With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising your ad is shown for free and you pay only when someone clicks it. It pays off when people already search for what you sell, when you can measure which clicks turn into sales, and when your margin is larger than what a sale costs you in ads. If any of the three is missing, fix it before you spend.
The rest of this article explains each part, using Google Ads as the main example because it's where most European SMEs start.
In short
Every time someone searches, Google runs an auction among all advertisers targeting that search. The highest bid doesn't automatically win.
Google finds every ad whose keywords, location, language and schedule fit the search.
The rank combines your maximum bid with the quality of the ad: how likely people are to click, how closely the ad matches the search, and what happens on the page it leads to.
Ads below Google's quality threshold aren't shown at all, whatever they bid.
You pay only what it takes to beat the advertiser ranked below you, and never more than your maximum bid.
The part many advertisers miss is that your landing page affects what you pay per click. Send an ad for "winter tyres 205/55 R16" to a shop's homepage and Google rates the experience lower than a page that shows those exact tyres. A lower rating means paying more for the same position.
winter tyres 205/55 R16
winter tyres 205/55 R16
What a good landing page needs is covered in our guide to the Google Ads landing page.
"PPC" is used loosely for most paid digital advertising, even though some formats are billed per thousand impressions rather than per click.
| Type | Best used for |
|---|---|
| Search ads (Google, Microsoft) | Reaching people who are already searching for your product or service. The right starting point for most businesses. |
| Google Shopping | Online shops selling physical products, shown with image and price. |
| Performance Max | Accounts with enough conversions and reliable tracking. Without both, it drifts towards wherever clicks are cheapest. |
| Display and YouTube | Remarketing and awareness. Rarely the source of a first sale. |
| Meta (Facebook, Instagram) | New products that nobody is searching for yet. |
| ChatGPT ads | A new channel, live in Europe since August 2026. Best treated as an addition, not a foundation. |
Five questions. A "no" to any of them is cheaper to fix now than after three months of ad spend.
The last point is the one nobody puts in a PPC plan. We've seen campaigns judged a failure when the real problem was a contact form that landed in an unread inbox.
A broad-match keyword like "accountant" can trigger ads for "accountant jobs", "accountant salary" and "free accounting software". None of those people will become clients. Without a negative keyword list and a weekly look at the search terms report, part of your budget pays for clicks that never had a chance.
Count a visit to your contact page as a conversion and Google learns to deliver contact-page visits. You get plenty of "conversions" and few customers.
Campaigns on your own company name nearly always look excellent. People searching for you by name already know you and would probably have found you anyway. Fold those numbers into the account average and everything looks better than it is. A brand campaign makes sense when competitors bid on your name, but always report it separately.
See the tyres example above: dearer clicks and fewer sales.
Some are useful. Many mainly raise spend. Read them one at a time.
Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and cost per click help you diagnose problems. To judge success you need one number: what's left after you subtract the ad cost?
For an online shop, that's gross profit from ad-driven sales minus ad spend. For B2B, it's the value of the customers won through ads minus ad spend. That means tagging every enquiry in your CRM with its source, so you know which ones closed.
Turn the sum around to find your break-even: divide 1 by your margin. At 20% margin you need at least 500% ROAS just to cover the ads. At 50% margin, 200% is enough. Knowing that figure before launch stops a lot of arguments later.
| Time | PPC | SEO |
|---|---|---|
| First month | Traffic from day one and the first data on what sells. | Technical fixes and content. Little traffic yet. |
| After three months | Enough data to judge profitability. | Possibly first movement on less competitive terms. |
| Six to twelve months | Steady traffic that you keep paying for. | Traffic starts to grow without a cost per click. |
| When you stop paying | Traffic stops the same day. | Traffic stays and fades slowly only if the site is neglected. |
The two work best together. PPC shows you quickly which search terms bring revenue, and those are exactly the terms worth investing SEO effort in. How to do that in practice is in our article on Google Ads and SEO together.
If the five questions above all came back "yes", PPC is worth testing with one focused campaign. For budgets and agency fees, read what Google Ads costs. If you already advertise and suspect budget is leaking, we'll review your account and show you where. How we run campaigns is described on our Google Ads page.
Pay per click. You pay when someone clicks your ad, not when it's shown.
Google Ads is the biggest PPC platform, but not the only one. Microsoft Advertising, Meta and, since August 2026 in Europe, ChatGPT also sell ads, some of them billed per thousand impressions rather than per click. In everyday use, 'PPC' covers most paid digital advertising.
Enough for the campaign to collect conversions. Work it out from cost per click and how many visitors you need for one enquiry or sale. Our article on Google Ads cost walks through the calculation with an example.
Only if competitors bid on it, or you want to control the message for a sale or launch. Either way, report it separately from everything else.
Ads can run the day they're approved. Judging profitability takes longer: usually two to three months of stable running, and more for B2B, where an enquiry takes weeks to become a deal.
Read them one at a time. Some are useful, many mainly raise spend, and auto-apply hands those decisions to Google.
We check settings, conversion tracking and search terms and show where budget leaks. Free, no commitment.