Choosing the right Pay-per-click strategy and getting optimum results off it is more like an art than a science. Although it may sound as an easy enough process at first sight ('OK, I pay only when people are interested…') creating the right strategy that will give you good results and maximum ROI can be a very difficult task that takes quite a lot of planning and quite a lot of monitoring .

There are plenty of options and  services to choose from. There are even more options for your advertisements and your results can be anything from disappointing to wonderful. "Turning the Tide" to your benefit and actually earn more money out of your promotions is a task you have to work slowly on based on the feedback you get from your adverts at any stage.

The bottom line is quite simple for you: You want maximum ROI .You want many sales through your website for the minimum possible of promotion expenditure. You want many visitors that enter your site with a very high probability of purchasing from you. I do not think that it can be said enough times that your most important effort before you attempt any promotion (including pay-per click) is the content of your website. Your website is your store and you need to invest in making sure that you create the ideal website – if such a thing exists. And this is also an art form in itself (check again for our articles on this).

At this article we simply present the basic steps for organizing your pay per click strategy starting from:

Choosing your keywords.

This comes up as one of the most important initial stages of setting up your pay-per click campaign. People often use their log files to decide some of the keywords they will use in their campaign but unfortunately this inherits a strong bias in the results that you should try to avoid.

Choose your keywords in a brainstorming session with your colleagues and try to be as vague and as precise(!) as possible. It is natural to start your pay-per-click with as many keywords as you can, and refine your placings and your selections as you go along. At the same time keep a close calculation of your initial budget as you may come to its limit before you even know it. Choosing very popular keyword and getting millions of clicks from people that may be vaguely interested in your product is not something that you wish, unless you have a massive budget and you wish to slowly build a brand name. In most cases though you want visitors that will end up purchasing your products and not just visit your website.

Chosing your advert

Equally you should pay extra attention to the  wording that your advert will have. Pay per click adverts usually allow very few words so you want to squeeze in as much as you can. There are plenty of  "strong word" lists that you can find over the internet that can help you create a good sentence for your advert, but pretty often one needs just to follow its own ideas and feelings about how the market and its relevant customers work. The choice can be entirely up to you. Keep in mind that extensive over – hyping is not something you want to go for. Be as close to the truth as you can and remember that sometimes honestly works better than anything else.

Choosing the placement

There are quite a few search engines available today that provide you with pay-per-click campaigns. Unless you have very strong reasons against this I would advise only the use of the three largest ones.

Google Adwords will provide you with prominence in the world most popular search engine. Keep in mind that competition in ad words can be quite strong so you may not be as prominent your campaign as you wish. Google Adwords will also allow you to have keyword –specific placement in various content sites thus increasing your visibility.

Overture (formerly goto.com) gives you a rather good service for some search engines and content sites. Bidding in Overture promotes the top three bidders but unfortunately it is usually to your advantage to be the top bidder since you get to be shown in many more web sites / search engines. There is a tide against the use of Overture –these days which is really a result of some strategy routes they have taken.

Looksmart also allows you prominence in various search engines and sites and can give you extremely good results at a low cost if followed correctly.. Sometimes choosing either looksmart or Overture will give you the same prominence for some sites, so it is good idea to double check that your promotion is not appearing twice in the same page for the same keyword. On the other hand you may want this to happen to avoid a competitor being shown on the same page.

Google Adwords is today the most successful pay-per-click option that you can have, since it can offer you easy prominence in the world's  favorite search engine. Bidding and placement in Adwords is actually slightly more complicated than in any other pay-per-click since the actual hierarchy of the ad words is governed also by the popularity of the pay-per-click advert. This disallows adverts to be placed on irrelevant keywords (and also can make popular adverts more popular). It is important to have the best possible choice of words in your ad words campaign in order to make  your advert the most "attractive" to your audience. In this case the content of the advert can play the most important role in its success.

Adwords have recently been added to some Google –affiliated sites, that are content sites (and not search engines). This content targeted advertising can boost your clicks via  Adwords - and also boost the amount you pay Google every month . Statistics so far show that ROI for the content targeted advertising links is much smaller and the actual purchases that are done through them much fewer (so you may end up paying a significant amount of money for those clicks for very few sales). It is important to decide whether content targeted advertising can be used to your like of business. My personal suggestion is that if you are not interested in creating a brand name around your product, avoid using them since the return you will get is minimal.

Checking the results

Setting up a campaign with either of those pay-per-click authorities ( I do not really like to call this service a search engine) or with any of the others that exist requires constant and careful monitoring . Checking your daily, weekly and monthly logs for will show you how many people visit your site from these engines through the pay-per –click system (which you can also get from the statistics of each of the pay-per-click authorities).

Double checking your keywords –and avoiding the usual biases – will also give you a good hand on what is happening in your web site. It is important to establish the best possible link between your purchases and their origin (what would the use be in a campaign in which nobody would purchase your product even though you have many links through it). Some of the best web analysis software can offer detailed path analysis of your visitors through your site and all the way to your purchasing. Use them as best as you can and spend a lot of time in trying to understand what your numbers really mean.

Creating a great PPC campaign may be an art form but there are various hard scientific "truths" associated with it. Understand the best and optimum techniques can indeed be hard work but experience usually pays off rather quickly. It just takes patience, monitoring , continuous planning and constant feedback checks through the results of each campaign.