The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) paid advertising with the search engines compared with normal techniques is just this: almost all normal methods are broadcast methods to potential customers who have shown little interest in buying your service. Think of radio ads, magazine ads etc etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure there some directed than others, if you are selling marketing services to businesses, you advertise in a Marketing magazine, but that's a course method these days.

Search Yahoo for "solicitor" and down the right hand side, you'll see links by websites who are paying them to have their advert and site listed there on the first page of results. This is Paid Search Engine Advertising and this is why Google is a multi billion dollar firm!

What about someone searching Yahoo for " direct advertising for solicitors"? That's a potential customer that right at that precise moment in time is interested in learning a very specific thing. If you expect to offer a service that can help, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Yahoo or other. What's its value to you to have that potential customer visit your website within 3 seconds of typing that into the search engine?

You could search engine optimise your website to make sure you have excellent positions for that term, but it takes time and a sizeable investment of money. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really comes into it's own, and is poorly utilised as far as I'm concerned. You could be on the first page of MSN the same day for the search term for a very small budget. In a month or less you'd have some indication of the amount of potential customers that will definitly search for that term, go to your site, and buy your service. This is right on the money, research into your targeted market for a bargain budget that you simply can't get any other way.

Lets say that the campaign costs you 20p per click, and 500 people click your advert making a total spend of ?100. And say your conversion rate is a average one percent, so you've got 5 new sales and more importantly five new customers that you can now sell to again. All this for just ?100 outlay! How much is your typical user worth to you? Isn't this worth it?

One key thing to know is how Google ranks the sponsored PPC marketing ads. In essence it is a real time auction. The top bidder wins. If you bid 20p and someone else bids 25p, they will rank above yours. In truth it is a lot more complicated than that: if you have a top quality PPC advertising, it is likely for you to rank above the 25p advert because the search engine will give boosts to higher performing PPC Adverts. The point is that if your PPC professional knows what (s)he's doing with PPC bid management, it is possible to achieve higher rankings (read additional traffic) for a lower budget. So your limited online website promotion budget is stretched and you save cash. On the other hand, if your Pay Per Click ad campaign is controlled by someone who does not know what they are doing, it will cost you more.

Here is a list of the things a competent Google Advertising Professional should perform whilst administering your account, if yours isn't, we strongly propose you get a review of your PPC campaign immediately:

Bid or Don't Bother - The goal of PPC bid campaigns is to get on the absolute first page of your MSN, Google, search engine etc quickly. However, where there's in excess of eight (in normal conditions) even PPC ads can drop off the 1st page. Where there's competition like this, there's absolutely no point doing a PPC marketing campaign if you're not on the 1st page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) settings, or forget it.

Tracking for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not usual marketing, so use that to your gain. The technology exists to track each and every sale and from where it comes. You can learn exactly which advert converts to sales and which don't. Remember, it's one thing to have lots of people visiting your site, it is another to have a lot of sales. Would you prefer to have for PPC internet advertising: an advert that generates one thousand leads and 1% sales, or one that generates a hundred leads but ten percent sales? In each you get the same sales, but the former costs you ten times the price in PPC advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A very common mistake is not matching the webpage that users land on when they click your advert, to the content of your advert; which should be aimed at what the user searched for. This just means that when the user clicks your Advert, they see what they want to. Internet users are lazy! Did you know that 1/2 of all internet browsers exit a website in under eight seconds just because they do not discover what they expected!

A/B Splt Testing your Ads - This is good PPC technique and simply means having more than one advert and testing which works best. Let me give you one example, we had two ads which were totally the same in every way except the start of the top title. One began "Learn to Prevent..." and the other began with "Stop...". Split testing determined that 5% of the users who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8% of the users who saw the "Stop..." ad clicked that one. Guess what, we abandoned the first advert and got a better quality advert which in the end Google promoted to the top ad position on the page, for the same Price Per Click!

Have Many Ad Groups - The basic rookie mistake is to group every keyword together to supply a single advert. This is very bad. Keywords should be divided into groups with advert text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching / Phrase / Broad - Google Pay Per Click Advertising allow three alternative ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but many online marketers just go for the basic matching option. You could double your traffic from intelligent use of the other options which many lazy Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.