Pay-Per-Click search engines are now the rage on the internet. Never before in the history of internet marketing can you instantly drive hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors to your website at several cents per visitor. In this article, I would like to focus on the strategies for Google Adwords specifically, and not for other PPC search engines like Overture. This is due to the multiple advantages that Google Adwords bring to smart marketers on a budget, as compared to the deep-pocketed marketers that dominate Overture.

Before I proceed to the strategies for effective advertising, I would first outline several important benefits of Google Adwords first.

The first major advantage is the instantaneous response of Google Ads to your campaign adjustments. Simply make a change in your keyword, or your bid price, and you will see the results on Google several minutes later. You do not have to wait several days for your ads to get modified or go 'live', giving you the flexibility of responding rapidly to the changing market conditions.

The second major advantage is that with Google Ads, the higher your click-through rate, the higher your ad position on the search engine results page. Alternatively, you can afford to bid lower and still be able to stay in the same position. This means that your ad rankings is dependent on both your bid price and click-through rate. The conclusion you can draw from this is that Google Adwords allows you to advertise more effectively than Overture if you prefer to win with strategies, other than with money alone.

With that, we can move on to the actual strategies of advertising with Google Adwords.

The first step you need to take is to brainstorm a list of about 100-200 different keywords. 'Tennis racquets' and 'Wilson tennis racquets' can be considered as different keywords, but not 'tennis racquets' and 'tennis racquet'. This keyword brainstorming is extremely crucial because the keywords you bid on determine the quality of your traffic, and how easily the visitor can be converted into a paying customer. If the keywords you bid on are not related to your business, your visitors are not likely to convert into customers the moment they arrive at your website.

Secondly, if you're just starting out on your campaign and you do not have figures like your Visitor Value yet, then you can start by driving around fifty to one hundred visitors to your website per day, on a tight budget. The purpose is to obtain figures like the conversion rate of your website, your visitor value, and also other numbers like the cost/conversion.

Visitor Value - the value of each visitor at your website. If for example, you make a profit of $10 for every 100 visitors to your website, then your Visitor Value is simply $0.10.

Conversion rate - the percentage of your visitors that convert to customers.

Cost/ Conversion - how much money you need to spend on your Adwords campaign to convert eac

h visitor to a paying customer.

Once you obtain such important figures, or if you have such figures before you start your Google Adwords campaign, you need to fine-tune your campaign for maximum profitability.

One rule of thumb is that you can never bid more on each click than your Visitor Value. If each visitor costs more than the value he/she can bring you, then you are losing money on each click.

Next, you need to monitor you campaign over time and see which are the keywords that convert to customers, and which are the keywords with zero results. Remove the keywords with no results from your keyword list, or you will be paying unnecessarily for keywords that do not convert.

The next crucial step you must take is to continuously tweak your ads for ever-improving click-through rates. Since a higher click-through rate gives you the same ad position for the same bid price, you can cut your costs dramatically if you can somehow manage to double or triple your click-through rates.

In this case, the trick is to match the keywords to the ad very closely. For example, if you are bidding on the keyword 'Legal Consulting Services', you must include the words 'Legal Consulting Services' in your headline, or at least somewhere in your ads. This gives you a higher probability that the ad matches what the visitor is looking for.

Also, you need to pay attention to how well your 'Landing Page' is related to your ads. If your ads are closely related to the copy or salesletter on your 'Landing Page', then the visitor clicking through the ad will be interested in what you have to offer. If your ads do not match the words on the 'Landing Page', the visitor will discover that what you offer is irrelevant to what he/she had in mind, or what you promised on your ads. The visitors will end up leaving immediately, increasing your campaign costs.

In conclusion, Google Adwords is a very powerful advertising tool which you can use to drive large quantities of targeted prospects to your website. If you implement the proper strategies and techniques, keeping your costs down while your conversion-rates up, then you will be able to succeed in marketing your business online.

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