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What's All the Fuss About Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

The introduction of pay-per-click advertising has opened a whole new world for many Internet advertisers who once had to wait in line for search engines to find and list their sites and often had to wait for long periods of time to increase website traffic..

Both Google (Google AdWords) and Yahoo (Yahoo Search Marketing) now allow people to buy search engine placement on their sites. Purchasers pay by the click so every time someone actually clicks on a paid link to their page, the advertiser is charged.

The key ingredient to creating a successful pay-per-click ad on either Google or Yahoo is to know what your keywords are. Knowing what your keywords are is essential if you want to run a successful pay-per-click campaign. That's because your ads are set to appear when people type in specific keywords. You tell Google and Yahoo what keywords you want and you write the ad to go along with them. You want to be sure that what you are promoting is the type of product or service people want when they type in specific keywords.

If the keywords you choose are not the ones your target market is using you won't be able to get targeted visitors to your website. People will either read your ad and not click on it because it's not what they are looking for or they will click on the ad but will not buy or opt-in once they get to your site. When that happens, you are paying for traffic that has very little interest in what you have to offer.

You may be tempted to use only the keywords that get thousands of searches each month. These are the more popular keywords. This is not a good idea for a couple of reasons:

  • Very popular keywords are likely to cost you more because other advertisers want them too and bidding wars occur for good placement.


  • Very popular keywords are often very general. The traffic you will drive to your site is not targeted and your conversion rate may be quite low.

While you may want to bid on these keywords, getting high placement should not be your objective unless you know these words convert well on your site. It doesn't make a lot of sense to pay $3.00 per click and get 100 visitors if none of them buy. You will have paid $300 ($3.00 x 100 visitors) and made NO money.

A good pay-per-click campaign will make use of 200 to 500 keywords. Yes, that's right - 200 to 500 different keywords. The more targeted the keyword, the better chance for driving targeted traffic and making sales. And, the more targeted the traffic, in most cases, the less expensive it will be.