Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays a fee each time their ad is clicked, rather than per impression or per conversion.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays a fee each time their ad is clicked, rather than per impression or per conversion. Google Ads invented the modern PPC auction in 2002, and the model now powers most paid search (Google, Bing), most paid social click-through formats (Meta, LinkedIn, X), and many affiliate networks. The defining feature is risk transfer: the advertiser only pays when a user actually clicks, which means the platform is incentivised to serve the ad to users likely to click rather than to anyone in the targeting bucket. Click prices clear in an auction where each advertiser sets a maximum bid, the platform multiplies that bid by a quality score, and the highest expected-value advertiser wins each impression.

PPC matters in influencer marketing as the comparison benchmark brands run against creator deals. A creator post with a tracked link that generates 800 clicks on a £1,200 fee has an effective PPC of £1.50, which the brand compares against Google Ads PPC for the same query and against paid social PPC on the same platform. Influencer PPC is typically more expensive than paid social PPC on the same network, but click quality is usually much higher because the audience trusts the creator referral. Brands optimising purely on PPC across channels often underweight influencer spend because the comparison ignores that quality differential. Brands running creator campaigns alongside paid search and social typically build separate PPC benchmarks for each channel rather than pooling them.

For creators, PPC sits behind any conversation about affiliate splits, performance-based deals, and trackable-link economics. A brand running creator content through paid amplification on Meta or TikTok pays the platform PPC on top of the creator fee, and the combined CAC drives the brand-side willingness to renew. Creators with audience profiles that produce low-PPC engagement (high relevance to product category, strong click-through behaviour) command renewal fees the same way a high-quality paid search keyword commands higher CPC tolerance. Collabios surfaces the inputs a PPC calculation needs at booking time (transparent fees, deliverable specification, audience metrics) so brands building cross-channel acquisition models can compute PPC consistently across creator, search, and paid social spend.

Three concrete examples: a DTC skincare brand pays a creator £1,500 for an Instagram Reel that generates 1,200 clicks on the trackable bio link, producing an effective PPC of £1.25 — cheaper than the brand’s Google Ads PPC of £2.80 on the same product-category keyword. A B2B SaaS brand runs a paid LinkedIn post amplifying a creator’s organic content where the platform charges £4.20 per click and the creator-fee component adds £0.80 per click on top, for a blended PPC of £5.00. A travel brand compares its three acquisition channels in 2026: Google Ads PPC £1.90, Meta paid social PPC £1.10, influencer-link PPC £2.40 — with the influencer PPC justified by a 3x higher conversion rate against the same lead-magnet landing page.