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Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

There are hundreds of pay per click search engines. Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on your keywords and how much traffic they draw.

The largest companies in the pay per click industry are Overture and Google. Google is not a pay per click search engine, but it does provide pay per click advertising in text ad boxes to the right of search results it delivers. It also delivers pay per click ads to other content sites.

There are other per click search engines but they are not as large as Overture and Google, although they are worth a look. As mentioned above, one advantage these search engines can provide is they generally have lower costs per click to rank for a keyword than the larger search engines.

In addition to the general pay per click search engines, you may also be able to find thematic search engines that serve your industry or specifically cater to your target audience.

The main factors influencing how much money can be spent on a PPC campaign are:

How many searches are conducted per month using phrases relevant to your business?

How much are you, along with your competitors, willing to pay for those terms?

The goal of any advertising campaign should be to bring in more money from the campaign than it costs to run it. PPC is no different, but the level of detail you can measure in PPC is significantly higher than most types of advertising.

For example, with relatively inexpensive (some are even free) tools, you can determine which ads are generating sales or leads for your business. Beyond that, you can determine how much money you spent on a specific ad to generate a sale or a lead.

By measuring what's working, you can aggressively advertise on terms that prove to be winners for your business while shutting down ads that don't deliver.

Advertise on a large number of relevant search phrases. Brainstorm beyond the first dozen terms that come to mind to describe your business. Advertise on the terms used to describe your products, the product names, product codes, and the questions a prospect might type into a search engine that your services answer, and more.

Build unique ads for each search phrase. It takes a lot more time to write a unique ad for each search phrase relevant to your business rather than creating one ad for all of your search phrases, but the extra work will definitely be rewarded. Ads that are aligned with the corresponding search term receive more clicks, which will mean more targeted traffic, and in some cases paying less per click (on Google Adwords) due to the intricacies of how the advertising is priced.

Send visitors to the most appropriate page of your website. If you place an ad for a specific product within your on-line store, don't send visitors to your homepage and force them to dig for what they just searched. This will frustrate your visitors and increase the chance that they'll hit the dreaded Back button.

Track your results. Spending money without measuring the return on your investment is not a good business practise. At the very least, consider installing the free tracking tools available through Google Adwords and Overture.