To get a pay-per-click campaign off the ground is not as simple as it might sound. A number of my clients have tried their hand at walking their own campaigns, only to be overwhelmed by the time it takes to manage their campaigns, as well as the frustration of not knowing how to make their campaigns work.

They finally landed up knocking on our door, needing us to take up their campaigns & make it work for them.

So, in the event you are interested in walking your own PPC campaigns, then you require to do some preliminary work, to make sure that you know what you are dealing with. In this news story, I'll introduce the basics of a PPC campaign to you, of which you'll require a nice understanding to start. For the sake of consistency, I'll refer to Google AdWords which is Google's PPC product.

How does a Google AdWords campaign work?
Assuming that you have successfully created your Google AdWords account, ads & keyword lists, the method is as follows:

* The user, who is somebody out there looking for something related to your ads on Google, will type one of your keywords in to the search bar

* Google will then spit out search results which a relevant to the search query. As I discussed in my earlier news story, Pay Per Click Promotion - An Introduction, the "organic listings" are the search results that are found on the left hand side of the page. These results appear there naturally & they cannot pay Google to put them there.

* The "paid listings" are the ones that appear on the top left & right hand side of the page. Google refers to these results as the 'sponsored links'. These are the results that they have an interest in. One of these results will be an advertisement that you created using Google AdWords. They are often called 'sponsored links' because advertisers pay to have them appear there each time a relevant keyword is searched by a user.

* All right, so now that somebody has searched one of your keywords, your advertisement is now staring them right in the face. Your advertisement looks as if it could provide the answers to their questions, so they click on it.

* Two times your advertisement is clicked, the user is then directed to a page on your net site. When you created your advertisement, you would have inserted the URL for one of your web pages in to the advertisement known as the "Destination URL". The user will be redirected to this page.

* Two times the user arrives on this web page, they will start looking around your net site to see in the event that they can find what they are looking for.

* The user will then "convert" from an online site visitor in to an actual customer/client, depending on whether they have found what they are looking for on your landing page or not.
Every time one of your ads is clicked, Google will charge you a fee, hence the term 'cost-per-click' (cpc). You will have a nice suggestion of what Google charges per click, because you would have set a maximum cpc bid for each your keywords. This means that you would have determined what the maximum amount is that you are willing to pay per click, for each keyword.

Some advertisers prefer to pay a fee per 'impression'. An impression is every single time your advertisement is displayed, but not necessarily clicked. So, your maximum cost-per-impression is the highest amount that you are willing to pay per 1000 impressions.

Relevancy
Relevancy is a important idea to master in the event you are promotion in this way. Relevancy refers to how useful your ad's information is to the user. The more relevant the content of your advertisement is, compared to the keyword searched & the content of your landing page, the more useful it will be to the user. When Google sees that your ads are relevant in this way, they often reward you for this by pushing your advertisement up in position without increasing your cpc. So, the more relevant your ads are, the more likely your ads will beat your competitor ads in position & in cost. Effectively this means that the advertisers whose ads are beneath yours, could be paying over you are per click.

In the event you are willing to play smart, you will actually economize on your ads, as well as take the lions share of the potential business out there. In the event you are committed to walking your campaign in the way it ought to be run, then you will find that the money invested in your ads is returned lots of times over by the amount of business brought in by the ads.