The expense of a PPC ad campaign can vary from a small investment to thousands of dollars per month.

Part of the preparation of your ad is deciding how much money your company is willing to put aside for PPC ad campaigns.

If you arc using Google and Yahoo!, numerous user reports indicate that, at this point in time, Yahoo! Search Marketing is usually more productive in terms of getting your listings on partnered sites or into editorial-related listings.

If you have a fairly small budget, spend the extra time necessary to discover low-cost keywords.

You may also want to investigate some of the smaller search engines, whose prices may be more in line with your budget.

The smaller engines do not get the same amount or quality of traffic as the larger players, but they do attract niche searchers, so can be effective if your product is one that appeals to certain markets more than others.

Once you have come up with a list of keywords and decided which search engine(s) you are going to run your PPC ad campaign on, start bidding for keywords.

The concept of bidding is fairly simple. The more you pay, the higher in the paid advertising results section your ad will appear.

On occasion, search engines increase the minimum price of keyword bids. Bids in the 5 to 9 cent range were “grandfathered” in and allowed to continue at those levels as long as the advertiser wished.

However, it wasn’t long before bidding on a number of keywords went to 10 cents or over, because as soon as a new advertiser opened an account with your keyword(s), they immediately outbid keywords in the 5-9 cent range because they had to submit a 10-cent minimum bid.

Manual Bidding versus Auto-Bidding

With bidding, you can either handle the process manually or let the search engine auto bid for you, using settings you have chosen.

For example, on Yahoo! Search Marketing, the auto-bid feature allows you to do one of two things:

you can either “bid to position” where your maximum bid will automatically be changed to be set at 1 cent above any competing bids, in order to maintain your selected position, or you can set one maximum bid for all of the keywords you select from among your list.

The advantages of auto bidding are relatively self-explanatory. Auto bidding allows you to control your PPC campaign costs without having to be involved personally.

The search engine will automatically adjust your keyword bids according to the parameters you have set, thus controlling the amount of money you spend; this frees you from having to monitor and then change keyword bids.

The major disadvantage to automatic bidding is precisely that-it is “automatic.” Even though you may have set certain conditions on changing bids such as a maximum bid for a certain keyword to retain a rank of 2^nd and some search engines and third-party tools have complex auto-bidding functions called rules-based bidding, automatic bidding techniques have still not been perfected.

An auto-bidding program may miss opportunities that manual observation by the advertiser may have noticed.

Relying totally on auto bidding can have another downside as well. A competitor may begin bidding against you in such a way as to discover your maximum bid by Instigating a “bidding war” until your search engine reaches your maximum bid.

Your competitor then can either set their bid to be just one cent above you, or, if they have a lot of money and really want to dominate that keyword, they can bid you to maximum and just wait until your budget runs out.

However, if you had been present when someone was trying to do such a thing, you would have noticed the pattern of a “bid war” and perhaps abandoned the “war” before your budget was completely gone, and instead switched to a lower page rank.

By watching the bidding yourself (even with the aid of tools), you can manipulate the bidding so as to get the highest page rank for specific keywords in a more fine-tuned manner.

Keywords for a pay-per-click ad have an important basic function-getting potential customers to enter your website in order to purchase the products and services that you sell.

As an advertiser, you bid on keywords that describe your business, product, or service. This allows you to secure a ranking within the PPC ad section on the results page for that keyword when it is typed into the search box on the search engine.

Thus, keyword selection is vital to the process of attracting qualified prospects.

The first step in creating a list of keywords for your pay-per-click ad campaign is to brainstorming on what terms you think people are searching under when looking for what you sell.

Keep in mind that the more keywords you have, the more traffic and conversions you’ll be able to attract.

It is almost always best to choose keywords that are specific to your business rather than more general keywords.

Remember that the goal is not to simply attract visitors, but to attract prospects interested in what you are selling.

Otherwise, you will end up paying for clicks from people who are looking for products or services that you do not offer.

For example, if you were a local shop selling computer software, you would not want to bid on the keyword “computers,” because it would also attract people looking for computer service, personal computers, computer advice, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with software and what you sell.

In addition, the cost of general keywords is usually quite high. For example, on Yahoo!, the number-one position for the word computers is $2.99 per click.

In other words, by selecting more specific keywords, you attract higher-quality prospects at a lower cost.

Of course, keep in mind that cheaper keywords tend to get less traffic than general ones, but you can make up for that by creating a large number of keywords.

Search engines offer you a lot of control over your campaign, especially as far as keywords are concerned.

Many also offer you the opportunity to set the level or degree of matching your keywords to a visitor’s search query.

Using a technique like this, you can influence the degree of targeting to find the best balance of general and specific keywords for your business.

Common misspellings (such as “ocassion” instead of “occasion”) or other variations on your keyword (e.g. mottensive slang, acronyms, or a shortened version of the word that is commonly used) may cost a great deal less than your regular keywords, but still have a great deal of utility.

Keep in mind, however, that major search engines have been implementing systems that correct the searcher if he or she makes a spelling mistake.

Once such actions are taken by every search engine, the value of adding low-cost options such as common misspellings will be significantly reduced.

Keyword Selection Tools

There are tools that can help you generate keywords with case. Such tools arc found both within search engines themselves and from third-party companies.

Probably the most popular third-party keyword generation tool can be found at WordTracker.com, which will bring up keywords similar to one you enter.

You can then see how often the alternate keywords have appeared; WordTracker’s database contains over 300 million words that have appeared in searches during the previous 60 days.

Using this type of information, you can experiment with different keywords on the search engine and see what the cost per click of different variations would be to ensure they Fit into your budget and look like good choices.

There is one difference between the keyword-generating tools found within the major search engines like Google and Yahoo! and third-party tools that should be considered.

If you run tests of these two keyword tools, plus WordTracker and another niche engine keyword tool, you will find that totally different lists of keywords come up.

This reinforces our position that selecting the most appropriate keywords for your PPC ad requires looking at more than one keyword generation tool.

If your time is limited, at least look at one search engine tool and one third-party product to improve your chances of getting the best results.

Virtually the same argument is true when you talk about tracking keyword performance.  Let’s just say that the rule of using a backup tracking system in the form of a third-party product is always a good idea.

The reports you receive from the search engine are sometimes put together using certain assumptions, and the use of a third-party product to double-check your results can highlight discrepancies in keyword performance.

You then can discuss these discrepancies with your account representatives in order to discover the reasons behind the differences.

When it comes to deciding which keywords to use, we cannot stress the importance of experimentation enough.

Even with a relatively small ad campaign budget, you can still run week-long campaigns using different keywords on different search engines and see what works best for you.

The more combinations of search engines and key-words you try, the more effective, and least costly, your ad campaign will ultimately be.

Keywords: Keywords, pay-per-click ad, ppc.