…Chances are that you have heard about the amazing ROI that can be had with pay-per-click advertising on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Returning 300% or even higher is not at all unusual with this form of advertising. Here are some tips you can use to trim the fat from your search ad campaigning…

PPC…Not For Everyone

When pay-per-click is working, it is working well…That’s for sure. However, we do not usually hear stories about people who lost their entire ad spend. As with anything else in business, it is best to be realistic from the outset about your chances of success. B2B companies generally have a tougher time making search advertising work.
Install Website Analytics

To me this seems rather obvious. Let’s say for a minute that instead of promoting your business over the Web, you were to take a more traditional approach, like television advertising. You might be prepared to spend upwards of a quarter-million dollars just for production, to be followed by potentially millions of dollars of national media buys.

With this much at stake, it seems unlikely that you would simply write a check and forget about it. I bet if this were you, you would be watching the sales figures like a hawk to see if your campaign was actually bringing customers in. And if it did not perform, you would cut your losses quickly…It just seems obvious.
But for some reason, however, many business owners decide to jump into search ad campaigns without having the right mind-set. They blindly set their bids to a round number that may “sounds right” and then they hope for the best. Needless to say, these campaigns always perform poorly.

It is a necessity to know how effective each of your keywords and ads are in driving traffic to your site. You should be prepared to cut costs aggressively for non-performing keywords and to pay more for best placements.

Optimize Optimize Optimize

If you have tracking installed on your website but have not optimized your website’s ability to convert visitors into buyers, you probably will not be able to compete for the best possible placement for your ads. As a result, your ads will appear infrequently, buried deep within the search results pages. And more importantly, you will only be capturing a small percentage of the sales which you would have captured by identifying and eliminating sales bottlenecks.

Do Not Use Budget Caps

Google AdWords offers its users the ability to set a maximum daily budget. For instance, even if there is $100 of traffic available, you can tell Google to serve your ads in a way that only generates $50 of clicks. On the surface, this appears to be an excellent way to ensure that you will not overspend on your campaign.