Online marketers often use the word "PPC" to describe an advertising strategy that bases compensation for online advertising on how often users click on an ad. PPC advertisements frequently show up on social media streams and search engine results sites. To drive intrigued people to a website where they can purchase a good or service is the aim of a marketer conducting a PPC campaign.

PPC ads are typically conducted through a bidding format on social media platforms and search engines. The website conducts an immediate bidding when deciding which advertisement to display. An marketer starts by deciding on their highest cost per click (CPC). Additionally, they select the social media groups or search terms they want to target. The ad platform even considers the ad's own content, including its relevance to the targeted terms, the user experience on the destination page, and the ad's historical click-through rate (CTR). Due to the confluence of these variables, the ad with the greatest maximum CPC is not always the winner because a low-quality ad with a high CPC may lose to a higher-quality ad with a marginally lower CPC.

Ad networks also use a PPC strategy to offer display advertising on other websites, but they do so for a fixed fee rather than a price. Before showing the advertisements, the ad network and the marketer decide on a CPC, and sites with more traffic or a more valued audience demand a higher CPC.

PPC advertising is most frequently used when a business needs to increase website traffic. Advertising efforts can use a cost-per-mille (CPM) strategy that pays per thousand views if the objective is to increase brand recognition (the number of times an ad is displayed instead of clicked). Other advertising efforts may operate on a cost-per-lead (CPL) premise, charging when a prospective consumer joins up to receive information about a promotion.