Pay Per Click Advertising - Hot Markets Gobble up Your Ad Budget

Paid search is the hottest area of online marketing today and this trend is only going to strengthen. Forecasts sales in paid search of over 14 Billion US in this year alone and will continue to grow at an astounding rate of 37% each year.

Google leads the way with its increasing share of paid search, primarily from its pay per click service, AdWords. Traditional media is losing its market share as ad dollars move to online marketing, and specifically the paid search arena. With this glut of dollars invading the paid space, unwary advertisers are at risk of making mistakes that can quietly consumer thousands of dollars.

Take a closer look at how you can set up and optimize your PPC campaign.

Simple and Informative

Advertisers enjoy PPC advertising because it is simple, they have greater control over their ad campaign, and they receive better feedback on its performance. The growing importance of online marketing makes PPC an important arena for them to use and master and in fact, it's not uncommon for CEO's to do their own company's PPC campaigns.

If you're not currently using pay per click campaigns, it is increasingly important to understand them and have a strategy to optimize their performance. Large campaigns need to be well planned and managed. It looks simple but it's easy to waste thousands of dollars. The beauty of PPC advertising is the speed at which you can reach your target market and the high quality of sales leads that can be generated. The downside is the price and the need for excellent conversion to sales. At $5.00 to $10.00 USD per click in many cases, you can run through your ad budget quickly.

The pay per click advertising programs with the greatest market reach are offered by Google and Yahoo. Google's program called AdWords delivers targeted pay per click ads via its own search engine Web sites and a host of partner sites.

Yahoo purchased Overture Search in 2003 October and renamed it Yahoo Search Marketing, which has a selection of specialized Pay Per Click advertising programs. These major PPC advertising programs offer an astounding reach to highly targeted consumers. In contrast to organic search engine listings, PPC listings don't require an extensive content development and link building campaign.