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Somebody has quoted you for PPC. You have seen the ads at the top of a Google results page, and you are not sure whether those are the same thing, something related, or something else being sold under a name you do not recognise.
So, what are PPC ads. They are adverts you pay for by the click rather than by the appearance, and almost everything confusing about them follows from that one billing rule.
This post is the definition. What the letters mean, how PPC relates to the two other names you keep hearing, where the ads actually run, and what the model is bad at. If you would rather skip to the part where somebody runs an account for you, that is a different conversation and it can wait until this one makes sense.
What the letters mean, and what you pay for
PPC is pay-per-click. The platform shows your ad to people it thinks are a match, counts nothing when they scroll past, and charges you at the moment one of them clicks through to your website.
That is genuinely different from most advertising anybody has sold you before. A poster charges you for the wall for a fortnight whether ten people look at it or ten thousand.
The amount is not fixed either. You set a maximum you are willing to pay for one click, and Google says your actual cost is often less, sometimes much less, than that maximum, because you pay what it takes to clear the advertiser below you rather than what you offered.
Two questions follow immediately, and both have their own answers elsewhere on this blog. What a month of it comes to in total is the budget question, and what settles the price of a single click is the mechanism behind the auction.
PPC, Google Ads and paid search
Three names get used as if they were one thing, and the reason is that in the UK they very nearly are. They are still three different kinds of word.
PPC is a way of being billed. Paid search is a place the ads appear, on a results page, alongside what somebody typed. Google Ads is one company's product, which sells paid search and quite a lot else, and bills most of it per click.
The reason the names collapse into each other here is scale. When the competition regulator gave Google strategic market status in search and search advertising in October 2025, it did so on a finding that more than 90% of UK searches take place on its platform.
Ofcom puts the audience side of that at 82% of UK adults using Google Search, around three billion searches a month. Saying PPC when you mean Google is imprecise rather than wrong.
Where PPC ads appear, with examples
Search results are the placement everybody pictures, and they are not the whole of it. Google's own glossary divides the places an ad can appear into two networks.
The Search Network is results pages, Maps, Shopping and partner search sites. The Display Network is YouTube, Gmail, Blogger and thousands of ordinary websites carrying ad slots.
| Where it appears | What it looks like | What the click is worth |
|---|---|---|
| Search results | A text ad above or below the organic results | Somebody typing the thing you sell, right now |
| Shopping | A product photo, price and shop name | Somebody comparing a specific item |
| Maps and local | A promoted pin or listing | Somebody looking for a nearby supplier |
| Display and YouTube | A banner or a video slot on somebody else's site | Somebody who was not looking for you at all |
| Social platforms | A post in a feed, billed the same way | Somebody who fits a description of your customer |
The billing model is the same across the whole list. The intent behind the click is not, which is why the last two are usually cheaper and usually worse.
The same model, in a social feed
The same model runs the feeds too. Attention on social platforms is bought and billed much the same way, and the difference is what the person was doing when the ad reached them.
Search catches somebody mid-errand. A feed interrupts somebody who came for something else. Both are pay-per-click, and treating them as the same purchase is where a lot of money goes.
How to do PPC marketing, and who does it
The honest answer to how to do PPC marketing yourself is that the account will do what you tell it, including the expensive things. Most of the early work is subtraction: reading which searches actually triggered your ads and blocking the ones that were never going to buy.
really focus on your google business profile, try some ad spend but dont go on their spend recommendations. google "wants me" to spend £30 a day but I get good "xxx shop near me" local search result on £2 a day.
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, April 2026
A fifteen-fold gap between the recommendation and what worked for him. The platform's suggested budget is a suggestion from the party being paid, and it is the first number worth ignoring.
What is Google PPC management, and when it is worth paying for
Google PPC management is somebody doing that subtraction on your behalf, week after week: reading the search terms, cutting the waste, adjusting bids and budgets, rewriting the ads, and checking the pages the clicks land on.
It is worth paying for when the waste is larger than the fee, and not before. On a small account spending a few hundred a month, Google PPC campaign management can cost more than the clicks it is managing, and that arithmetic is the honest test rather than the size of the agency.
What PPC ads are good and bad at
PPC is quick and it is rented. An account can be live this afternoon and in front of people searching for what you sell by the evening, which nothing in organic search can match.
Nothing about the position is bought in advance either. Google runs what it calls the ad auction afresh for every single search, so where you appear is settled again each time rather than held for a month.
What you are left with when you stop
PPC stops the moment the card does. Nothing accumulates: a year of paid clicks leaves you with exactly the position you had before, whereas the results underneath the ads are slower to earn and do not disappear when you pause.
Is paid search right for your business?
Two numbers are worth knowing before you buy any of these clicks. The first is how few searches go anywhere at all: on Similarweb's clickstream panel, 69.5% of UK Google searches ended with no click on any result, the highest rate of the six countries measured.
The second is how much money is chasing the ones that do. UK advertisers put 44% of digital ad spend into search in 2025, £17.9bn of it, growing 6% year on year, which is the other half of why clicks are not cheap.
When paid ads are the wrong purchase
We have no advertising at all or any marketing strategies (wouldn't know where to start) or any such things. We only update our Facebook page with projects and photos etc... We are well established, and the bulk of our work is from recommendations, word of mouth and repeat customers.
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, April 2026
That is a perfectly good position, and it is where a lot of readers of this post are standing. A business full of repeat work does not need paid ads; it needs to know what it would buy if it ever ran out.
If you are trying to work out whether that is you, it is worth talking it through before any budget is set. The answer is sometimes no, and a no costs nothing to arrive at.
Where paid sits among everything else
Where paid fits at all, it fits as one option among several. The wider set of things this all sits inside puts paid search next to search, email, content and the rest, and none of them is the whole job.
The short version is the first line of this post. PPC ads are ads you pay for by the click, most of them are on Google in the UK, and the billing model tells you nothing at all about whether they will work for you.