Top 10 Tips for Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising has completely revolutionized how advertising is done over the Internet. No longer must advertisers purchase banners or text link ads on sites for a flat rate per month, but with virtually no guaranteed results (not even a guarantee of a click); instead, they can purchase "pay per click" advertising through a massive contextual ad server service, such as Google Adwords.

Now, with this new ability to advertise effectively comes several responsibilities: in order to use it correctly, you must understand how it works. You can't simply purchase the top right corner of a site for a flat rate per month. Below, I've included 10 important tips for PPC advertising:

1.Actually browse through sites that serve your advertisements. Eliminate those that are low quality or that are likely to inflate the price of advertising by giving you too many clicks per 1000 views.

2.Remember to always determine whether or not it is cost effective to advertise on contextual ad networks; or whether you should restrict your pay-per-click advertisements to the search engine itself.

3. Use "day parting" features to determine when your advertisements will and wont be shown. If, for instance, you find that at certain times during the day, you get a lot of clicks, but none are serious buyers, you may want to remove your days from that period of time.

4. Use the statistics program on whichever pay-per-click advertising program you are using to determine the effectiveness of ads. If ads are not effective (or are too effective), replace them with something else.

5. Test and refine your ads until you have the best possible advertisement (i.e. one that pulls visitors, but not visitors that don't buy).

6.Determine how many clicks you can afford to pay for per sale. You should be able to mathematically determine the optimal price per click.

7. Use Google Adword's keyword tool feature to search for additional keywords to use in your campaigns. The more you have, the more traffic you will pull.

8. Remember to segment each campaign into a list of keywords and an advertisement that matches that list. The smaller the list of keywords, the more narrowly focused the advertisement can be, making it more effective

9. Remove keywords from your campaigns that are not cost effective. Many keywords will pull searches, but will end up decreasing your click through rate or not converting to sales after someone clicks through.

10. Use negative keywords to prevent freebie seekers from running up your click through count. For instance, get rid of keywords like "free" and "cheap," unless your product is free or cheap.

Follow each of these ten tips carefully and you will find that using pay per click advertising isn't as hard as it may seem initially.