PPC Advertising stands for pay-per-click advertising. It is simply online marketing where advertisers pay only when their ads get clicked. In other words, as an advertiser, you are paying for the traffic to your website through an advertising campaign. Usually, you select keywords that are relevant to your business or website, sign up with PPC provider (like Google), and create ads relevant to your keywords and your website. When someone searches for a keyword you selected, your ad comes up and if it is compelling enough, that someone clicks on it and goes to your website. You pay for that click.

PPC advertising is very much different from newspaper, radio, magazine advertisement. With PPC campaign you can target your audience much better. And you are putting your ad in front of the very people who are looking for a service like you provide; they are more likely to become your customer. There is also much better and faster tracking of your success if you are serious about your return on investment. And most importantly, it is a lot cheaper for you if you do it right.

So, where to start? My advice would be to hire someone to manage your campaigns for you. Yes, the setup process is pretty quick and there are plenty of management tools. The difficulty is in the setup itself. If your account is set up correctly, you will know almost immediately, what is working and what is not working. You will be able to remove non-performing ads and put more money into the ads and keywords that are bringing you not only traffic, but, most importantly, business. A professional online marketer will be able to save you money by delivering this information quickly. They know what to measure too. Do you? You get all the statistics in the world. Which one is actually relevant to the performance? Is it the Click-Through-Rate? Is it number of visitors? Pageviews?

What will hurt you the most is the fact that you have a business to run. Do you have time to learn how to run ppc campaigns? If you do - that's great! There is plenty of incredibly useful information on the web. But what if you do not have 2 hours a day to spend on PPC campaigns? What happens then? What happens is that your campaign does not get enough attention, it under performs, and you waste your money. Another side effect is that Google, for example, monitors your campaign performance. If your account does not perform well, they penalize you for it - you pay more per each click compared to your competitors. The longer you wait, the more you pay. And Google will remember that bad performance record forever. So, when you actually decide to hire a professional to manage your PPC account, it will take longer for the professional to prove to Google, that you are an advertiser in good standing and reduce your rates. Something to think about.

If you are in a very competitive business, another thing to think about is all those other companies, who spend resources on professional account managers. And you will need to compete with them. But most important thing to remember is that if your advertising campaign brings you a lot of business, it does not matter, how much you pay to manage it. If your gain is bigger than your investment, you are doing something right.