Pay per click (PPC) auctions are used to sell positions in search engines. These auctions have gained increasing commercial importance, and many companies offer software to bid on these auctions. We present a trading agent for PPC auctions that is the first in our knowledge to use an explicit profit objective function. The agent creates a look‐ahead plan of its desired bids, which allows it to exhibit intelligent behaviour including the ability to hold back money during expensive periods. We tested the agent in the latter part of 2003 in a live Overture auction. The agent generated four times the number of visits as human managers, in addition to reducing cost and variability.