The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) paid advertising with the search engines compared with usual promotional is simply this: almost all usual techniques are broadcast methods to users who have demonstrated little interest in buying your service. Think of bill board posters, magazine ads etc etc. They are all broadcast ads. Sure there some directed than others, if you are selling marketing services to businesses, you put adverts in a Marketing magazine, but that's a course method these days.



Enter "solicitor" into MSN and down the right hand side, you'll see ads by websites who are paying the search engine to have their ad and site displayed there on the main page of results. This is Paid Search Engine Advertising and this is why Google is a multi billion dollar firm!

How about someone searching MSN for "how to do direct marketing for lawyers"? That's a person that right at that moment in time is interested in learning a very specific piece of information. If you expect to offer a service that can help, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of MSN or which ever Search Engine you prefer. What's its value to you to have that person visit your webpage within three seconds of typing that into the search engine?

Sure, you could search engine optimise your webpage to make sure you have excellent rankings for that keywords, but this takes time and a significant investment of money. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really comes into it's own, and is under used I think. You could be on the first page of Google the same day for the search term for a modest budget. In a month or less you'd have some indication of the amount of users that will positively search for that term, browse your site, and purchase your service. This is real time, research into your targeted market for a small budget that can't be got get any other way.

Lets say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your advert making a total spend of ?100. Lets say the conversion rate is a modest one percent, so you've got 5 new purchases and more importantly five new customers that you can now sell to again. All this for ?100 spend! What is your average client worth to you? Isn't this worth it?

One key thing to understand is how Google ranks the paid for Pay Per Click marketing ads. In essence it is an auction in real time. The highest bidder wins. If you bid 20p and someone else bids 25p, they will rank above yours. In truth it is considerably more in depth than that: if you have a superior quality Pay Per Click advertising, it is possible for you to rank above the 25p advert because the search engine will give boosts to higher performing Pay Per Click Adverts. The key point is that if your internet marketing professional knows what (s)he's doing with Pay Per Click bid management, it is probably you will get better rankings (read additional traffic) for a lower budget. So your limited online marketing budget works harder and you save money. Conversely, if your AdWords ad campaign is administered by someone who does not know their job, it will cost you more.

Here is a list of the jobs a competent Google Advertising Professional should be doing whilst administering your account, if yours isn't, we strongly recommend you get a review of your online marketing campaign today:

Bid or Don't Bother - The objective of Pay Per Click advertising campaigns is to get on the absolute first page of your MSN, search engine, Google etc quickly. However, where there is in excess of 8 (in normal conditions) even Pay Per Click ads can drop off the 1st page. Where there is competition like this, there is absolutely little point doing a Pay Per Click marketing campaign if you are not on the first page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or there is no point.

Tracking for Better Website ROI - This is innovative marketing, this is not usual marketing, so you can use that to your gain. The technology exists to monitor each and every sale and where it comes from. You will learn definitely which advert converts to sales and which do not. Remember, it's one thing to get significant people visiting your site, it is another to have a lot of sales. Would you rather have for Pay Per Click internet advertising: an advert that generates one thousand leads and 1 percent sales, or one that generates a hundred leads but 10% sales? For both you gain the same sales, but the former costs you ten times the price in Pay Per Click advertising budget.

Landing Page Matching - A common issue is not matching the webpage that people land on when they click your advert, to the words found in your advert; which should be targeted at what the user searched for. This simply means that when the user clicks your Ad, they see what they expect. Did you know that internet users are lazy? Incredibly did you know that 1/2 of all internet browsers leave a website in less than 8 seconds because they do not discover what they expected!

A/B Splt Testing your Adverts - This is good Pay Per Click technique and simply involves having more than one advert and testing which one works best. Let me give you one example, we had two adverts which were totally the same in every way except the beginning of the title. One started "Learn to Prevent..." and the other started with "Stop...". Split testing found that five percent of the people who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8% of the people who saw the "Stop..." advert clicked that one. Guess what, we abandoned the first ad and got a better quality Ad which in the end Google promoted to the premium ad slot on the page, for the same Cost Per Click!

Many Ad Groups - The basic amateur mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single Ad. This is very bad. Keywords must be divided into groups with Ad text that reflects the keywords searched for.

Phrase / Broad / Exact Matching - Google Online Marketing allow three different ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but most advertisers just go for the basic matching option. You could significantly increase your traffic from clever use of the other options which most lazy Google Advertising Professionals do not even bother with.