PPC

Pay per click: an advertising model where you pay for each visitor the ad sends, priced by keyword auction.

Pay per click is the dominant pricing model of search advertising: you bid on keywords, your ad appears when people search them, and you pay only when someone clicks. The price is set by auction, so competitive keywords cost more. Google Ads runs the largest PPC marketplace; Bing, Meta and Amazon run their own.

Why it matters to an indie builder: PPC is rented traffic with instant feedback. Unlike content marketing, which compounds over months, a campaign starts producing data the first day: which headline pulls clicks, which landing page converts, what a customer actually costs. That information is worth paying for even if you later turn ads off, because it tells your product pages and your SEO effort what language works.

A concrete example: a screenshot tool spends $240 on exact-match keywords around share screenshots with a url. Cost per click lands at $0.85, delivering about 280 visits. Landing page converts 3.2 percent to install, so roughly nine installs at $26 each. If a customer pays $8 monthly and stays fourteen months, lifetime value is $112 against $26 acquisition: scale it. If churn shortens that lifetime to two months, the same campaign loses money, and you have learned it for the price of one week of clicks, not one quarter.

Common mistakes: broad match on generic terms, where budgets evaporate on browsers with no intent, bidding to position one when position three converts identically at half the cost, no negative keyword list (free, torrent, jobs, are classic budget drains), optimizing for clicks instead of conversions, and quitting after the learning budget instead of iterating creative. Wire conversions before launch, run small and exact, expand only what the numbers defend. The sem entry pairs with this one; the analytics blocks on IndieBoot cover attribution.