Pay per click advertising consists of ads (when you do a Google search, they show up on the right hand side of the page) that are written by advertisers to be triggered when certain keywords or phrases are searched on. Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are sent to the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”.

Pay per click advertising can be a VERY profitable way to increase sales and leads (if done correctly).

	It’s fast – you can have a campaign up and running in less than 30 minutes. Getting your site into the search engine listings can take weeks or even many months depending on the competition level.
	If you understand how to manage a pay per click campaign, you can have immediate feedback and metrics to determine the return on your investment. You can see exactly how much money you’re spending, what your potential customers are doing online, and what sales you’ve made. If you think about advertising in the Yellow pages, it’s the exact opposite…with the Yellow pages, you never even know if anyone sees your ad!
	It can tell you what the money terms are! How do you even know what search terms you want to optimise your site for? You can test them quickly and easily with a pay per click campaign, and then apply that knowledge to your search engine optimisation efforts.

	Google’s rules and tips and tricks to work within them – Google doesn’t make it easy to advertise. There are lots of unwritten rules for how Google likes campaigns to be set up and run. These rules have a direct impact on how much you’ll pay for the advertising. If not respected and understood, many campaigns are doomed to be unprofitable. These rules include:
	Keyword grouping Quality score Ad relevancy Click through rate management Bid pricing And many more…
	Keyword research – I guarantee that if you’re already using adwords, you’re leaving out important keywords in your campaign. If you have 10-30 keywords currently, you should most likely be bidding on 1,000-3,000. It’s that big of a difference when you have access to the right tools and strategies.
	Ad testing – If you’re not split testing (comparing a control to a candidate, or a different ad to see which is better), you’re most likely getting only ½ the visitors to your site than you should be.
	Conversion tracking – Most business owners don’t know how to track whether a pound spent on advertising generated any sales. Obviously, without this information, you’re flying blind.
	Tools – There are several very important tools in the market to help create and manage pay per click campaigns. The problem is that they are expensive, and don’t make financial sense for one business owner managing one campaign.
	Only sending visitors to the home page – There are probably many different types of potential customers for your products and services. Sending them all to a generic home page isn’t nearly as effective as sending them to a targeted page that tells them exactly how you can solve their particular problem.