Stick to Your Budget Do calculations and stick to them. What percentage of your visitors buy? What is cost of product? and so on. Don't be tempted to start a bidding war against a Pepsi or Wal-mart! Set a bid cap based on your calculation of your visitors' value. You are only interested in showing a profit.

Pay Per Click search engine optimisation is a full time task, as bids change without notice. You can literally, sit in front of your screen and manage your bids on an hourly basis. Naturally, this is far from practical and of course time is money. Be disciplined and set yourself a time budget as well as a financial one. Will you monitor your bids once a day or week? Three times a day or even more frequently?

Bid at Smaller PPC Search Engines Okay, Overture is daddy, but prices reflect that. A visitor who searches at Overture is just as qualified as someone searching on same words at any PPC Search Engine. Often newer and smaller PPC Search Engines have less bid competition and represent good value.

Qualify Your Title & Description After results have been returned. Make sure your titles and descriptions are focused to type of visitor you want. This can actually increase your click throughs by 44%. Write your title and description so that they relate to keywords that you are bidding for. Often using keywords in both title and description will increase your click through rates. People will only click if they are genuinely interested - so you'll save money that would have been wasted from clicks of people who were just browsing your link. When it comes to Pay Per Click tips, this is arguably, one of most important to note.

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Richard Baker is Director of Blue Fruit Ltd - a specialist Pay Per Click placement consultancy.

"...overdelivering solutions at affordable prices"

http://www.bluefruit.com ----------------------------------

The second factor that a bidder at Overture must address is issue of tracking. If a business doesn't know which search phrases it's leads are coming from, that business can waste a good deal of time and money. This is where Web programming technologies such as PHP, PERL, and ASP can be extremely useful. Without going into too much detail, these technologies can be used to track a customer from click to sale.

If you are interested in Overture, you should read over some of resources available from their site at http://www.overture.com/. But there is one resource that you won't find unless you are a business that uses Overture, and it is located at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. This second link is to their Search Term Suggestion tool, and it is a useful tool for determining keywords and phrases that are used in searches. It's also a pretty good all-around marketing tool to find out what's hot online.