Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online marketing activity that allows you to place ads in prominent places on search results pages for search terms relevant to your business. You bid for placement on specific search phrases and are then charged each time a person clicks through to your website.

The beauty of PPC is that you advertise only to people who have actually expressed an interest in your business and pay only when they actually click through to your site.

The ads are purchased through PPC advertising suppliers, and the two largest are owned by Google and Yahoo. Google's Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/) displays results on Google.com, AOL, Ask Jeeves and many smaller search engines. Yahoo's program is run by Overture (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/), and the results appear on Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and many other syndicated partners. MSN has recently stepped up to the crease with their own PPC offering (https://adcenter.microsoft.com/).

The main downside is that you only get traffic as long as the accounts are live and you are paying for each click. This means that there can be a very steep and potentially expensive learning curve while the campaign is optimised.

The first thing to do before setting off on any PPC campaign, is to decide how much you are willing and able to spend to get 'sales' on your site.

It is then a simple process of adding in the conversion rate of the site and working back to an acceptable Cost Per Click (CPC) for your business. For example, if you have a target of £10 to spend on each sale and you know that your site converts at 2% - then if you pay 20p CPC for 100 clicks, you will get 2 sales for £20 spent.

A quick look at the overture 'view bids tool' will tell you what position you will get for your 20p and therefore what volume of sales you can expect: www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml


Tips for a successful campaign

Advertise on a large number of relevant search phrases: these will typically be both less expensive and have higher conversion rates - a great combination that will allow you to also bid more aggressively on the generic terms because of their contribution to the campaign.

Build unique ads for each group of related search phrases: targeted ads focussing on your specific strengths will bring more traffic and convert better.

Send visitors to the most appropriate page of your website:

Resist the easy way out of using the home page for all keywords and place the visitor on a landing page that is appropriate for the keyword in question.

Track your results: remember, optimisation is the most important part of the process and can only be carried out properly with effective tracking. Both Google and Overture offer campaign conversion tracking as part of their package.

Campaign Optimisation: optimisation can be carried out once the keywords have had some time to run and some useful data collected.

Last, but not least, have a solid plan for reappraising your campaign performance on a regular (4 weekly) ongoing basis.