Ten minutes from right now you can have a Google campaign up and running, sending visitors to your web site. The speed at which you can do new things and make changes in Google's system is stunning.

But speed can also be a trap. Sometimes people do rash things when they're in a hurry.

Blowing your whole budget on PPC management is easy - you select a keyword, make an ad, and pay for bunches of visitors that are not going to by anything from you. To help you be sure not to spend money getting the wrong kinds of visitors to your website. Ask:

How Many People are Looking for this Product?

Finding the answer to this question will help you understand what you should expect in the way of traffic and new customers that Google can send to you, and avoid disappointments. Even if you don't get everything you are hoping for in terms of traffic, you will probably discover some traffic sources that are not as high-profile but equally profitable.

In just a few seconds you can have a good idea of the traffic. Look up the useful search term selection tool at http://inventory.overture.com (or http://inven tory.uk.overture.com for the UK). Put in a few of your main keywords and overture will show you the number of searches its serves over the last month for each of the terms.

For example, you have a company that sells a skin-care product designed to slow the aging process. Let's imagine you've just started and want to bring more folks to your web site through Google. Where do you start?

To start with, get a starting list of potential keywords. Here is what we brainstormed:

skin

beauty

acne

cosmetics

makeup

cosmetic surgery

dermatology

anti-aging

wrinkles

oils

moisturizers

And this is nowhere near complete. But if we run over to Overture's keyword selector tool and enter these terms to see how many searches they get in a month, here's what we find out:

skin 7,290

beauty 5,006

acne 1,872

cosmetics 1,862

makeup 1,796

cosmetic surgery1,736

dermatology 622

anti-aging 503

wrinkles 485

oils 390

moisturizers 120

Notice what's going on here:

The keyword "skin" got over 60 times as many searches as the bottom term, "moisturizers." That term may be one of your most valuable players.

When you check out your keywords on Overture you will also get with them words that won't be relevant. You will use those as negative keywords.

To be successful in managing your PPC you will need to come up with all the variations and different combinations of search terms that the multitudes of skin care product searchers are using. Then take them to the Overture keyword selection tool again.

According to Overture, we could conceivably get tens, even hundreds of thousands of US searches in a month on those top keywords.