Google Adwords / PPC

Key Points on Google / PPC
You bid on position in the listing
Top 3 in Adwords are top in Google
Provides highly qualified traffic

Google Adwords is the largest Pay-Per-Click search engine. This approach is different to the other search engines. Adwords doesn't care about your META tags, or page structure. With Google you bid for placement in the search results for a particular keyword or phrase and pay each time somebody clicks through to your site.

When you submit to Google your site is reviewed by human editors to ensure that your content matches the search term that you want to bid on. This results in Google results being highly focused and accurate to the person searching. It normally takes 2-3 days to have a site approved before you can bid.

The highest bid is the No.1 spot and then each placement below No.1 has a lower bid the further away from No.1 you go. For competitive words the bid price can be very high - as much as $5 per click, but for less competitive words it can be much cheaper.

Adwords can work extremely well in many cases, the traffic reviewed from Google tends to be very focused with a higher click to sales conversion than other search engines. The clicks you receive are from people who are actively searching for your product. This is much more attractive than passive banner ads where you are trying to appeal to people who may not be interested in you at that moment.

To calculate the right bid level for any keyword you need to assess how much average profit you make from customers that visit your site, for example

For every 10 visitors you get 1 sale
For every sale you make $10 profit
= for each visitor you make an average of $1 profit.

This would be you maximum bid in Adwords. If you bid more than $1 then you will lose money.

Being number 3 is often not much worse than being No.1. Check the resources and tools section for tools to manage bids at the PPC search engines.