To survive in business nowadays, you’ll need to use a variety of vehicles to get your marketing messages in front of your target audience. One tool that allows you to get immediate results is Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on the internet.

PPC advertising is a technique you can use to display your ads on popular search engines’ results pages and content sites. You only pay when someone clicks the link in your ad.

The power in advertising on the search engine results pages comes in your ability to control the placement of your ad by only showing the ad when someone specifically searches for what you have to offer, bidding enough to be competitive with other advertisers, and ensuring your ad is compelling to the person conducting the search.

The words and phrases that people enter into the search box in order to find what they’re looking for are called keywords. Some of these keywords result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages that contain that keyword.

When you set up a PPC advertising campaign, you will select one or many keywords that pertain to your business. Once you’ve selected the keywords, you tell the search engine company that you want your ad to be displayed each time someone searches for that keyword.

Where your ad is displayed is determined by how much you are willing to pay every time someone clicks on your ad and how often your ad is clicked. The search engine company ranks all of the advertisers who bid for a keyword and determine the order in which ads are displayed.

Very popular keywords usually require very high bids and may or may not be profitable for your business. It’s essential that you track your PPC campaigns to be sure your income is more than your advertising cost. You’ll need to test and track to achieve a balance. In an ideal situation, you will be able to use keywords that are searched frequently but that cost very little.

The first step in PPC campaign management is to select the keywords you wish to target.

Once you’ve selected your keywords, decide how much you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad. You’ll need to set a maximum cost per click (CPC) for each keyword you’re targeting. The amount you bid determines where your ad will be placed in the search results. Your goal is to be placed near the top of the ads listing.

When you’re just getting started, set your maximum CPC based on the average of what other advertisers are paying. Most of the search engine companies will give you a range when you’re setting up you PPC campaign. Again, you’ll want to be close to the top, but in most markets you don’t want to be at the very top - this is something you’ll need to test as your campaign starts producing.

One way to help with your placement is to take advantage of bid gaps. When there’s a significant CPC increase to move up just one spot in the rankings, you can bid in the gap and be close to the top. For example, if your competitors are paying:

$1.00
$0.75
$0.25
$0.24
$0.23

you might consider bidding $0.26 to try and reach the third position without spending too much money.

Eventually, you’ll be able to determine your maximum CPC by looking at your results.

If you’re selling a $100,000 product and you convert 1 out of every 4 visitors to your site – but only when your ad is in the top position - you’ll know exactly how much to spend to make sure your ad is in that position, and you’ll probably be willing to spend it.

On the other hand, if your product costs $50 and you get 1 sale out of every 100 clicks when your ad’s in the top position, but 2 sales out of every 100 clicks when your ad’s in the fourth position, you’ll definitely want to keep your bids lower so that you stay in the fourth position.

In addition to monitoring and manipulating your CPC, you’ll need to test your ad copy. The amount you bid is only half the equation in determining your ad placement. If no one ever clicks on your ad, the search engine company will stop displaying it. Let’s look at how this works:

Advertiser A pays $0.10 per click and their ad gets clicked 100 times.
Advertiser B pays $0.25 per click for the same keyword and their ad gets clicked 10 times.

The search engine company makes $10.00 from Advertiser A and $2.50 from Advertiser B. Which do you think they rank higher?

The beauty of PPC advertising is you can make changes and they go into effect immediately. When you find that an ad isn’t producing the results you want, you can change it, change the amount you’re paying, and even stop it from running – and you can make that happen in seconds.

As with all of your business endeavors, monitoring and testing is the key to PPC campaign management. To be really effective, you might want to use tools designed specifically for this task or outsource this work to a company who specializes in PPC.

To get help with managing your campaigns, check out PPC Campaign Monitor at http://thebreakthroughmarketer.com/info/ppcmonitor_01.htm.

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