Before promoting one's site through a pay per click (ppc) search engine, it is very important to take into account a few important points. Paying attention to the following points will not only increase one's conversion rate, but it will also minimize the advertiser's chances of losing one's funds as a result of fraudulent clicking.

Title and description

When choosing the title and description for one's advertisement, one should take special care to include factual, attention grabbing information about one's service or product. For example, if one is promoting an online casino directory, then one may consider using a factual title such as "Online Casinos" as opposed to the title "Gambling" which is too broad and general. An example of a factual and attention grabbing description might be "Receive $1000+ in free casino bonuses" as opposed to a plain description such as "Directory of Internet casinos". Which title and description would you be more likely to click on? (A) "Online Casinos: Directory of Internet casinos" or (B) "Online Casinos: Receive $1000+ in free casino bonuses"?

Keywords

Choose relevant keywords that accurately describe the service or product that you are promoting. Given sufficient time and resources, one can literally produce thousands of related keywords for any subject. However, using a massive list of keywords is not advised because in most cases only a small fraction of these keywords are relevant while the vast majority of the keywords are not, and would merely serve to drain the advertiser's funds. For example, whereas the following keywords may accurately describe an online casino directory; "online casino, online casinos, online casino directory", other keywords such as "gambling, poker chips, Las Vegas" are too general, too vague and in most cases irrelevant to the subject of interest.

Search Results Positions

The first set of positions in search engine results will usually attract the most amount of traffic. Although this is advantageous for person's whose results appear in the first set of search results in google, yahoo, msn and other free search engines, it may not be the case for persons whose search results appear in the top positions of ppc search engine results. Most ppc search engines have affiliate programs which offer webmasters incentives to promote them, and the more people an affiliate webmaster can get to click on the paid listings, the more money he/she earns. While many ppc search engines have anti-fraud systems in place to minimize the risk of an advertiser losing his/her funds as a result of fraudulent clicking, some ppc search engines may not. For this reason, it is not always advisable to bid for the top 3 search result positions of a ppc search engine unless the ppc search engine has a very effective anti-fraud system to protect the advertiser from fraudulent activity.

Investigating the PPC search engine

Before opening an account with any ppc search engine, it is advisable to read as many reviews about the search engine as possible. Most especially, read about the experiences of persons who have used it before. Does it have good customer service? What anti-fraud measures does it utilize? What is it's Alexa.com rank? Who else is advertising on it? Are there any super affiliates advertising on it? How do the bid amounts of the ppc search engine compare to the bid amounts of other ppc search engnes? These will usually give you an idea of whether to use it or not.

Tracking Sales

Depending on the product or service being promoted, there are several ways to track the results of an advertising campaign. If you are the owner of a particular site which has it's own affiliate program, then you may wish to consider setting up a unique affiliate account for every ppc search engine that you decide to use. For example, you may set up an affiliate account for ppc search engine xyz and call the affiliate account xyz. Then you can track the effectiveness of search engine xyz by monitoring the profitability of affiliate account xyz. Some affiliate programs allow advertisers to set up unique advertising campaigns with unique linking codes, landing pages, etc. These are also ideal for tracking the profitability of ppc search engines.

Monitoring Traffic

One means of tracking the traffic received from ppc search engines would be to allocate a unique entry point for each ppc search engine and to monitor the statistics of that entry point. Another means of tracking the traffic received from ppc search engines would be to add the tag ?Name-of-PPC-search-Engine at the end of the url being promoted on the ppc search engine. This would serve to inform the advertiser as to which ppc search engine sent a particular visitor. The best way to monitor the traffic received from a PPC search engine is to add an indepth statistical tracker to a website in order to monitor exactly where the traffic is coming from. It is very important to keep a close eye on where your traffic is coming from because if there is any fraudulent activity going on, you'd want to stop it before your advertising funds expire. For example, if a ppc search engine affiliate has posted a link back to your service/product with misleading words in order to encourage his visitors to click on your listing, then you'd want to know about it before your advertising funds are exhausted due to fraudulent clicking.

Monitor Bids

It is very important to monitor the bids for the keywords chosen on a regular basis. Bid amounts constantly change as advertising accounts drop out and new advertising accounts open, etc. For example, if you are paying $0.26 per click to be in the third position of the search results for a particular keyword, but position number four is only bidding $0.05 per click, then you are wasting $0.20 per click because you would only need to bid $0.06 per click to be in the third position of the search results.