As you may know by now, PPC advertising is an important part of any marketing campaign. The following series of five articles will cover the basics of PPC advertising, including landing page best practices, optimizing your returns, PPC tools, and more. What is PPC Advertising? PPC Advertising, or Pay-Per-Click Advertising, is the process of paying for keywords that are relevant to your website. When a user types in a set of keywords that you’ve bid on, your website – along with two others – will appear at the top of Google in a sponsored box. This is separate from SEO campaign management in that you don't pay for SEO results, but you do often put in much more time. To ensure effectiveness, you will only pay when the user clicks on your ad. However, Google will only “trust” that your ad receives returns if you follow best practices and have a highly relevant landing page. The Benefits of PPC Advertising A PPC marketing campaign is fast-launching, and can be active in a few days. There are a number of benefits to PPC advertising. A PPC marketing campaign is fast-launching, and can be active in a few days. It’s extremely easy to track, since a tracking code is in place and data is automatically gathered by search engines. Conversions, too, are easy to notice, and it doesn’t take a great amount of expertise to interpret the relatively straightforward data and adjust accordingly. And finally, the number of free tools will help you test keywords and design the highest-converting campaign you possibly can. Getting Started On a PPC Campaign The best way to get started on a PPC campaign is to just jump in and begin testing. After your preliminary keyword research, you will bid on the keywords you want in an auction-like system. The more competitive the keywords, the higher your bid must be if you want your ad to appear at the top of the listings results page. Keep in mind that the fee for being placed third on the page will be much lower than first, but the click-through rate will remain high. We recommend, then, that if you’re just starting out, you aim for the third position. From there, monitor your campaign closely and note what works. Read the other articles in this series for a more in-depth look at PPC advertising, and ask our marketing consultants if you have any questions! Find out more about Clarity VenturesSee our Enterprise Web portfolio