed ads for beer and liqueurs.

The following year Google purchased AdMob for $750 million to give more attention to Mobile Searches.

2010-2011

In 2010 Microsoft Search was renamed as Bing, and it partners with Yahoo to publish ads on their network. Same year google launched two new features: –

  • Product Listing ads
  • Remarketing

These features made Google the best PPC Company in India and other parts of the world.

2012-2013

Mobile Searches are becoming more popular, and according to data, more than 25% of clicks originated from mobile devices. This year google attained revenue of $50 billion.

Next year, Google added a new innovative feature that allows turning off some devices in ad targeting.

2014-2015

In 2014 Google launched their shopping campaign, which allowed advertisers to promote their complete inventory. Later they blocked advertising of adult content through Google Adwords.

In 2015, they launched call-only campaigns, enabling users to call a company or business from search results directly.

2016-2017

In 2016 Google inaugurated expanded ads and removed the right sidebar ads. They also introduced a new interface for Google Adwords.

On 23rd June 2017, Google announced they are stopping reading Email for Gmail advertisements. Later they were fined €2.42 billion by the European Commission for antitrust practices.

2018-2019

This year Google launched their AdBlocker on Google Chrome to stop annoying ads. Later this year, Facebook becomes the first PPC network to ban all cryptocurrency ads. The same year Google Adwords was renamed Google Ads.

In 2019 Twitter banned all the political ads, and later Google also did the same.

Final Words 

The above paragraphs show the evolution of PPC in short. PPC helped many companies to grow over the years. The use of new technologies like AI and big data has continuously improved CPC ads campaigns. Hence, PPC marketing may have changed a lot in the last two decades, but it is still prevalent.