Pay Per Click Advertising has become an extremely popular method for generating website traffic, building lists of qualified prospects in specific niches, making sales and, in some cases, reaching prospects around the world where it wouldn’t have been either feasible or likely using traditional advertising methods.

Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising, if used correctly, can set you on a path to potential financial independence, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It’s very important for newcomers to get the proper Pay Per Click education by reading one of the excellent books on Pay Per Click Advertising before actually getting in the trenches and spending money.

There are several different companies that you can choose for your advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the undisputed king of Pay Per Click Marketing is Google Adwords. Google has changed their advertising rules several times now since opening their doors at the early part of this decade, but still has an enormous following. It’s estimated that Google gets apx. 47% of all searches being done on the Internet with Yahoo second at 23%, followed by MSN at 11%. Number two and three combined don’t get as much traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you a lot of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be fierce and potentially very expensive, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Read on.

One of the most recent changes that occurred at Google was the ability to separate “Search Ads” and “Content Ads” within your campaigns. When you advertise using Google Adwords your ads will not only be displayed within the Google search engine, but also may be placed on other people’s websites that have related subject matter and also on some of their “Partner Networks”. Some of these partners are other PPC Advertising companies just like themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it’s very important that you keep these two entities separate when running your campaign. You now have the option to either pay less money for the traffic you receive through the Content ads or you can eliminate them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you do choose to run them, even at a lower cost, you set up an entirely different campaign. I know that it sounds like a big hassle, but there’s a good reason for this. That reason is tracking your ads. If you don’t track your ads then you are losing money. It’s important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to eliminate waste and only pay for what’s actually working. It’s virtually impossible to do this when you have both Search and Content running in the same campaign.

If you’re new this may seem like a lot of “chatter” to you. If that’s the case, I highly recommend that you invest in a good book on Pay Per Click Advertising, as mentioned above. If you’re not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, think of it this way; you could be doing a labor job somewhere or continue in your day job for the rest of your life. Which seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up correctly you’ll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what works, increase your profits by redirecting the money that you were wasting into another area of your advertising portfolio and increase your bottom line by doing so. Does it still sound like too much work? Get those campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!

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Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is something most new website owners find difficult to master. The way PPC works is simple, you open a free account with a search engine (eg Google or Yahoo), then you place an advertisement for your website with a list of words (these are your “keywords”) you wish to have trigger the showing of your ad, state how much you are willing to pay (“bid”) for each visitor who clicks the ad and ends up on your website and set a daily maximum budget figure. The PPC search engine will then start to deliver visitors (“traffic”) to your website.

When somebody types one of your keywords into the search engine, your advertisement will be shown. Its position will depend upon the amount you offered (“bid”) on the keyword. The highest bidder gets number 1 position, the next highest gets to number 2 and so on (in the event of a “tied” bid, the position is decided on first come first served basis). The higher the position of your ad, the larger the number of people who will see it and the more likely you are to receive visits to your website. It is called Pay Per Click because you only get charged when someone clicks the link to your website, there is no fee for showing your advertisement.

The first thing to note is that although the way PPC works is simple, that is not the same as saying it is easy to use Pay Per Click advertising. Some people seem to take to PPC as naturally as breathing but, for the vast majority of people, PPC involves a steep learning curve and lots of experimenting and testing. For some people PPC brings major grief, lots of frustration and sometimes a lot of wasted expense. Here are a few simple tips to help anyone just starting out with Pay Per Click advertising.

Search Engine Size Matters.

There are literally hundreds of search engines for you to choose from when starting to use PPC Advertising. Some of these smaller companies will accept bids on keywords for a fraction of the minimum bid required by the bigger search engines. However, it would be a false economy to look only at price, you also need to take volume and quality of traffic into account as well as time spent managing your advertising campaigns. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft control about 90% of the total volume of search engine traffic between them. The remaining traffic is spread between the hundreds of smaller search engines. This means you might need to set up campaigns with 20 small search engines to match the traffic you would get from one Yahoo campaign. You might well be getting cheaper clicks this way but you would be spending 20 times as long managing the campaigns. Time is money: stick with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft when you first start using PPC advertising and save experimenting with small companies for later when experience will give you an advantage.

Never Pay More Than A Visit Is Worth.

Of course you want to get as many visitors to your website as possible but never be tempted to increase your bids above a level you know will be profitable. There is no point in getting to the number 1 position for a search term if you have to pay more per click than a visitor will potentially earn for you. Work out your conversion rate (ie what percentage of visitors actually make a purchase) to estimate how much each visitor to your website is worth) and make sure your bids stay below that figure with a comfortable margin for profit. The way to get more visitors is to use more keywords, use the keyword research tool the search engine provides, select keywords carefully for relevance and add them to your campaigns.

Avoid The Obvious

Look for cheaper, less popular keywords and keyword phrases and take advantage of them to bring visitors at a much lower cost than the obvious popular keywords. Single words and two or three word phrases are most popular and, therefore, most expensive. Use keyword research tools to locate longer keyword phrases, similes and less frequently searched terms. Make sure your keyword research is matched to the individual search engines. The best keywords for Yahoo, might not perform well in a Microsoft campaign, so use the keyword tool provided by each company to build up your keywords and keyword phrases for the particular search engine.

Don’t Think “Seen One Seen Them All”

Take time to learn how each search engine works. Although PPC works on the same principles throughout the Internet, each search engine has a different interface. The way you set up and manage a campaign effectively is different with each one and it is essential that you spend time learning how each one works. Failure to do this can mean you end up doing things the hard way or, worse still, it can cost you money. The search engines have different rules, eg on what words may be used in ads and the way keywords relate to your landing page. This means you can’t take your Yahoo ads and keywords and just upload them into a Google or Microsoft campaign. Make sure you understand exactly how to set your maximum bid and daily budget level for each individual campaign: if you get that part wrong you could be waving goodbye to large amounts of wasted cash.

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How can a bid-managed Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign improve website sales and lower your cost-per-acquisition? Learn from Neutralize (*\*) the UK’s most experienced search engine marketing agency in this introductory presentation.

Discover a key secret behind successful pay per click advertising campaigns, presented by Advertisedge.com Founder & Principal David Edwards.