The dollar amount a company allots to pay per click advertising is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) bids. Bid prices vary depending on the company’s advertising budget and the time the company plans to use paid inclusion. Other deciding factors are the keyword popularity and competition from other advertisers. The more popular the targeted keywords, the higher the PPC bid needs to be to secure the space on the search engine pages.

PPC bids pay for the advertisements that many people see on a search engine results page, generally at the top or on the side, and are separate from natural results. Natural results are websites that rank through search engine optimization techniques. The ads that PPC bids pay for are generally called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear when the certain keyword that the PPC bid purchased is entered into the search query.

Some of the most prominent companies that take PPC bids include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. The PPC bids required to secure certain keywords start at $.01 and go to $.50. There are keywords that draw higher PPC bids. Bid checkers allow a query on numerous PPC engines to find out the top bids for a certain keyword or phrase.

There are also software programs for management of PPC campaigns at Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter in one easy interface. Management of PPC campaigns is time consuming and requires close monitoring to ensure that the budget allotted is justified. The software management programs claim that their advanced bidding algorithm saves costs and most have a comprehensive reporting function that monitor the return on the investment.