Darryl Jacques Director of Client Services

Pay-per-click advertising is easy, right?

Pick a few keywords, toss out a clever ad, then sit back and watch the dollars come rolling in! Your boss, awash in new revenue and impressed by your genius, doubles your salary and whisks you off to Aruba in the corporate jet. If this hasn't happened to you yet, check your efforts against the following PPC campaign suggestions, listed in chronological order:

1. Put effort into your keyword selection. You're a careful shopper when you go to the grocery store, right? You don't just grab the first can or box that you see (unless you're a bachelor). You compare brands, examine prices carefully and look for the good deals. So when choosing your PPC keywords, why would you pick the same keywords that everyone else is targeting, then go toe-to-toe on those keywords with all your competitors, most of whom have a bigger PPC ad budget than you do?
   
   Instead, spend some time thinking about keywords that describe the goods and services that your company provides, then use online tools to get additional suggestions and variations of those keywords. Compare prices for those keywords across Google and Yahoo (and MSN, soon to emerge from beta testing). The more you think about your campaign when you set it up, the less you'll have to think about it later.
   
   
2. Put even more effort into your ad creation. Don't use the same ad for all your keywords. Don't send all click-through visitors to your home page. Do put the keyword in the title. Do solve a searcher's problem or tout a key benefit of your product or service. Do differentiate yourself from the clutter of everyone else's ads. Do understand and utilize your ad options (broad match, content match, negative match, etc.).
   
   Take a few minutes to examine ads that were written by competitors for your keywords, and you'll quickly find some pretty uninspired stuff. You can do better. Remember, you want to impress your boss with your genius so he'll send you to Aruba.
   
   
3. Test, compare and try again. A PPC campaign can be like your cable TV. It can empty your bank account even if you're not watching it. With so many demands on your time, the PPC campaign can get ignored, especially since it quietly and unassumingly churns along without complaint--at least until the credit card hits its limit.
   
   A good PPC campaign should be carefully monitored. Different ads for the same product or service should be created, each solving a different problem or promoting a different benefit. Run them side-by-side, to see which garners the most clicks. Your favorite, most-inspired ad creation might be completely ignored. Your most important keyword might be in danger of getting delisted because of a horrible click-through rate. Write, re-write and monitor your ads.
   
   
4. Track your keywords through to conversion. Most businesses that run PPC campaigns have a general idea of their keyword click-through rates, but don't install the additional code to follow the keyword click through the website to see if it leads to a conversion--the website visitor filling out a form, purchasing a product or downloading something. Installing the conversion code is crucial; with that information, you can determine exactly how much each PPC conversion cost.
   
   For example, let's suppose that you decide to sell vacation packages to Aruba (since you'll be spending so much time there yourself). The average bid price for the keyword "aruba vacation" last month was $1.50, and 100 people clicked through to your site, which cost you $150. Of those 100 people that clicked through to your site, five of them purchased the vacation online. Your cost per conversion for "aruba vacation" was $30. It's now up to you to determine whether you're making money at that cost, and also to analyze your other keywords to see how much the cost per conversion is for each of those. Bids should then be raised and lowered accordingly.

Okay, maybe PPC isn't as easy as you thought. But with some thought, initial effort and attention, it can be consistently profitable. If you don't have the necessary time to dedicate to your pay-per-click efforts, 10x Marketing has a team of trained professionals that does. And we won't even require a company car…