Pay per click is a digital advertising model used over the internet to build the traffic of a particular website for a business. This calls for the advertiser paying the publisher depending on the number of clicks received. The concept of a pay per click strategy is now considered to be crucial in every digital marketing campaign.

Even though the importance of a PPC campaign remains unmatched, there are still many individuals that don’t know the story of its origin. In this article, we dive into the details of the history of PPC and how it evolved to be an effective strategy in modern marketing campaigns. 

• The Year Of Discovery – 1996

The first traceable PPC campaign was created during the early years of 1996 by Planet Oasis. During this time, Yahoo and Lycos were the preferred search engines, since Google hadn’t yet been introduced into the digital world. 

Planet Oasis had a webpage that displayed the digital world with the face of reality. Several companies such as Warner Bros and The New York Times paid in sums of $10,000 to hold a position on the homepage whilst smaller companies paid under $3,000 to be placed in the categories of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘entertainment’.

• PPC Can’t Be Beneficial, Right? Wrong! – 1997

After the PPC campaign was launder by Planet Oasis in the year of 1997, over 400 businesses signed up to be a part of the marketing campaign. While several sceptics in the industry continued to be doubtful of the strategy, many began to notice the benefits of running a PPC campaign and found themselves running to Planet Oasis to be a part of the process. 

Several businesses had to be a part of the process mainly due to the presence of their competitors being a part of the list. No one could afford to be left behind.

• Competition For Planet Oasis? – 1998

When a successful strategy is introduced, there will always be businesses that follow the footsteps of the leader to try and personalise the strategy in a way that it becomes their own. Goto.com took inspiration from Planet Oasis and followed the play. 

However, Goto.com made the newfound strategy their own by allowing their customers to bid against each other, which allowed them to score a higher profit. The lesser competitive keywords were thus let out for a lighter sum, making Goto.com a favourable choice in comparison to Planet Oasis. 

• Goto.com’s Process Of Clearing Spam – 1999

Needless to say, the search engine results of the earlier decades of the internet weren’t half as advanced as the services we have today. Although the PPC campaign was allowing relevant results to be displayed to the users, it wasn’t able to distinguish between spam and reliable sources. 

To overcome this problem, Goto.com ideated that those paying through pay per click ad campaigns can be considered to be the most reliable and high-quality content, allowing the spam content to be filtered out. Meanwhile, Google was on its way to building the most successful search engine model in the world. 

• The Slowest Year Of PPC Campaigns – 2000

Although the year 2000 was the year that Google introduced the concept of Google Adwords, it’s also known to be the slowest year for PPC campaigns, but why so? A substantial financial crisis came under the name of the dot com bubble. Despite their growth in stocks and sales, dot com companies disappeared overnight. 

Although Google and Yahoo suffered from the aftermath of this disaster, they managed to pull through the year. Online advertising faced its first major loss during 2000. 

• Google Didn’t Stand A Chance: The Year Of Overture – 2001

Google Adwords had managed to see substantial growth within the year of 2000 and while Google worked for its recovery from the dot com bubble, Goto.com decided to up their game plan drastically. They decided to rename themselves to Overture Services Inc.

Overture decided to expand their business and online advertising model furthermore by partnering up with companies such as Yahoo and MSN. This partnership inevitably benefited both the parties involved, with their profits skyrocketing to $288 million whilst Google was at a profit of $85 million. 

• Google’s Success Begins – 2002

In 2002, Overture lost two of its main clients to Google. This made their stocks plummet down by more than 40%, leading to a huge loss in the company. These clients had further approached Google for their PPC campaigns, making online advertising the heart of Google’s success. 

Although Overture fired back at Google with a lawsuit, things began to drop further down for them as they lost AOL to Google over the end of the year. Google was on its way to being the most influential digital platform for online advertising campaigns.

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