Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is essentially taking the concept of traditional advertising e.g. an ad in a newspaper, and moving it into the online world.

PPC advertising comes in a number of different forms, including:

• Search engine advertisements – those inside the red dotted box are paid advertisements:

• Website banners – although it is becoming less common for websites to pay per click.
• Content Networks – both search engines and PPC advertisement specialists offer the ability to publish PPC advertisements across a network of websites called content networks. These networks can be niche-specific e.g. all car-related websites.

Planning a PPC campaign that makes the most of your dollars can be complex, however, there are some best practices to ensure you don't waste your money targeting the wrong people:

The above equation essentially says that choosing keywords that have a high search volume (i.e. lots of people search for a word or phrase) plus words that are relevant to your site plus those keywords that have a minimum number of competitors will help you stay within your budget in a PPC campaign. You can find out the search volumes and competitors using the tools described in Developing Your Own Website.

When choosing your words or phrases, refer back to the keywords list you developed in the section Developing Your Own Website. When setting up your PPC campaign remember:

1. Bid on phrases made up of 2-3 keywords, rather than single keywords as single keywords will turn out to be very expensive e.g. 'fashion' as opposed to 'latest fashion styles'.
2. Don't just setup a PPC campaign for 20 phrases: take the time to setup a campaign with at least 100 phrases and keywords – more if possible.
3. Rope in your friends and family – get them to sit down and tell you how they would search for your products and services online i.e. what would they type into the search engine?
4. If you are advertising a product or service, make sure you send traffic to the specific page for that product or service: don't make them look for it once they get to your website.
5. Run multiple ads – in search engine PPC campaigns you can setup multiple advertisements with small changes to each: this is called 'split testing' advertisements. It doesn't cost you more to do this but what you are doing is testing how a different message in an advertisement can be more appealing and result in more clicks. Then you know which ad works better so you can use it.