Between AdWords and Overture, there is little to choose except for the emphasis on user-friendliness that Google maintains. Not only do you get instant traffic, it is ridiculously easy to make campaign-wide changes to your ads, and this is a big concern when you are managing several ad campaigns or have a large list of keywords. Now, let’s look at how to guarantee that your "instant traffic" translates into " instant sales ".

PPC Basics
Quite like search engine optimization, PPC advertising is a lot about getting the basics right. If you have solid foundations, your campaigns will invariably be a success. Let’s go through the core elements of any PPC campaign.

Keyword Research
When compiling your keyword list, consider using a professional tool such as WordTracker or NicheBot instead of coming up with all the keywords yourself. Why? Because quite frankly, no one has the time to manually compile a list of several hundred keywords. Also, these tools will tell you exactly what people are searching for AND give you a lot more options that you may never have even thought of. Using either WordTracker or NicheBot, you can easily compile a keyword list of even a thousand keywords in under an hour.

Once you have your keyword list ready, break it down into sub-lists . Essentially, instead of lumping together all the keywords, you can use the main keywords as "headers" build your list around them. These headers will be the keywords receiving the most traffic. To give you an example, take an online soccer store. Possible headers would include "soccer store", "soccer equipment", "soccer goals", "soccer accessories", "soccer merchandise", "soccer nets" and even "soccer supply". All these terms have hundreds of related keywords. What’s the advantage of creating sub-lists? For one, it helps you focus your campaign even further – you can send visitors clicking on your "soccer goals" ads to an internal page on your store that is dedicated to soccer goals, and so on. Second, your campaign becomes more manageable – if one theme of keywords is not working well, you can improve it without affecting the rest of the lists. However, the most important reason to using sub-lists is that you can create ads that are customized towards your header keywords. An ad for "soccer equipment" will not be as effective as an ad for "soccer nets" if they both appeared next to search results for the term "cheap soccer nets". Customized ads will give you higher click-through rates , and a high ad CTR can help lower overall costs .

Ad Copy
Your ad copy will make or break your PPC campaign, so it is important to get it just right. There are two sections of your ad, the title (or the heading), and the ad description . Apart from adhering to the basics (place your sub-list "header" once in the title, and once in the description), there is a lot to learn about writing winning ad copy. Think of PPC ads as intensely summarized version of a regular sales letter – approach ad copy with that view will help you write better. The ad copy has two key components – a riveting title/header, and a compelling description. Taking Google’s example, you have space to write 25 characters in the title, and two lines of 35 characters each in the description. Eventually, writing winning ad copy boils down to convincing the skeptical searcher into clicking on your ad (amongst several others) in a maximum of 95 characters. Put each ad that you write through a stricter test than you would put your sales letter. The title is the key to attracting the searcher’s attention – if it contains the keywords that are being searched for, the keywords will show up in bold and help make the ad more visible. The description, on the other hand, has just two short lines to convince the searcher to click on the ad. Focus on the user and the benefits your website / product will provide. If it helps, you can make a bulleted list of key terms that highlight your business and spread them throughout your ads. Use the title to grab the searcher’s attention , and then reel them in with your ad description. If you follow the principles you have used to write your sales letter, you’d be at an advantage compared to most of your competition.

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