Pay Per Click Internet Advertising Campaign Management

A Pay Per Click (or PPC) internet advertising program can be simply summed up in one phrase - Every time an advert is clicked, the advertiser pays the advertising network for the privilege of having their advert displayed in the first place.

Banner advertising, in the early days of the world wide web, was generally pay per impression. The advertiser could buy a number of impressions, on various web sites, in the hope that people would click through to their web site.

Of course, click fraud, the evolving market, and a number of technical and social evolutions have meant that, these days, advertisers only ever pay for results.

Pay Per Click ensures that the advertiser gets value, and protects them (to a certain extent) against fraud and other facets of internet advertising. It's still possible to end up in a crap shoot situation, and waste a lot of money, which is where correct Pay Per Click internet advertising campaign management comes in.

Of course, from the other side of the fence - the publisher - it is also possible to make some money with PPC. If both sides understand the relationship, then both can make it work in their favor.

Given that advertisers will pay good money to display their adverts, it follows that content providers (publishers) can make good money displaying them. This is most commonly done through networks, which broker agreements between advertisers, on the one hand, and publishers, on the other.

The most famous of these networks is Google AdSense / AdWords. AdSense displays context sensitive advertising messages alongside related content, and AdWords provides advertisers with the opportunity (for a fee) to associate their adverts with specific keywords.

It is this association that makes AdWords so powerful, and also makes AdSense so lucrative.

It's a simple question of supply and demand : if there are many more sites than advertisers, competition for those slots is low, and the cost per click is a minimum; around 5 cents per click.

If there are many more advertisers than sites, then each spot becomes more expensive, as they bid against each other for display space : up to $50 per click, or more.

So, to make money, content providers should find those high value keywords, and create content around them.

To save money, advertisers need to try and make sure that they associate their products with keywords that aren't too expensive, but still relevant.

And that's the core of PPC Account Management.

Understanding the following is the key to success with AdSense and AdWords.

Advertisers must realize that each bid on a key phrase is a trade-off of cost against effectiveness. It is tempting to buy a cheap keyword that is 'kind of' related to the product being sold, in the hope that some traffic will be generated.

The trouble is, if the keywords are not closely related enough, then the traffic will be poor quality (low conversion), and probably low volume. It si vital to isolate the correct cost/traffic relationship, and bid on the keywords intelligently.

The AdWords Keyword Tool is a the core of the research process. The two most important numbers are the CPC (Cost Per Click), and CTR (Click Through Ratio) for specific keyword phrases.

The CPC tells the advertiser how expensive the keyword is, and the CTR indicates how effective it is.

By a similar token, for those making money from AdSense, the CPC and CTR are vital. They let the publisher know how much they can make from a specific keyword. After all, if nobody clicks, nobody gets paid...

The golden rule in using AdWords has to be to set tight spending limits, and stick by them, whatever. There is no point spending good money for a few results; at some point the keywords have to be abandoned, and better ones chosen.