Pay per click advertising is services such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or NineMSN Search Marketing. Paid search is one of my favourite techniques for business lead generation because it's instant, it's accountable and it's effective. The first thing you want to do is to actually optimise page search spend and the first way to do this is to make sure you install conversion tracking so you know where your expenditure is leading to desired actions, for example, an acquired sale, and where your budget is under-performing.

These tools are easy to use, but if you are not yet familiar with them, you can simply do a search in Google for "Google AdWords Conversion Tracking" and you'll quickly find information on how to install and use these trackers. This software will show you just how different landing pages, keywords and ads are working for your business. If you really want to maximise your return on investment with Google AdWords and other search paid programs, you need to:

1. Test Lots of Different Keywords: One keyword, even ten are not enough. You should try hundreds or even thousands of different keywords and key phrases to figure out which will get great results for your business and which are just a waste of money. Conversion tracking tools can tell you which are performing the best.

2. Test multiple ads: Google Adwords, for one will let you try out different ads to see which are the most effective at driving traffic to your website. You'll find out that some are far better at this than are others. For example, we worked with a client in the finance sector not so long ago and learned that one particular ad got traffic and conversions at less than a third of the cost of the other ads they were using. When you're a larger company spending five figures on ads a month, a 30% saving is quite a lot of money.

3. Break up Your Pay Per Click Account into Targeted Ad Groups: An ad group is simply a group of ads which will be brought up by a certain group of keywords. Let's suppose that you're a mortgage provider. As such, you offer mortgage refinancing among your products. You may have an A group of ads which are triggered by the keywords "refinance mortgage" and closely related variations. The ad which comes up in these keyword searches will have these words in it and will be targeted to potential customers who may use these keywords - and send those who click on the ad to a landing page which is about refinancing mortgages.

You're trying to make your ads and your websites as closely related as possible to your keywords; this is what gets higher conversion rates for your business.

These methods can make your web based advertising dramatically more effective. Your Google AdWords and other pay per click programs can double, triple or even get ten times the results they are getting for you now!