Pay per clicks and Google Word Ad

[buffy]

Where is my advertising dollar best spent? I have a smallish budget and want to get the most out of it. Some tout Oveture ("you're dead if you don't use it" says the Oveture specialist!!). You'll never get anywhere unless you become a google word advertiser says the same one. Sounds like that SEO has found a niche. Is it not enough to just optimize and submit. Do you have to do all this other stuff?

[miles]

That question is hard to answer. Have you checked to see what your keyword is going for, conversion rate, and so on. How much do you want to spend on the advertising 100.00 or 1000.00 each one will is going to give you different levels of success. The best thing I could suggest is put 25.00 dollars in a overture account and 25.00 in a google ad words account and see which one gives you the best conversion and go with that one.

[webdiversity]

It depends what line of work you are involved in and the sort of people you want to reach out and touch..

I'd say be prepared, whichever PPC provider you opt to go with, to earmark the money as R & D. In the initial stages of setting up and running accounts new advertisers always make mistakes.

Even though we work in the business we made big mistakes. Fortunately we learned from them and now do a pretty reasonable job of :

1. Finding a few nuggets of gold (niche keywords, the ones that go for peanuts but deliver good numbers of visitors on a daily basis.)
2. High CTR (Click Through Rate). Deliver the PPC visitor to the exact page they came looking for, don't expect them to click through the site. There will be time for you to get to know them once you have got them to part with money/e-mail addy etc..
3. Track the traffic like there's no tomorrow. We know the exact value of each and every visitor. If it's not a lot more than the sum of the ad spend, we know we have a dud ad on our hands. Google is good because you can do a chunk of trial and error in a short space of time.
4. Spotting the timewasting, bandwagon jumping PPC providers that seem to crop up every day. There won't be more than 10 PPC providers we would consider for our clients and only 6 or 7 we use regularly ourselves,(Overture, Overture UK, Google AWS, Find What, Sprinks, Espotting, Looksmart Bidsmart). All have their plus points and their drawbacks, depending on your budget and model.

Whichever provider you chose, the deciding factor in the campaign will be YOUR performance, and not the PPC provider. They are merely selling you their inventory. It can be a lot of fun though, so enjoy.