The advantages of Pay Per Click (PPC) internet advertising compared with traditional promotional is simply this: almost all traditional methods are broadcast methods to people who have demonstrated little interest in purchasing your service. Think of bill board posters, flyers through doors etc etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure there some targeted 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 Yahoo for "marketing" and down the right hand side, you'll see ads by websites who are paying the search engine to have their ad and site listed there on the main page of results. This is Paid Advertising on the Search Engines and this is why Google is a multi billion dollar industry!

How about someone searching Yahoo for "what is the best van maker"? 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 sell a service that can helpthem, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Yahoo or other Search Engine. What's its value to you to have that person visit your webpage within 4 seconds of typing that into MSN?

You could search engine optimize your webpage to get you first page rankings for your term, but this takes time and effort and a reasonable investment in cash. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really starts to shine, and is under rated I think. You might be on the first page of MSN the same day for the search term for a relatively low budget. In a short time you'd have some inclination of the quantity of people that will positively search for that term, visit your site, and purchase your service. This is real time, research into your specific market for a low budget that is impossible to get any other way.

What's more, lets say that the campaign costs you 20p per click, and 500 people click your ad making a combined total spend of ?100. Lets say your conversion rate is a average 1%, so you've got five new orders and more importantly 5 extra customers that you can now sell to again. All for just ?100 spend! What is your typical consumer worth to you? Isn't this worth it?

A fundamental thing to understand is how Google ranks the sponsored PPC marketing ads. Basically it's 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. Actually it's definitely more involved than that: if you have a better quality PPC advertising, it's likely for you to rank above the 25p ad because the search engine will give boosts to better performing PPC Adverts. The key point is that if your advertising expert knows what (s)he is doing with PPC bid management, it's probably you will get improved rankings (read additional traffic) for less money. So your valuable online website promotion budget works harder and you save money. Alternatively, if your AdWords advertising campaign is controlled by someone who does not know what they are doing, it will cost you more.

Some of the tasks a competent Google Advertising Professional should be doing whilst administering your campaign, and if yours isn't, we strongly propose you get a review of your PPC campaign immediately:

First Page is King - The key factor of PPC advertising campaigns is to get on the very first page of your Google, MSN, search engine etc fast. However, where there's more than eight (typically) even PPC ads can drop off the first page. Where there's competition such as this, there's definitely no point doing a PPC marketing campaign if you're not on the 1st page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or there's no point.

Track Your Conversions for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not usual marketing, so you can use that to your gain. The technology exists to track every sale and where it comes from. You will know exactly which ad converts to sales and which don't. It's one thing to have significant traffic, it's another to have a lot of sales. Would you rather have for PPC internet advertising: an ad that generates 1,000 clicks and one percent sales, or one that generates one hundred leads and 10% sales? For both you achieve identical sales, but the former costs you ten times the price in PPC advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A common mistake is not matching the webpage that consumers see when they click your ad, to the words found in your ad; which definitely should be aimed at what the potential customer searched for. This simply means that when the potential customer clicks your Ad, they see what they expect. Internet users are lazy! Would you believe that did you know that 1/2 of all internet browsers exit a website in under eight seconds just because they don't discover what they expected!

A/B Splt Testing your Adverts - This is good PPC technique and simply involves having more than one ad and testing which one performs the best. Here is one example, we had 2 adverts which were the same in every way except the beginning of the title. One started "Learn to Prevent..." and the other started with "Stop...". Split testing determined that 5% of the consumers who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8% of the consumers who saw the "Stop..." ad clicked that one. It will not surprise you to discover that, we dropped the first one and got a better quality Ad which in due course Google promoted to the top advertising position on the page, for the same Cost Per Click!

Multiple Ad Groups - The first rookie mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single Ad. This is typically bad. Keywords must be split up into separate groups with Ad text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching / Broad / Phrase - Google Online Marketing allow 3 different ways to match search terms to your keywords, but many online marketers just go for the default matching option. You could significantly increase your Click Through Rate from clever use of the other options which many careless Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.