Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

Introduction:

Of all the important decisions that go into a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, the most critical one is which keywords to target. Choosing the right keywords will drive a continuous stream of qualified buyers to your site at affordable CPC's. Choosing the wrong keywords will negate even the most well planned Pay Per Click Advertising strategy.

Going Beyond The Obvious:

At first glance, choosing keywords for your Pay Per Click Advertising program seems easy. Anyone can come up with a list of obvious keywords related to their web site. The problem is, because the keywords are obvious, all your competitors have come up with the same list of words. This can lead to price inflation for these keywords on the Pay Per Click Search Engines, making it difficult for anyone to profit from these keywords. The key to a successful PPC Advertising strategy is to identify targeted, hard to find, niche keywords that drive profitable traffic to your site.

Monetizing The "Keyword Tail"

The enormous number of queries that fall outside the obvious keywords is known as the "Keyword Tail". An advertiser's ability to mine the "Keyword Tail" for profitable nuggets of Search terms is often the difference between a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, and one that loses money.

Examples of keywords that fall into the "Keyword Tail" are singular, plural, and misspelled versions of keywords, and keyword terms related to the obvious keywords for your site. For example, if you own a site that sells fishing supplies, you may come up with the following list of keywords:

Obvious Keyword: Fishing

"Keyword Tail": Fly Fishing Equipment

Fly Fishing Gear

Fishing Lures

Fishing Reels

Many of the Pay Per Click Search Engines offer tools to help advertisers identify hard to find keywords related to their sites. Overture's is the most advanced in this area, but Google's works well too. The leading third party tool to help advertisers uncover profitable keywords is offered by a company called WordTracker. WordTracker not only helps identify good keywords for your Pay Per Click Advertising program, but it also tells you how many times the words were searched on across all the major Search Engines. This is important, because the more niche the keyword, the less traffic it will generate. It doesn't do any good to find a perfectly targeted keyword if it only generates a few clicks a month.

Because each targeted, niche, keyword by definition will only produce a small amount of traffic, it's important to identify as many as possible so their combined traffic will have a meaningful impact on your Pay Per Click Advertising program.

Summary:

The beauty of Pay Per Click Advertising is the more targeted the keyword, the less you'll likely have to pay for each click. This is opposite of how every other form of advertising works. If you use direct mail, magazines, TV, or even other forms of online advertising to market your products, the prices rise as the audience becomes more targeted.

To succeed you must take advantage of this unique dynamic of Pay Per Click Advertising by using every available tool to help you think "out of the box" to create a comprehensive, targeted list of keywords to drive a steady volume of profitable traffic to your web site.

Stan Hauser is a leading expert in internet advertising, with a particular emphasis on Search Engine Pay Per Click Advertising. He has worked in senior management roles at a top 10 Media Metrix property for over seven years, and is the creator of http://www.pay-per-click-advertising-guide.com

More PPC Advertising Articles

Profiting From Second Tier Pay Per Click Search Engines
Once you venture into the world of Pay Per Click advertising, you'll soon discover that the marketplace is sharply divided between tier 1 Search Engines (Google and Overture), and everyone else. While it's difficult to imagine a comprehensive, successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign that doesn't include the major players, companies that limit themselves to Google and Overture may be missing out on profitable traffic.

3 Strategies to Profit When Click Prices Increase (Part 3 of 3 Series)
What is Average Customer Lifetime Value?Traditional business philosophy is that ?it is often more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to generate repeat sales from existing ones and that existing sales are more profitable due to the reduced marketing expense.? This strategy is very effective for offsetting the affects of rising pay-per-click costs.

3 Strategies to Profit When Click Prices Increase (Part 2 of 3 Series)
What are Website Conversion Strategies?Website conversion strategies are marketing and technology efforts focused on increasing your website?s efficiency with turning visitors into prospects or customers. The majority of website conversion strategies involve redesigning your current website and re-writing your website?s copy.

3 Strategies to Profit When Click Prices Increase (Part 1 of 3 Series)
Although the degree of increase varies among industry resources, a recent survey conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) indicated an average 26% increase in bid prices in 2004.Statistics aside, all indications show an upward trend in keyword bid prices which means fewer results in 2005 from the same dollar spent on pay-per-click marketing in 2004.

Google Adwords: Higher Traffic and Sales in 2 Hours or Less!
There are various ways to purchase highly targeted advertising at very low prices. Google AdWords is one simple and quick way to to do this.

Googles AdWords Select(tm) Groundbreaking Program
One of the absolute best online marketing processes available to any business today is Google's AdWords Select advertising program. It produces immediate results within minutes after being setup, drives highly qualified traffic via selected keywords and can be monitored and modified on a 24/7 basis via Google's excellent online interface.

How Much Should You Pay for a Click
You have a web site ready for action. Your product catalog, order tracking, credit card payment system, and fulfillment process are all in place.

How To Use Pay Per Click Ads Without Ruining Yourself
It may seem to be a very expensive way of selling your products. But if it's done the right way it can be a money making machine on auto-pilot.

Adlink Success - A New Advertising Style From Google Adsense
There is a new advertising style from Google Adsense that is available in your Adsense panel, it is called ?Google Ad Links.?This new ad system presents a list of 4 or 5 vertical links(you can pick either 4 or 5 and Google will supply the actually links) to your site visitors, when the visitors click on one of the targeted contextual words it displays a results page from Google listing ten Adwords advertiser?s ads for this related topic.

Plan Your Way to Pay-Per-Click Campaign Success!
Have you heard the saying, "planning is everything?" Perhaps there is some truth in that saying so let?s discover how to successfully plan your pay-per-click campaign.Let?s keep this simple and create a list of required tasks to successfully plan your pay-per-click campaign.