Adwords and other Pay-Per-Click Programs – An Overview

If you haven’t used Adwords yet to promote your business, you’ve been missing out. Not only is it one of the fastest ways to advertise (you can get ads up in less than 5 minutes), but it is also one of the easiest ways to reach a massive audience. You don’t need good connections.

You don’t need a big mailing list. You don’t need a massive budget (in fact, you don’t even have to pay for your advertising fees until the end of the month). And you don’t need a degree in computer science to “engineer” a site that ranks well in search engines.

So what do you need in order to be successful with Adwords? First of all, you need an account. If you haven’t started one yet, hop over to http://www.google.com/adwords and open one.

Once you open an account, you will want to start testing some of Adwords’s features. Try out the keyword tool to find new keywords related to your niche. Use the bid tool to determine approximately how much your advertising campaign will cost. And so on. Get familiar with Adwords.

Once you become familiar with Adwords, you will want to consider making a campaign for your business. But before you do that, you need to understand the following two things, which will help you to structure your campaigns correctly:

1. Google Adwords—and all “pay per click” advertising programs—charge you per click, not per impression, action, or sale. What does this mean? It means it is incumbent on you to ensure that you are a) paying the right price per click; b) purchasing the right keywords; c) writing ads that people will actually click on; and d) making sure clicks turn into sales. Google will serve ads for you, but other than that, it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to get a decent ROI.
2. Two things determine how well an ad is ranked by Adwords (but not necessarily other PPC advertising programs): 1) your bid; and 2) your ad’s click through rate (CTR). What this means for you is quite simple: if your CTR is phenomenal, you can get a high ad position without paying more money per click. If, on the other hand, your CTR is lackluster, you’ll have to pay out the nose to get that same position. So make sure you write an ad people will click on – or prepare to pay.

As a new Adwords user, you certainly have a lot to learn. But if you keep the two things above in mind, you shouldn’t stray too far from making successful campaigns and capitalizing on them.

Now, with that in mind, you shouldn’t forget that there are other pay per click advertising programs available. While Adwords offers high quality traffic in large volume, it also costs more to use (i.e. bids for keywords are higher) than most other pay per click advertising programs.

You may want to consider complementing your Adwords campaigns by creating parallel campaigns with the following advertising programs:

1. Yahoo Search Marketing: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com. While Yahoo has a much smaller market share of the search market than Google, it is still formidable when compared to most other search engines. Additionally, many keywords on YSM are much cheaper than on Google.

1. Microsoft Search Beta: http://advertising.microsoft.com. MSN, like Yahoo, receives a considerable amount of search traffic – although still much less than Google. If you want to scalp some cheap PPC keywords, consider checking MSN out, too.

So there you have it: a brief overview of how to use Google Adwords, as well as a list of its major Pay-Per-Click competitors.