Beginner's Guide to Starting a PPC Advertising Campaign

Pay per click advertising methods are becoming increasingly attractive to many companies that want to promote their business on the Internet. Instead of relying solely on traffic from organic search results, pay per click advertising platforms such as Google Adwords can help your company achieve prominent placement on the search engine.

Google adwords may seem expensive to some, however, it can get target leads into your website. Here are 5 steps to help you launch your PPC campaign:

Step 1: Set your budget. Google Adwords, and other PPC programs, allow its users to set a daily or maximum ad budget. This option is great for tracking your campaigns and allows you to spend at a level you’re comfortable with. Set your budget fairly low when you first begin to see what type of interest you are generating, and then start paring it down. Alternatively, you can invest a lot of money in your PPC campaign and approach several different markets with different PPC ads to see what works, and what doesn't.

Step 2: Identify your willingness to take on risks. Boris Mordkovich, in his book "Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook" states that PPC campaigns are less risky than traditional tri-media campaigns. However, he adds that search engines provide different ROIs. The ones that do offer a higher ROI may cost you more, so you need to decide beforehand what types of risks you are willing to take.

Step 3: Select your keywords. Most PPC programs offer free tools and resources to help you narrow down the keywords that are most appropriate for your niche. Invest in some time and effort in using keyword tools to ensure that you have an optimal list of keywords for your niche. You can do this with A/B testing and monitoring the results.

Step 4: Review your campaign’s results. Most pay-per-click search engine advertising campaigns offer real-time reports of your campaign, which means you can find out what is working – and what isn't – relatively easily. These reports will give you an overview of the number of clicks for a certain keyword or keyphrase, what time of day the ad was clicked, and if you have an analytics program enabled, whether that click led to a sale.

Step 5: Optimize your ads. After reviewing the reports and finding out what worked for your campaign, you can stop paying for the keywords that bought in little to no traffic, and focus your efforts on the keywords that offer a better return. Once you have this list of keywords, you can start creating compelling and unique ads, and deciding which markets and locations the ads should appear in.

Getting started with Google Ad words and other pay per click advertising methods is a relatively easy process, and much of your success will be a result of trial and error. Go through these five basic steps so you can make the most of your PPC advertising campaign.