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What is pay per click search advertising?
Pay per click advertising, often known as Pay Per Click (PPC), is a form of advertising offered by the various Internet search engines. Advertisements are attached to particular keywords (or key phrases), and shown only when someone searches on that keyword. The major Pay per click advertising providers are Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Most advertising is purchased on a cost per impression basis. This means that the advertiser pays whenever someone sees the advertisement. Pay Per Click is purchased on a cost per click basis. The advertiser only pays when someone actually clicks on the advertisement. Most Pay per click advertising is handled on a Pay Per Click basis.

How does Pay per click advertising differ from natural search?
  The primary differences are:

• Pay per click advertising can be launched quickly. Natural search generally takes months to show a return.
• Pay per click advertising focuses on a large number of keywords. Natural search needs to be focused on a few high-return keywords.
• Pay per click advertising is highly measurable. Tracking results on natural search is more difficult (although not impossible).

Isn't Pay per click advertising expensive?
Poorly managed, Pay per click advertising can be very expensive. Properly managed, it can be a goldmine. Most critical is that the results are carefully tracked, and that the data received from tracking is used to optimize the advertising.

Clearly, organic search engine optimization has some distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising like cost effective, long term results etc. However, there are undoubtedly certain situations and scenarios where pay-per-click advertising makes more sense fiscally and strategically. With a high enough budget, you would be able to have an effective organic search engine optimization campaign running in tandem with an effective pay-per-click campaign. But if you have to choose one, look into your unique situation before you decided.

Should I start with Pay per click advertising or natural search?
If you have a budget less than 20000 Rs or need results immediately, we strongly recommend that you start with Pay per click advertising. This allows you to test your online market and measure the results on a keyword by keyword basis.

However if budget is not a constrain, we recommend you to go for Organic SEO where you would get long term cost effective results along with PPC for starting months, until your website gets visibility In search engines. Paid click campaign can also be done during festive seasons.

Why shouldn't my company manage Pay per click advertising internally and hire experts for doing same?
In many cases, managing Pay per click advertising internally is the best way to go, and we've told many prospective clients this. You should consider outsourcing the management of Pay per click advertising when one or more of the following are true:

• You expect the monthly media cost to be in the thousands of dollars or higher.
• Your product or service is available in a sufficiently large geographic area.
• You have hundreds or thousands of potential keywords.
• You have tried Pay per click advertising and couldn't make it profitable.

How long does it take to launch Pay per click advertising accounts?
Once all paperwork is in place, we can usually launch Pay per click advertising within three weeks.

How long will it take to receive results?
Once the accounts are created and activated, traffic should be received by the website within hours, if not minutes. Generally, traffic will ramp up over the first few days of the campaign.

How many keywords can I bid on?
We will advertise on as many keywords as are necessary to adequately cover your particular market space. We would generally prefer to have too many keywords, rather than too few.

What about click fraud?
Click fraud is a legitimate problem with Pay per click advertising. The major Pay per click advertising engines has technologies in place to prevent click fraud, but they do not always work. We closely monitor our Pay per click advertising accounts for suspicious behavior. This often results in a credit being made to the account by the search engine.

How do you track the results?
Most notably, we track results beyond the click. An increase in website "visibility" doesn't pay the bills.

 The first step is to determine what is being measured on the site. In most cases, a site is either attempting to sell directly, or to generate leads for an offline sales team to work. We refer to these actions as online "transactions."

Once the transactions have been defined, there are a number of third-party technologies like Google analytics, Web stats that allow one to connect such transactions with their original source. The amount of information given is quite limited, and there is no way to ensure that transactions are not being counted multiple times.

What is a bid limit?
A bid limit is the maximum you can spend per click for a particular keyword. While receiving clicks for less than the bid limit increases profitability and is very much welcome, it is extremely important to have an upper boundary.

How do you calculate bid limits?
The formula for calculating bid limits is as follows:
Transaction Value x Conversion Rate x Advertising Percentage

Transaction Value represents the value of the online transaction. For instance, if you are selling widgets for $100, and your cost of goods is $60, the value of a transaction is $40. If the site is collecting leads, you need to determine what a lead is worth.

Conversion Rate is the percentage of website visitors that submit a transaction. If 200 people come in on a particular keyword, and ten of them submit lead forms, the conversion rate is 5%.

Advertising Percentage is a strategic decision as to how much of the value generated by a transaction should be allocated towards discretionary advertising spend.

 As an example, let's say you have a transaction that you determine to be worth $100. For a particular keyword, the conversion rate is 4%. You're looking to grow as quickly as possible, so you set the advertising percentage as 50%.
The formula would be:
 $100 x 4% x 50%
For a bid limit of $2.00 per click.

Bid limits should be calculated on a keyword by keyword basis, as the conversion rate (and sometimes the transaction value) can vary greatly from one keyword to the next.

What is click fraud and how concerned should we be about it?
Click fraud is the act of sending fraudulent clicks to PPC advertisers. The clicks can either be generated by automated technology or via actual manual clicking on advertisements. The goal is either to generate revenue for affiliates or to increase the costs of a competitor.

Click fraud is certainly a problem, but the degree of problem is difficult to determine, as the search engines have not been forthcoming with real data. Given that they make money from click fraud, this is unacceptable and will likely be remedied in the courts (the lack of data, that is).

 To their credit, the major search engines seem to be working hard to fight click fraud. We’ve seen them issue refunds to our clients before we were even able to ask.

Third party fraud detection tools can also help. When shown evidence of click fraud, the search engines generally will issue a refund.

In the meantime, it’s something of a cost of business in the Pay per click advertising game. One should certainly keep an eye out for suspicious behavior, but realize that all one can do is lower it, not remove it entirely.