2. How much are you, along with your competitors, willing to pay for those terms?

The average monthly ad spend on PPC advertising is a couple thousand dollars, but this varies immensely from less than $50/month for regionally targeted and niche businesses to millions a month by large national retailers.

The goal of any advertising campaign should be to bring in more money from campaign than it costs to run it. Pay Per Click is no different, but level of detail you can measure in PPC is significantly higher than most types of advertising. For example, with relatively inexpensive (some are even free) tools, you can determine which ads are generating sales or leads for your business. Beyond that, you can determine how much money you spent on a specific ad to generate a sale or a lead. By measuring what’s working, you can aggressively advertise on terms that prove to be winners for your business while shutting down ads that don’t deliver.

Tips for Success

1. Advertise on a large number of relevant search phrases. Brainstorm beyond first dozen terms that come to mind to describe your business. Advertise on terms used to describe your products, product names, product codes, and questions a prospect might type into a search engine that your services answer, and more.

2. Build unique ads for each search phrase. It takes a lot more time to write a unique ad for each search phrase relevant to your business rather than creating one ad for all of your search phrases, but extra work will definitely be rewarded. Ads that are aligned with corresponding search term receive more clicks, which will mean more targeted traffic, and in some cases paying less per click (on Google Adwords) due to intricacies of how advertising is priced.

3. Send visitors to most appropriate page of your web site. If you place an ad for a specific product within your online store, don’t send visitors to your homepage and force them to dig for what they just searched. This will frustrate your visitors and increase chance that they’ll hit dreaded Back button.

4. Track your results. Spending money without measuring return on your investment is not a good business practice. At very least, consider installing free tracking tools available through Google Adwords and Overture to measure which terms are delivering results for your business. Beyond that, consider using a 3rd party statistics tool with conversion analysis to compile results of your various pay per click programs into one easy to manage interface.

Go for it

People are searching for what you sell at this very moment! If your site is not showing up near top of results, your competition thanks you.