The advantages of Pay Per Click (PPC) Google AdWords compared with conventional methods is just this: almost all conventional techniques are broadcast methods to consumers who have demonstrated little interest in buying your service. Think of magazine ads, bill board posters etc etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure there some focused than others, if you are selling marketing services to firms, you put adverts in a Marketing magazine, but that's a crude method these days.

Search MSN for "marketing" and on the right hand side, you'll see links by websites who are paying the search engine to have their link and site displayed there on the main page of results. This is Pay Per Click Advertising and this is why Google is a multi billion dollar company!

Compare that to someone searching MSN for "how to do direct advertising for lawyers"? That's a person that right at that precise moment in time is interested in finding out a very specific piece of information. If you expect to produce a service that can help , you'd better hope that you're on the first page of MSN or other Search Engine. What's its value to you to have that person visit your webpage within four seconds of entering that into the search engine?

Sure, you might search engine optimize your webpage to make sure you have first page positions for your term, but it takes time and effort and a reasonable investment in cash. This is where paid internet marketing really comes into it's own, and is under used in my opinion. You could be on the first page of Yahoo the same day for your search term for a very small budget. In a week you'd have some indication of how many consumers that will definitly search for that term, visit your website, and purchase your service. This is real time, research into your specific market for a bargain budget that can't be got get any other way.

What's more, lets say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your ad making a total spend of ?100. Lets say your conversion rate is a reasonable one percent, so you've got 5 new purchases and more importantly 5 new customers that you can now sell to again. All this for ?100 outlay! How much is your typical client worth in total? Isn't this worth it?

One important thing to know is how the Search Engine ranks the sponsored Pay Per Click marketing Adverts. In essence it is an auction in real time. The highest bidder comes out on top. If you bid 20p and a competitor bids 25p, they will rank higher than yours. It is in fact significantly more involved than that: if you have a superior quality Pay Per Click ad campaign, it is definitely possible for you to rank higher than the 25p ad because Google will give performance increases to better performing Pay Per Click ads. What this means is that if your advertising expert knows what (s)he is doing with Pay Per Click bid management, it is possible to achieve better rankings (i.e. more traffic) for a lower budget. So your important online marketing budget is stretched and you save budget. Conversely, if your online ad campaign is managed by someone who doesn't know their job, it will cost you real money.

Here are some of the things a specialist Google Advertising Professional should be doing whilst managing your account, and if yours isn't, we strongly advise you get a review of your online marketing campaign as soon as possible:

Be in it to Win It - The goal of Pay Per Click bid campaigns is to get on the absolute first page of your search engine, MSN etc quickly. However, where there is more than 8 (typically) even Pay Per Click Adverts can drop to the second page. Where there is competition like this, there is definitely little point doing a Pay Per Click marketing campaign if you're not on the first page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) settings, or there is no point.

Track Your Conversions for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not usual marketing, so use that to your gain. The technology exists to track every sale and from where it comes. You can learn definitely which ad converts to sales and which don't. It's one thing to have significant traffic, it is another to have a lot of sales. Would you prefer to have for Pay Per Click paid advertising: an ad that generates one thousand clicks and 1% sales, or one that generates one hundred leads and ten% sales? In each you achieve the same sales, but the former costs you ten times as much in Pay Per Click advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A common mistake is not matching the webpage that potential customers land on when they click your ad, to the actual content of your ad; which definitely should be aimed at what the person searched for. This simply means that when the person clicks your Ad, they see what they want to. Incredibly internet users are lazy! Did you know that half of all internet consumers exit a website in under 8 seconds because they don't find what they expected!

Split Testing your Ads - This is good Pay Per Click technique and simply means having more than one ad and testing which one performs the best. Here is one example, we had two adverts which were identical in every way except the beginning of the top title. One began "Learn to Prevent..." and the other began with "Stop...". Split testing found that five percent of the potential customers who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8 percent of the potential customers who saw the "Stop..." ad clicked that one. It won't surprise you to discover that, we abandoned the first one and got a better quality Ad which ultimately Google promoted to the top ad slot on the page, for the same CPC!

Several Ad Groups - The first amateur mistake is to group all your keywords together to supply a single Ad. This is very bad. Keywords should be divided into groups with Ad text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching / Phrase / Broad - Google AdWords allow three alternative ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but most advertisers just go for the broad matching option. You could double your traffic from intelligent use of the other options which most lazy Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.