Pay Per Click Advertising in Plain English

Perry Marshall, in his Guide to Google AdWords, says this about PPC advertising: "[It] is about getting in front of people who are looking for what you sell right this moment and get them to respond."

You have the ability to reach your target market instantly, and get them to make a decision on your product/service. And that's not just it.

It takes just 10 minutes for you to set up an ad campaign in Google AdWords - and immediately after your ad is ready, it will start bringing in traffic to your websites. No matter what you're selling, you have a chance, in 10 minutes, to start making sales.

What other advertising platform let's you make a sale that fast?

Better question - how can YOU use this speed (of getting an idea to the market and testing it almost instantly) to your advantage?

The biggest advantage of PPC advertising is that you can test new business ideas quickly and cheaply by running an ad campaign for a few hours and monitoring its results. This alone can save you thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in advertising and product creation - but only if you do it right (I'll show you how to in the next 6 chapters).

Pay-per-click advertising operates on two simple premises:

• You pay only for visitors that come to your site (no upfront costs - every "click" while being an expense is also a chance for you to convert that visitor into a customer). You pay a certain amount "per click" on your ad. If nobody clicks on your ad, you don't pay a dime... and also get no visitors. The goal is to get many TARGETED visitors, while paying as little as possible per click.
• Your ads are displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching / looking for. (i.e. If some one search for "weight loss" and you're bidding on the term "weight loss", your ad will be displayed when some one searches for that phrase.)

There are two major PPC ad engines:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo Search Marketing formerly Overture).

While they are both very effective in pulling in traffic, I exclusively use Google AdWords (and I'll explain why in just a minute).

Having said that, I don't discourage you from using YSM. In certain niche markets the YSM network is still not hyper-saturated (unlike AdWords, where the competition is higher) and you may be able to realize serious short-term gains if you play the PPC game right.

What I would discourage you from is to using a PPC ad network other than AdWords or YSM. Beyond these two the situation is pretty bleak with poor traffic quality, click fraud and lack of a size able user base all contributing to an abject failure.

5 Reasons why you should be using Google AdWords

Reason 1: The Google audience / user base has traditionally catered to technical audiences and more importantly, to Internet savvy users.

The kind of users who are comfortable with buying online

These users (the tech-savvy, buying kind) are more likely to use Google than Yahoo or MSN).

Reason 2: Google AdWords delivers instant results - you can have your ad campaign up and running in 10 minutes flat. Compared to this Yahoo can take anywhere from 2 to 5 days while they manually review ads.

Reason 3: With AdWords, you can go target your prospects geographically down to countries, states and cities. This is a great advantage for businesses selling hard goods or services - they would prefer local prospects as opposed to someone half way across the world.

Reason 4: My favorite quality about AdWords is that it rewards good ad performance - that is, for an ad that converts (clicks/impressions percentage) exceptionally well (high click-through-rate (CTR)), your ad will get better ad placement as well as better pricing.

Google wants to display the most relevant ads for the user. So... it makes perfect sense that YOU will pay less per click, the higher the click through rate of your ad is.

Note: Click-through rate is simply the percentage that users click on your ad. For example, if 100 users saw your ad, and 2 people clicked your ad to visit your website, your click-through rate would be 2% (2/100).

Reason 5: Your competition cannot see the exact amount you're bidding for your keywords or the CTR your ads are getting - a distinct tactical advantage that Yahoo lacks.

Basically, your competition will NEVER be able to tell how you are marketing your product, unless they use a trick I'm going to show you later; So, they won't be able to copy off of your marketing and steal your prospects.

Bottom line - bringing instant traffic to your websites and converting those prospects into satisfied customers is a much better option than waiting around for your search engine rankings to.

And, in my opinion, Google AdWords is the only game in town when it comes to PPC advertising.

In the next chapter, I'll sit with you and take you through the entire process of creating an ad campaign through Google AdWords. I'll take you from start to finish - from picking your keywords to creating an account to writing an ad to making it go live - and we'll do it in less than 10 minutes.