Let’s take a look back, a throwback of sorts, back to the year 2000, when Pay Per Click was just getting started. This was uncharted waters, where companies were willing to test those uncharted waters of the PPC world. FindWhat was a popular search engine that didn’t offer any organic or “natural” search results. It was PPC only, and the higher you bid the better placement you got.
There was no algorithm. They didn’t crawl your PPC landing page to make sure that it was in line with the keywords you were bidding on.
Top placement in a category such as “Finance” was based on how much you were willing to bid per click.
Not only were the bid prices much lower than they are now (top bid was $1.05 per click for finance), whatever the advertiser bid per click was clearly shown in the search results!
Imagine if Google Adwords ads all included the bid prices of each click.
Then imagine if you only had to pay $1.05 for a top finance keyword!
Fast forward to 2016.
SEMrush.com reports that the word “finance” on Google AdWords is now $5.86 per click.
