Pay-per-click advertising offers a performance-based approach to online advertising, meaning that even if your ad appears in the number one spot, you don’t pay anything until someone actually clicks on it. Google’s “AdWords” program is by far the most popular of the pay-per-click programs, having sold over $16 billion in AdWords advertisements in 2007.

Pay-per-click is especially useful for start-up websites, or for websites that have not been optimized for the search engines. It can take months or even years to rise in the search engine rankings for certain keywords. But who has that kind of time or patience? A pay-per-click campaign offers the possibility of top placement…for the right price.

So how does the Google quality score affect my cost-per-click (CPC)?

Most pay-per-click programs operate on a bidding system. The more popular a keyword, the more intense the competition, the higher the bid price. But wait, not everyone pays the same amount per-click for the same ad position. Google calculates a “quality score” for the landing page that is linked to the ad. Landing pages that are determined to have the greatest relevancy receive the highest quality score. The higher the quality score, the lower the cost per click. So when designing a landing page, pay particular attention to the keywords and content. The keywords used to trigger the pay-per-click ad should be relevant to the content of the landing page.
How to come up with relevant keywords, you ask?
A good tool to use when trying to come up with relevant keywords for your pay-per-click campaign is the Google Keyword Tool. Just type in a keyword and the tool will automatically come up with a list of keyword suggestions including statistics on monthly search volume and intensity of competition for each keyword or key phrase. As a general rule, the competition for a single keyword will be far more intense than that of a key phrase consisting of two or more words–e.g., “Cars” versus “Used Cars in Seattle”.

Other considerations for any pay-per-click campaign include budgeting, testing and tracking.