PPC Advertising has become a very popular method for getting qualified traffic, building lists of prospective customers in specific markets, creating sales and, in certain cases, contacting people worldwide where it wouldn't been feasible using traditional advertising methods.

Pay Per Click, if used correctly, can set you on a path to wealth, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It's very important for newbie's to learn the in's and out's of Pay Per Click by reading one of the outstanding books on PPC Advertising before actually getting in the trenches and spending money.

There are quite a few different companies that you can choose from for your advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the Most popular is Google Adwords. Google has changed their advertising rules quite a few times now since starting out five years ago, but still has loyal following. It's estimated that Google gets apx. forty seven percent of the searches being run on the Internet with Yahoo Search Marketing second at 23%, followed by Microsoft Search Network at 11%. Number two and three combined don't get as much traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you lots of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be aggressive and could be expensive, if you don't know what you're doing. Read on.

One of the recent changes that occurred at Google was the ability to bid separately on "Search Ads" and "Content Ads" within your campaigns. When you use Google Adwords your ads will not only be shown within the Google search engine, but also may be placed on other companies websites that that offer similar items or services and also on some of their "Partner Networks". Some of these places are other PPC Advertising companies similar to themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it's important that you keep these two methods separate when running your campaign. You may now either pay less money for the traffic received through the Content ads or you can get rid of them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you do choose to run them, even at a lower cost, you place them in an entirely different campaign on their own. I know that it sounds like a big hassle, but there is a good reason for this. The reason is tracking your ads. If you don't use ad tracking then you are losing money. It's very important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to get rid of waste and only pay for what's working. It's virtually impossible to do this when you have both of these running in the same campaign.

If just starting out this may seem like a lot of "chatter" to you. If that's the case, I highly recommend that you invest in a good book on PPC Advertising, as mentioned above. If you're not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, look at it this way; you could be digging ditches somewhere or be stuck in your day job for the rest of your life. What seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up right you'll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what's working, raise your profits by redirecting the money that you were wasting into other areas of your advertising portfolio and multiply your earnings by doing so. Is this still too much work? Get those campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!