Getting Started With Pay Per Click Advertising

The popularity of pay per click marketing has been steadily increasing among business owners. Unlike organic search rankings, which take time to develop, pay per click advertising can place your business on top of search engine results immediately.

Google adwords may seem expensive to some, however, it can get target leads into your website. Below are some guidelines for starting on Pay Per Click campaign.

Step 1: Set your budget. Programs such as Google Adwords allow you to set a daily budget, or limit, so you can better manage your marketing campaign. This allows you to pay only for what you want at any given time, and can be valuable in tracking where your marketing budget is really going. 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. Advertising with the more popular search engines may be more costly so you need to decide if you are willing to take on the added risks.

Step 3: Choose your keywords. There are many free online tools that you can use to discover the most relevant keywords for your market. Keywords are the backbone of every pay per click campaigns. Selecting the wrong keywords can be disastrous to your campaign so you need to spend some time to make sure that you get the right keywords. Aside from keyword research, you may have to do A - B split tests to select a winning list of keywords.

Step 4: Review your campaign's results. Most PPC platforms provide a convenient reporting tool that gives you the ability to adjust your campaign based on the data you gathered so far. Reports will usually include the number of clicks for each keyword, the time of day your ad was clicked, and the location of those who clicked your ads.

Step 5: Fine-tune 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 Adwords 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.