If you are putting together a PPC ad, it can be tiresome thinking of what to put in it to make it different from the others, but there is one thing you absolutely should not leave out when it comes to the finished ad. In order to make sure that people click on your ad, you should take care to ensure they remember why they are clicking it. It is fairly simple, but many people forget it – and that is the keyword itself. Strange as it may sound, plenty of people compile PPC ads without any mention of the keyword in them. It won’t stop your ad showing up, and you may still get clicks on it – but research shows that if the keyword isn’t in the ad, clicks are less likely.

One of the major reasons for this is the fact that a keyword in a PPC ad will show up in bold on the screen. This level of emphasis has proven over time to be more persuasive than ads without the bolded keyword. It sounds simple, and obvious, but the fact is that people with a limited amount of space for text will often cut out everything that they can get away with in order to get in the maximum information and persuasion. In truth, your PPC ad should only ever be a taster for the real selling, and therefore it does not make sense to cut out the major selling point. So keep your keyword in your ad, whatever else you cut.

Understanding pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising really isn’t so difficult. A person signs up with a PPC company (the best known one is the Google operated Adsense, but others do exist). As PPC is all about earning money from advertising revenue on your website, you will need to have a website with at least a few pages on it to sign up. This is a given in another respect; to use PPC, you’re going to want to be displaying ads, and you need a website to do that with!

The sign up procedure is like signing up for anything else, though you will need to provide your real name and your address so that payments can be sent to you. When the sign up process is complete, one follows on-screen guides to making your own ‘advertisement unit’. You can usually pick the colours and the font of the advert, but the advert content itself is generated in a variety of ways – you do not actually pick the companies that you will be advertising. Instead, the ad unit usually picks up ‘keywords’ from the text of your website and displays relevant adverts in your chosen colour and style; this is known as contextual advertising, and works incredibly well.

You will be provided with a snippet of HTML code, and wherever you insert this on your website, the ad will eventually appear. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you will earn a pre-determined amount of money in to your PPC account. This can be anything from eight cents to $5, depending on the demand of the niche your website is based around. The money from ‘clicks’ accumulates in your PPC account, and when you reach a certain amount of money, you can request a check to be sent to you. PPC is simple, easy and efficient, and requires minimal coding know-how.