Pay per click advertising is basically putting an advert on someone else's website and paying every time somebody clicks on the advert to go to your site. The cost can range for a few cents up to a few euros, so it can be quite expensive. Usually the adverts will go on a search engine page, often to the right hand side, see Google's page as an example. These adverts can also go on other sites depending on the campaign settings.

The main advantage of this sort of advertising is that the results are instant. Usually, visitors will click through to your site within hours. It can be extremely effective if you are running a promotion and need immediate wider exposure. Getting visitors through search engine optimization on the other hand can take months for the results to show.

Some companies spend tens of thousands of euros a month on pay per click advertising. This can be fully justified if you also spend the time to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment). Simply put, for every thousand visitors that click through to your site, you need to be able to measure the cost against the return. This also means being able to differentiate between visitors coming through the pay per click campaign, and those going to your site through other means. This is a critical and yet often overlooked linchpin to effectively conduct pay per click marketing.

For more information on pay-per-click advertising look at Google's Adwords Advertising and Yahoo's Search Marketing.

First, we do in-depth research on relevant keywords. It's a bad idea to just put in a few obvious keywords, as this will cost you much more. It's extremely important to research keywords to find out how searchers in your target market phrase their queries. Do they use the plural or singular? Are there other keywords that might be used interchangeably to describe your product or service? Are there certain words that would disqualify the searcher? For instance, if you sell chillis, you don't want your adverts showing when people search for the band 'Red Hot Chilli Peppers'. It's very important to build an extensive list of negatives keywords because Google will demote your ad for poor performance, and you'll have to pay more to have it show up on the first page. Your server logs or stats service will then tell us which keywords are good for attracting paying customers and which are getting only casual clickers.

Secondly, we write two or more compelling and clear ads. Take a look at all the ads that currently come up in the various engines for your keywords, and chances are you'll find them boringly similar. It's hard writing good ads that don't exceed the character limits (Google won't allow abbreviations), but it's the key to success with PPC. In fact, Google rewards often-clicked ads with higher positioning. Bear in mind you don't want clicks for the sake of it. The ads should also be clear enough so that only people genuinely interested in your product or service will click. Otherwise you are just throwing money away.

You have to think outside of the box when writing PPC ads. Your products and/or services exist to solve a multitude of your customers' problems, or you wouldn't be able to stay in business. Together we'll brainstorm a list of every problem we can think of. Then I'll write ads to offer your solution to whatever problems your competitors aren't mentioning in their ads!

Thirdly, monitor, test and tweak - In Google's PPC program, I always write at least two ads for each ad group so that you can test one against the other. You can even have one of the ads go to a special landing page so you can test one page against the other. Many advertisers don't analyze their server logs or use a third-party stats service to know whether they're achieving a positive return on their PPC investment. Unless your ads are there mainly for branding, we must continually crunch the numbers.

Continually monitoring the ads performance against your competition is key in ensuring you don't pay too much. Failing to do this could mean you are paying far more per click than you need to. This is where our service effectively pay's for itself. Good campaign management can result in as much as twice as many genuine visitors than advertising on pay-per-click without an experienced campaign manager. For example, if your budget is €50 per day, and each click is costing €1, a basic campaign would get you 50 clicks per day. A good campaign manager will be able to get you anywhere from 100+ genuine visitors for the same cost. So you've effectively saved €50.