Using Google Adwords and other search engine pay-per-click services is still one of the most underestimated methods of getting customers to your website – and your store’s site. Pay-per-click advertising is still revolutionary in its ability to pFor example, there are over 100 real estate agents in the Kitchener-Waterloo area; only six of them are bidding on the keywords “Kitchener real estate.” That’s one of many great opportunities where the market badly under-represents itself and

Using Google Adwords and other search engine pay-per-click services is still one of the most underestimated methods of getting customers to your website – and your store’s site. Pay-per-click advertising is still revolutionary in its ability to penetrate right to the market that is looking for a specific product – yours, in fact. Yet, there are still many businesses that do not even attempt to compete in this space.

For example, there are over 100 real estate agents in the Kitchener-Waterloo area; only six of them are bidding on the keywords “Kitchener real estate.” That’s one of many great opportunities where the market badly under-represents itself and it’s an advantage that many business can take. In some spaces, there is no competition at all and the first advertiser to go into that area finds herself in a situation akin to having a Yellow Pages section all to herself.

Here’s a further primer on the what, why and how of pay-per-click marketing.

What you should know about Search Engine Marketing

Pay-per-click advertising should be a top priority in any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using online research as part of their purchasing strategy. As early as 2004, Forrester Research reported that over 50% of consumers research online. Using online advertising is an easy way to get your name in front of those people, even if they don’t click on your ad.

Targeted pay-per-click advertising has been around for a few years, and it’s important to reiterate that its biggest advantage is still that there is no wasted energy. You may want to broadcast your message to a broad public via television, newspaper or even billboard advertising but with search engine advertising you only spend money on people who use your advertisement.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind as you look deeper into search marketing:

· Google rules here, too (of course). Just as with organic search (and, well just about everything else) Google rules the world of pay-per-click marketing with its Adwords platform. MSN got into the game about a year and a half ago (in other words, at least a generation late, in Internet time). Yahoo only recently made updates that make them as good as Google was three years ago. We have to note that Yahoo was way ahead of Google in offering email, services and Yahoo news and more, but Google’s long term focus on search has them winning the online advertising revenue war.

· Search Marketing Optimisation is similar to Search Engine Optimisation. Since the beginning, Google has ranked the relevance of landing pages using means similar to the way it ranks search results in regular searches. If your landing page is deemed not as relevant to the search terms as those of others, your ad will end up lower in the ranking. With the introduction of its Panama bid platform, Yahoo finally followed Google in ranking ads on a basis other than the advertiser’s maximum bid. So the lesson here is, as it goes for SEO so it goes for SEM: build a good website.

Why use pay-per-click advertising

Some recent improvements to pay-per-click advertising only make this more sensible than ever. For example, if friends are emailing each other about where to go shopping in Kitchener, it would be advantageous to have your name included in their gmails; you would be one of few advertisers taking advantage of the targeting offered with pay-per-click.

A full list of advantages of pay-per-click advertising would also include:

· Your start up cost and investment are entirely manageable. Because you only pay for advertisements when people click on them your cost is determined by the market with pinpoint accuracy. It’s also controlled by the limitations you place on your own spending budget. Google and other search engines all allow you to set a budget. If you want to try out pay per click advertising at $20.00 for three days, you can do that. Compare that to television advertising, where the minimum budget begins in the thousands or newspaper advertising, where the smallest ads cost hundreds.

· It’s the easiest way to acquire visibility through search. Search engine optimisation is a tricky, often competitive process that may not yield the results you want. You can spend piles of money and months of your life trying to get ranking for the terms you are targeting; using pay-per-click you can be on page one of Google in minutes.

· In fact, it’s the only form of advertising that offers free visibility. As suggested above, if users are searching for information on a product and your ad shows up in the sponsored results, people see it. If they don’t click on your ad, this costs you nothing even though you have gotten your name in front of them.

Pay-per-click advertising ought to be a critical component of any marketing strategy, even if it’s only a minor supplement to the rest of your advertising. If your potential customers see an ad elsewhere and they go home to use the internet to research, they are likely to forget your name or the name of your store. Using pay-per-click, you can be sure that your name will be available to them, as long as you’ve covered your keyword bases.

How to use pay-per-click advertising

You’ve got three choices: do it yourself, hire an expert or train your own people.

Doing it yourself is relatively risk free. You simply open an account with Adwords along with other pay-per-click brokers like Yahoo and MSN. Then you begin to target the keywords that you think you want to rank for. However, unless you are a savvy marketer yourself and you understand search behaviour, you will probably not get the results you desire with this. You probably won’t lose money this way but you may wonder why you are unable to get much traffic from this and you may give up in frustration. However, you can rest assured that at least some of your competitors are using this effectively. If you want to compete with them, you will have to do what they are doing: acquire expertise in search marketing.

That’s where search engine marketers come in. You can hire out or hire in. Search marketers are experienced at working with AdWords and other interfaces and they will know how to target your ads effectively. They will have been trained in or have acquired knowledge of search behaviour – critical to success here. They will know how to find many more keywords that will drive targeted and economically priced traffic to your site.

They will probably even be able to keep your search marketing budget down and will know how to maximize your search marketing effectiveness. Since search marketing is all about targeting the audience that is searching for your product, search marketers are forced to be transparent about the effectiveness of campaigns. In this way, working with search marketing is refreshingly different from working with traditional advertising.

Probably the best advice is to have in-house search marketing; you can either hire people who understand this sphere or train your own marketing or web people. If you already have an in house SEO, you may want them to branch out into search marketing. There is a lot that can go wrong with search marketing campaigns, so give your noobs time to ramp up their understanding or hire a full timer who understands the landscape.

It’s vitally important to use all other aspects of internet marketing as well.

· In this day and age, you need a good website no matter what business you are in.

· Make sure that you employ at least the basics of search engine optimisation.

· And build an appealing, attractive website that meets all the basics for a user friendly environment. If people are going to your website and finding an outdated design, dead links or worse, they are going to be turned off of your company.

In some cases, if your market is primarily web users, use of pay per click advertising as well as banners and other forms of Internet advertising might be all the strategy you need.