DEFINITION
Pay per click (PPC) is a search engine marketing technique that requires you to pay a fee every time someone clicks to your website from an ad you've placed in a search engine's results.

INTRO
PPC can be defined as a marketing system on the Web in which the advertiser pays when the user clicks on its advertisement and goes to its site. This is a more interactive, results-oriented method compared to paying for just the placement of a banner ad on a Web page regardless if anyone clicks on it. The one that bid the most gets its offering to appear first in the results list; the second-highest appears second, and so on. After all paid advertisers are displayed; all the other results appear just like regular search engines. If the user clicks on a paid advertiser's offering to go to its Web site, the pay-per-click search engine charges the advertiser's account for the bid amount.  PPC marketing helps many companies to successfully widen their exposure to those using the web.

The success of an ad within the PPC advertising campaign is determined foremost by relevancy. If the ad describes what your audience is searching for, then they are more likely to click on your ad and turn into a potential customer.

Online advertising campaign management can become much more effective - and complex - with the introduction of pay per click (PPC) search engine services. Also known as sponsored listings, paid placement, pays per click listings through services such as Overture and Google Adwords offer a way to buy your way to the top of search results for any term you wish. With proper management and a clear focus, pay per click services offer some of the most well targeted, far-reaching, and economical advertising on the Internet.

Pay per click campaigns, however, are not perfect. Without constant monitoring, you sometimes risk sustaining advertising costs that can spiral out of control, focusing on terms that don't convert well for your product or services. There are many professional companies in operation that provide a professional Pay Per Click Optimization, Management and Consulting company which provides maximum ROI by optimal placement and using proper keywords and narrowing gap between bids through its keyword management services. Pay per click advertising is one of the quickest and useful ways of promoting your business online.

Today, the major pay per click advertising programs are offered by Google and Yahoo. Google's program called “AdWords” delivers targeted pay per click ads via its own search engines and a host of partner sites. Yahoo owns Overture which has a selection of specialized ppc advertising programs. These PPC advertising programs offer the best quality traffic for most website marketing campaigns.

Process How Does PPC Advertising Work?
Good Targeting and Timing
Finding the Right Keywords
Writing Your PPC Ads
Writing Your Ad Titles
Top PPC Pay Per Click Programs
How Does PPC Advertising Work?

The first aspect is the Cost per Click. It is controlled by your eagerness to bid and budget a certain amount for an ad placement. All pay-per-click search engines possess unique bidding nuances. Depending on your product or service, you may be amazed how bid position six attracts less click-through but produces more website actions. Or maybe position four generates more actions. Regardless - test, test and test - the outcome may mean lower costs and higher actions for you. In Overture's direct advertiser center, a marketer only views the top five bid placements. Bid a penny below the fifth bid position to attain the sixth one. Typically, because this bid placement is not "visible" in the marketers' control panel, you can obtain a great bid placement at a dramatically lower click cost with sustainable or increasing conversion rate. A pay per click advertising strategy should be based on "service" - on knowledge, expertise and advice that comes from successfully managing PPC campaigns for lots of other marketers over a long period of time. The basic requirement is to work with a set of initial set of keywords to target your pay per click campaign, and then research additional keywords, across your target audience's entire research/buying cycle, to test for effectiveness in meeting your marketing goals.

Keep the following key factors in mind when opting PPC Advertising

Bid on lots of cheap, targeted keywords and phrases, including misspellings, and avoid the expensive general words that everyone is bidding on.
Never bid more per click than what a single visitor is worth to your site-it's the best way to make sure your ads remain profitable.
Target your ads as much as possible. Write "custom" ads for each keyword and use the various bid management and targeting tools offered by the different PPC search engines to reduce your costs and increase your clicks
Design your landing pages so they convert qualified visitors to buyers. If your ads promise "cat toys with bells," make sure they actually direct visitors to a page where it's easy for them to buy these items.

In addition to that, you must keep the following things in your mind that:

How many searches a month are performed at the search engine?
What major search partners or affiliates does the search engine have?
How many searches are generated each month by the search partners or affiliates?
Is it possible to opt out of having your listing appear in the results of the affiliate sites?
What fraud prevention mechanisms are in place?
What is the procedure for filing a "fraudulent clicks" report?
Will an account be credited for fraudulent clicks discovered?

Keyword Research

Your search engine optimization consultant should help you target the right keywords. There are keyword suggestion tools you can use such as those provided by Overture, Google and Wordtracker. Through experience you'll see these keyword services can lack accuracy. Good keyword selection goes deeper than this because you must still filter out those ads that don't bring real paying customers.
That means you'll have to find lesser-used, two or three-word phrases, many of which aren't suggested in the keyword suggestion tools. It takes skill and experience to cull out the good keyword phrases. Keywords can also be found in your web site transfer log files however, they will only show those keyword phases your site is already ranking high on. Both AdWords and Overture have keyword rules and they may not allow you to bid on keywords that aren't used very often, even if those keywords are highly productive in terms of profit.
If you specify a negative keyword, your ad will not be displayed when the negative keyword is typed in. Negative keywords prevent unqualified click-through charges. Negative keywords can be especially important if you are including a very broad keyword term. For instance, if you are offering a widget that is not free, you would not want your PPC ad to appear when someone types in "free widget". If your ad did appear when "free widget" was typed in, someone might click on it thinking your product was free and then immediately leave your site. You would be wasting money on an unqualified prospect.

Targeting

Who should see your ad? Pay per click search engines, pay for placement or pay for ranking search engines are a highly effective way to attract cheap, targeted traffic to your website. The best and most popular pay per click search engines are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Miva . Lower-priced pay per click search engines which also provide an excellent service are GoClick and Enhance Interactive
The huge success of Yahoo! Search Marketing and FindWhat in providing cheap, targeted website traffic has encouraged the arrival of dozens of other pay for placement, pay for ranking or pay per click search engines. Often you can buy this search engine traffic for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular pay per click search engines.
Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines can be a powerful, instant source of qualified traffic for your website-provided you do your homework and invest a bit of time in managing your campaign. In fact, many website owners who've mastered keyword targeting and know the "insider" bidding strategies tell me that more than 90 percent of their traffic comes straight from the PPC search engines!
PPC search engines are constantly looking for new ways to improve their services-and your results. After all, they want you to keep purchasing advertising from them and not their competitors.

Here's an overview of some great tools they're offering to help you better target your ads and keep your campaign costs down:

1. Keyword Matching Options (offered by Overture and Google AdWords). Both of these search engines offer options that allow you to fine-tune the way your keyword is matched to the phrases people type into their engines. Their options differ slightly, but here's a rough breakdown:

Exact match:
A listing is triggered by the exact keyword phrase and nothing else. Example: "fishing rods" will match "fishing rods" but not "fancy fishing rods."
Broad match.
A listing is triggered by the keyword phrase or slight variations of it, even if the words are out of order or separated by other words. Example: "fishing rods" will match "Rod's Alaskan Fishing Adventure" and possibly even "Rod's Fish & Chips." Warning: The broad match option can work well for highly specific queries, such as brand names or serial numbers, but can result in a lot of poorly targeted click-throughs for general terms, especially terms that have more than one meaning, such as "dolly," "tackle" or "nails."
Negative match.
When words identified as "negatives" are typed into the search engine along with the keyword phrase, the listing will not appear.

2. Contextual Targeting
Contextual targeting places your PPC listing on websites where the content somehow relates to your ad. Obviously, this can be a great way to increase the exposure of your ad.
3. Geotargeting (offered by Overture and Google AdWords).
Geotargeting allows you to choose which countries or geographic regions your ads appear in. This feature is best suited for businesses that offer local services or products that are useful only in specific regions.
4. Day Parting
Kanoodle is the only search engine we know that offers this option. "Day parting" allows you to choose the time of day your ads will appear in different regions, so they're only available during "prime viewing times."
5. Keyword Research Tools
The most popular keyword phrases are always the most expensive. Keyword research tools help you find common variations and misspellings of the more popular keywords so you can keep costs down while still generating traffic.
6. Multiple Ads for the Same Keyword
Google AdWords allows you to "split test" different ads for the same keyword so you can see which ad attracts the most paying customers. This can save you a lot of time, and enables you to make sure your ads will yield the highest possible return on your investment.
7. "Autobid" Software
Autobid software is a bid management program that tracks the bidding activity on your different keywords and automatically adjusts your bidding amount so you can maintain your ranking. The more sophisticated bid management programs allow you to "cap" your bids so you never spend more than you want.
PPC advertising allows you to get your web site listed on the results pages of an almost limitless number of keyword phrases. That kind of reach is incredibly powerful. For most of the PPC engines, the advertising rules and listing procedures are straightforward. The highest bidder for a phrase gets top spot. Both programs have relevance requirements. That means you have to target the right type of searcher or consumer with the right keywords. Your ad must get clicked on regularly enough or it will be removed.
Before setting up an account in Overture or Google Adwords, consider your target market relative to your product or service being offered on your website. Keep in consideration that:
What benefits does your product or service satisfy for your customer?
What are the demographics and psychographics of you primary target market?
What customer circumstances does your product or service support?
Good PPC advertising requires you to generate a keyword list that tests the bounds of Overture's and Google Adword's relevancy standards. A longer keyword list is preferable at the start since you will ultimately filter it down based on performance.
Once your campaigns are submitted to Google Adwords, Overture or any other pay-per-click search engine, your work has really just started. But we'll leave that for round two.
Writing Ads:

For any website in any industry, before forging ahead with a pay per click advertising campaign, it is important to first understand the way your audience uses language to search for your products and services online and then ensure that you are properly targeting a solid mix of relevant search terms. Additionally, you must have a methodology or tool to closely manage your pay per click advertising on an hourly basis, test keywords and positions and prices, tests click-through rates and measures your ROI by keyword and by pay per click program.
With Pay Per Click ads, there are strict character limitations to follow so the text needs to be as powerful as possible. When we write Pay Per Click ads, we combine our clients' targeted keywords with compelling, superlative-free, direct response copy. The call to action is always to get the person to click through to the site. The landing page must back up whatever the ad is offering and entice the reader to make a purchase, sign up for a subscription or contact the client. Pay Per Click ads can focus on offers, geographic locations, a particular demographic, brands or anything else that is unique to what you offer and what your customers are searching for. Different ads should be written for different keyword phrases. For instance, if you are bidding on five different brand names, you should have five different versions of your ad, each one focusing on a different brand. Satisfy the searcher and you'll be rewarded with higher conversion rates.
Include keywords in your ad text or title
. If your keywords appear in your ad text, users will be able to immediately recognize that your ad is relevant to their search.
. One way to create targeted ads is to create multiple ads within an Ad Group. In each ad, include one or more of the keywords from your keyword list.
. Another way to customize your ad text is to create multiple Ad Groups, each with one keyword and one ad that contains that keyword.
. Short, non-repetitive sentences work best.
. Double-check spelling and grammar.
We'll test multiple ads per Ad Group.
. Try different messages, and see what works best.
. Our system tracks the CTR for each of your ads, so we can identify and remove ads that perform poorly.
To produce effective PPC ads you must bid on the right selected keyword phrases, write persuasive, moving ad copy and have a well written page to have them click through to. The bid price on some keyword phrases is mind bogglingly high, so good judgment is necessary now. If you know how to attract the prospect and deliver them seamlessly to a solution they need, you'll be rewarded with a good sales rate.
The title is treated differently by different PPC programs; however, having your keywords placed in the title is a good decision usually. That's the golden rule of search engine marketing; use your customer's words to grab their attention. When you test different ad wordings, you'll discover which are effective. You have to learn quickly however, because you may not be allowed to bid on that phrase again, if your ads performance was particularly poor. Some of your competitors will be making offers to customers that you'd think would wipe all chance of profit, and their ad may make your well written masterpiece invisible in comparison. It is competitive, and you must be prepared to deal with the challenges that you'll face from your competitors.
Of course the words free, instant, and bonus, are attention getters. Call now, or get yours here, are calls to action to encourage readers to click through to your site. Each program has guidelines that you'll have to read. If you make mistakes, you'll be warned once, then ignored. They have no interest in your web master's problems or your manager's concern with legality of terms.
Your domain name listed below the title can influence the reader's perception of the quality and relevance of your ad. If your current domain name sounds unrelated or too promotional sounding, you might consider getting a new domain with a name that sounds a little more serious. An important thing to remember is how your value proposition to the customer can be conveyed in a few select words.
Having a search engine copywriter do this for you makes sense because they are familiar with the psychology involved, keyword choices, and the rules and regulations of the PPC programs. They also know what copy content is needed in your pages. Generally speaking, before launching your PPC campaign you should take an inventory of the product and services categories you're interested in, along with the specific products and services you have to offer.

BENEFITS:
Lately, the marketing industry has experienced a fast and increasing growth of Pay Per Click (PPC), the online advertising system that made the traditional ways of promotion on the net an ancient experience. Due to the constant fluctuations that every single market has to go through worldwide, almost without exception, a wide range of companies have decided to abandon their former skepticism in order to bet on an innovative advertising system that keeps them at the forefront of their market segment. In this way, more and more high-quality firms decide to invest a growing portion of their advertising budget on PPC. Other, more doubtful firms are still wondering if this tool is really suitable for them.
Many small companies commit a common mistake when they decide to move to PPC. They believe that this system can, as if by magic, provide immediate revenues. This more and more repeated fallacy leads to an inappropriate handling of the advertising budget. As long as the development of PPC keeps this rate of growth, the field will get even more competitive and muddy. One of the consequences of this tendency is that the profits that could be obtained in a short term will be lower each time.
Different companies should then project a longer vision, despite of the implied risks, and consider PPC as a tool that, in the medium and long term, will adjust to their needs as well as provide revenues. This online advertising system has resulted in tremendously profitable returns for those that have properly administered their inversion on marketing and played with craftiness in the PPC game. Companies that haven't decided to put money on this kind of advertising program hide behind their doubt with an obvious question: how can you realize if PPC is truly effective?

In any kind of financial investment that a person or company makes, one often knows how much money is available and decides which portion of this amount will be invested, trying always to run the least risk possible. What can't be set so easily are the revenues that this decision will mean in the near future. The first step when someone has to assess the return of investment is to define accurately what is called conversion. The best way of evaluating the success of an advertising program is to know beforehand if it will represent profitable sales or activities that bring incomes. The follow-up of the campaigns performance is a very important issue to ensure that you will get the highest return of investment.
Not every single PPC program looks at the conversion in the same way. In some cases, conversion means receiving information about the lead for a future contact and potential sale. Sometimes conversion implies a closed sale or a subscription, or any other action that the user completes on the site. In any case, the fact is that the tracking codes have to be properly connected with the purpose of reaching an accurate calculation of the conversions and the associated costs. Sometimes, the tracking codes are not so useful. An example of this situation is the case of a Website that desires to get phone calls from the leads in order to sell the products by phone. In this situation it is better to perform a manual calculation of conversions.
Once it is decided which kind of response is expected from the campaign, you should analyze which is the better cost per conversion. Most small companies make the common mistake of asking if the cost should be equal or lower than the ideal profit. This type of reasoning usually brings more complications than advantages. That's why the best way of calculating this cost is by doing it based on the customer life cycle.
Another important point when determining an optimum cost is to compare the number of leads with the cost per conversion. The more leads you desire to get, the marginal cost for each one will be increasing. At a certain point, an extra conversion will imply that you're losing money.
Some collateral issues that are not always considered are the mouth-to-mouth promotion, as well as the chance of someone that has seen the ad but types the URL without clicking on it, which makes difficult an adequate tracking.
For certain, deciding the cost per lead based on the client life cycle is the best way of calculating the potential profitability of a PPC campaign. Nevertheless, as in every decision of this kind, the success of each decision will depend on having in advance the most accurate information.

Programs:
There are numerous programs available. Those listed below are your best choices because they can deliver sufficient results for most campaigns. There are other programs available and you may find value in them depending on the type of product or service you're offering.
Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click Services
PPC Pay Per Click Advertising Programs
Google AdWords Select Cost Per Click
Google AdWords Tips
Overture Pay Per Click
Other PPC Advertising Resources

The keyword advertising that AdWords offers lets you:
Target your ads specifically to people who are looking for your products or services.
Avoid showing your ads to untargeted users who aren't likely to purchase from you.
Obtain the maximum return on your advertising investment.
Starting an ultimately effective pay-per-click campaign is difficult.
Although the paid search engines like Google Adwords and Overture want you to believe otherwise. A goal of "getting website traffic" is logically appealing since marketers tend to directly associate website traffic to producing website actions like sales, subscriptions and so on. The problem is "all website traffic is NOT created equal." Just because you receive "traffic" does not mean you will achieve website actions.

A search engine's mission is to deliver highly relevant search results to their customers. Therefore the natural search results indicate what the search engines believe most effectively satisfies their customer's expectations when they search on a particular keyword.
Paid search increases the simplicity of "getting website traffic" yet the difficulty lies at the heart of your primary goal - getting actions that drive business growth like sales, subscriptions or contact us form completions. Here lays the challenge not advertised by the paid search engines - how to generate website actions.
You are faced with a number of real challenges when aimed at achieving website actions from your paid search engine campaign. The challenges focus on two key aspects: the cost you pay per click and the relevancy you present to the click-through. These are important because they affect your business growth in terms of conversion and profitability - the intersection of website visitors with website actions.
Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on your keywords and how much traffic they draw. The largest companies in the pay per click industry are Yahoo! and Google. Google is not a pay per click search engine, but it does provide pay per click advertising in text ad boxes to the right of search results it delivers. It also delivers pay per click ads to other content sites.

Landing Page
In the slew of discussions of keywords, PPC ads, and even contextual search marketing that's standard for search, we've forgotten what the most important search marketing element is, in some ways, really: the website. The searchers are trying to find the best website to suit their purpose; the search engines want to help the searchers to find the best site; the advertisers want the searchers to find the site their pushing through the SEs.

It is important to know that it is extremely hard to get any money, or site traffic, or any other positive outcome for your website through search ads alone. That's even with the huge branding potential of the unclicked PPC ad (and it's there). Because the bottom line is that the bulk of the search ad payoff happens on your site; if so you don't get conversions through PPC searchers, you've thrown the bulk of your PPC spend out the window; this brings us back to landing pages. But to design the best landing page for searchers, you have to start by understanding how they'll think about your site when they get there, and how that will color their expectations.
In short, Landing pages are simply web pages designed specifically for a keyword or related group of keywords. They are highly relevant to the keyword searched and consistent with your ad's claim. They immediately focus a visitor's attention to a primary action. The jest of landing pages is that it asks your visitors to take an action.
One of the reportedly major reasons why pay-per-click marketing programs fall short of their intended goal is because businesses direct all of their click-through to their home page. Since most businesses' home pages are designed to serve multiple audiences they do not provide the level of relevancy and consistency expected from the visitor.
If your pay-per-click marketing is not living up to your expectations, consider which web pages you are sending visitors to. Are they relevant and consistent with your pay-per-click ads and keywords? Do they offer too many calls-to-action? Do they "fit" the expectations of the visitor searching on the particular keyword?