Paid search engine marketing – also known as PPC or PPC search marketing – is a great way to generate immediate targeted website visitors by simply paying for every visit to the website. Unless you have done your research and know how to correctly set up and manage a paid search account, you could spend lots of money learning the hard way how to do it, and still not get any business in the end.

Paid Search Basics
In short, here is how paid search works:

1. Set up an account and add a form of payment. Most people start out using Google’s PPC system called AdWords because that is where more than 70% of the population goes first when they want to search online. Sites like Bing are also good places to run paid search campaigns and you will find dozens of smaller sites out there offering the fact that they have lower costs. If you have lots of time to test, then certainly test those, but don’t forget where most serious prospects go to search.

2. Create your ads. It is best to create multiple ads and continually test them to see which ones convert the best. You are limited in the number of words you can use, so being a good copywriter will go far here.

3. Select your keywords. You will be bidding on placement of your ads based on the keywords that people use to find them. You will also be bidding against other competitors and sometimes having more competitors can drive up the costs. In some arenas, it is not uncommon to pay $5, $10 or more per click (that’s just for a visitor, not a sale) so you need to be really cautious when setting up your account and make sure to use daily spend limits to stay within your budget.

4. Monitor and Adjust. When you first launch your paid search campaign, you will want to check in multiple times throughout the day to see how it is performing and make adjustments (mainly to costs) along the way. After you start to see some patterns, you can cut back to just checking on it daily.

5. Tracking. It is critical to track your paid search campaign so you can ensure that you are getting a good return on your investment.   If you have an ecommerce site, Google makes it easy by having tracking code that you can put on the site.

If you are running a campaign and decide you want to have a professional take a look at what you are doing, you can contact the Pay Per Click Team at AKA Internet Marketing.