For novices in the PPC game, there are several Web sites available for detailed instructions on launching an eye-catching campaign. Ultimately, though, most advise on good paid marketing boils down to these five important tips to ensure you get the most out of your money.

Maintain focus on Google’s search network – To attract the people you know are searching for your relevant keywords, you want to be sure you place your ads where the search happens. Buying space through Adsense, where ads are placed on similar Web sites, can increase visibility and awareness of your brand, but ultimately the bulk of your referrals are going to come from where people are actively searching for information. Concentrate on the search network to build your audience.

Know your target audiences and how to sell to them – Think about your business: do you cater mainly to the people in your immediate geographic area, or do you serve a broader base that extends throughout the country? If the latter, more than likely you create different ads for print campaign to attract different demographics. The same practice should apply to your PPC ads. Campaigns for local, regional, and national audiences should be created separately because you will use different keywords to attract customers and clients.

Separate Ad Groups for maximum performance – If your business deals in multiple services, for example a restaurant that also caters events and retails food products, you will want to separate each facet of your company into its own ad group on Adwords. Each group should focus on one aspect, and perhaps further split the available services – a group for dining in, a group for catering weddings, a group for catering reunions, and so forth – to better draw in traffic from paid search. Be sure, too, to have a proper landing page prepared for each group to increase the quality of your ads.

Generate keywords! As you prepare your campaigns, you may have a specific number in mind. Here is where you can have some fun and take advantage of Google’s keyword tool to help you generate multitudes of probable searches. Don’t limit yourself when you make your bids, for even the most obvious search phrases may not bring in the traffic you’d expect. The more keywords you use for an ad group, the better you can test what works and what doesn’t for your advertising.

Test different ads for effective marketing – You wouldn’t use the same ad over and again for different print campaigns, so the same rings true for Adwords. Create at least two different ads per group and study their performances, tweaking as necessary to build click-throughs.

Take note of these tips as you begin your PPC advertising, and make good use of the free tools available through Google Adwords to help with your success. You just may find online advertising will quickly pay for itself.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local PPC advertising and professional SEO writing services.

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As the entire media world reels due to a contraction in available advertising dollars, Yahoo has launched three new products to help advertisers get more bang for their buck. The first, Search Retargeting, is a customized display-targeting solution that shares a user’s search terms with advertisers, who then can retarget the user with specific display ads throughout the Yahoo Network. (read more)

Source: Channel Web

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So you have decided to take the plunge and supplement your organic search optimization efforts with a pay per click campaign. You signed up for Google Adwords, set your monthly cap, created your ads…and waited. Daily you checked the performance of your ads, noting the number of clicks compared to impressions in Google search. Your click through ratio, however, is not as high as you would like for it to be, and in return you find little response to your site in the way of calls to action.

What money is being spent on Google Adwords is not yielding a sound return on your investment. It is natural to feel disappointed and worried that you are wasting money. Yet before you decide to give up on PPC altogether, consider giving your Adwords campaigns a makeover, as well as tweaking your site to be more compatible with your advertising. Through continuous experimentation and applying a number of helpful tips, you may just see a turnaround in Adwords that contributes to sales and increased traffic.

Here is one thing to consider when adjusting your Adwords campaigns: Capitalize each line in your ad. Uniformity in your Google ads can make an impression on search users. When you capitalize the beginning of each ad line, too, you are drawing the eye toward the ad and the compelling message within. Consider these two ads:

Brazilian diet secret

lose 20 pounds in 2 months

tastes great, good for you.

Brazilian Diet Secret

Lose 20 pounds in 2 months.

Tastes great, good for you.

The second ad with it staccato lines may appear more attractive to a site visitor than the former, which gives the impression of a run-on sentence.

So if you are feeling unsure of an ad placed in Google, try tweaking the words to a bolder, more direct line. You just may find this technique is a capital idea!

Kathryn Lively works for CINIVA Systems, an award-winning Virginia Beach website design company. She specializes in assisting clients with search engine optimization and pay per click management.

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Wikipedia defines Pay Per Click Advertising as thus:

Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines for the purpose of allowing websites to advertise for high visibility.With search engines, pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost Per Click (CPC).

For example, a website owner wants to be found under a particular keyword: limousine service. In searching a particular pay-per-click program, he finds that bids to be found on that phrase range from two cents to five cents per click. Bidding anywhere in that range, or above, will allow his limousine service site to be seen in sponsored results every time a user enters limousine service. For every time a user clicks on the link to the advertiser’s limousine site, the advertiser must pay however much he bid for the phrase, be it two cents or twenty.

Some pay per click programs allow advertisers to set a monthly spending limit. For example, the limousine site owner wants to pay fifty dollars a month for limousine service, bid at two cents per click. This allows him a maximum of 2500 clicks for that phrase, once the link has been clicked through 2500 times, his ad no longer appears in search results until the next month. If the site’s ad is clicked through less than 2500 times that month, the advertiser only pays for the click throughs, not the overall impressions.

Pay per click advertising is recommended for newer sites. Yahoo/Overture and Google Adwords are two of the most popular pay per click advertising programs, as both allow for exposure across a number of website and search engines. Overture sponsored listings appear on Yahoo, MSN, and other engines, while Google Adwords also appear as part of the Google AdSense program. Assuming our limousine website owner uses Google Adwords, he can opt for AdSense exposure and send his ad to website related to his content.

The key to a successful pay per click campaign lies in knowing which search terms to bid upon, how much to spend, and knowing which search terms are best relevant to your site. If your site is targeted toward a local audience, consider using localized, narrow phrases for search. If you wish to reach a wider audience, you may consider more generalized terms, though some may require large bids. Pay per click programs offer helpful keywords tools to help with bidding; research the popular sites in your field, know the search algorithms, and bid with care.

Kathryn A. Lively is a freelance writer specializing in search engine optimization and social media optimization. She also assists with Virginia Beach website design.

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