Pay Per Click Advertising - Keep your "search" & "content" Ads Separate or You'll Lose Money

Pay Per Click Advertising has become an extremely popular method for generating website traffic, building lists of qualified prospects in specific niches, making sales and, in some cases, reaching prospects around the world where it wouldn't have been either feasible or likely using traditional advertising methods.

Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising, if used correctly, can set you on a path to potential financial independence, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It's very important for newcomers to get the proper Pay Per Click education by reading one of the excellent books on Pay Per Click Advertising before actually getting in the trenches and spending money.

There are several different companies that you can choose for your advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the undisputed king of Pay Per Click Marketing is Google Adwords. Google has changed their advertising rules several times now since opening their doors at the early part of this decade, but still has an enormous following. It's estimated that Google gets apx. 47% of all searches being done on the Internet with Yahoo second at 23%, followed by MSN at 11%. Number two and three combined don't get as much traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you a lot of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be fierce and potentially very expensive, if you don't know what you're doing. Read on.

One of the most recent changes that occurred at Google was the ability to separate "Search Ads" and "Content Ads" within your campaigns. When you advertise using Google Adwords your ads will not only be displayed within the Google search engine, but also may be placed on other people's websites that have related subject matter and also on some of their "Partner Networks". Some of these partners are other PPC Advertising companies just like themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it's very important that you keep these two entities separate when running your campaign. You now have the option to either pay less money for the traffic you receive through the Content ads or you can eliminate them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you do choose to run them, even at a lower cost, you set up an entirely different campaign. I know that it sounds like a big hassle, but there's a good reason for this. That reason is tracking your ads. If you don't track your ads then you are losing money. It's important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to eliminate waste and only pay for what's actually working. It's virtually impossible to do this when you have both Search and Content running in the same campaign.

If you're new this may seem like a lot of "chatter" to you. If that's the case, I highly recommend that you invest in a good book on Pay Per Click Advertising, as mentioned above. If you're not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, think of it this way; you could be doing a labor job somewhere or continue in your day job for the rest of your life. Which seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up correctly you'll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what works, increase your profits by redirecting the money that you were wasting into another area of your advertising portfolio and increase your bottom line by doing so. Does it still sound like too much work? Get those campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!