PPC advertising on search engines work.

If you have an online marketing strategy, there’s a good chance Google AdWords or other search engine advertising initiatives are an important part of it. You’re probably carefully monitoring, and hopefully optimizing, your performance.

The advantages with search engine advertising are aplenty as campaigns can be adjusted immediately, ads can be tailored based on keywords, and  ads can drive immediate action. Another advantage is that search engine advertising is cost friendly – only you can set the budget for what you’re willing to pay.

While there are numerous advantages, search engine advertising isn’t for everyone. Just because it’s hot doesn’t mean that it will make business sense for you. A number of companies dabble in Google AdWords and shortly after, throw in the towel. The reason? They don’t believe they get the return on investment they think they should.

In order to decide if Google AdWords or other search engine advertising initiative is for you, consider the following criteria.

Set aside a budget

In order to really benefit from a search engine advertising initiative, you need to be prepared to spend spend what it will take to get the clicks.

In Google’s latest search engine marketing study, Google revealed one of the benefits associated with increasing a budget for search ads is that websites achieved approximately 78% of an increase in average clicks. This increase in clicks may be beneficial to your business, only if the benefits outweigh the cost.

This analysis includes an in-depth analysis of your competitors to evaluate what they are doing with PPC advertising. This is because your competitors may have bigger ad spends, and price you out of your ballpark. On the flip side, it is possible that you may be a first mover in the advertising space. This is beneficial for you as you can build a reputation with search engines by maximizing your ads’ quality scores – this is a direct indication of how Google assesses the relevancy of your ads, keywords, and landing pages to a person seeing your score. Higher quality scores typically lead to lower costs and better ad positions.

Make the time to track performance

The catch 22 associated with search engine advertising is that these initiatives have an unmatched ability to adjust to market conditions. You can adjust most pay per click campaigns and your changes are rendered almost immediately. The other side of the coin is that you need to commit the time to continuously measure the success of your search engine advertising campaign(s) and make changes when appropriate.

Think like a customer

Your customers are probably using search engines to find you or companies that provide similar products and services. In order for customers to find you, you need to place keywords that they are typing when doing a search. One of my favorite places to find popular keywords that are searched is Google’s AdWords: Keyword Tool. There you can find keywords to further optimize your search engine advertising campaign(s).

Is it for you?

As I wrote previously, advertising on search engines isn’t for everyone. If you decide to utilize this initiative as a part of your online marketing strategy, you may reap the associated benefits. It is important, however, to remember one thing – don’t throw in the towel if things aren’t going the right way. Evaluate consistently and adjust accordingly, and then repeat.