In this competitive world, effective marketing is the key to any successful business plan. Besides, the help of the print media (newspapers, magazines and journals) and electronic media (television), Internet is a great resource to publicize and promote their products. Today, thousands of companies use this medium to reach out to the vast majority of their customers.

Pay per Click is an online advertising model when the advertisers pay money for each and every ‘click’ delivered to his or her website from a link. The advertisements are served based on keywords and themes. Pay per Click is also known as ‘Cost per Click’ or CPC, ‘Paid inclusion’ ‘Paid Listings’, ‘Pay per Ranking’, ‘Pay per Placement’ and ‘Pay per Position’. This is one of the most powerful marketing tools to promote online marketing. PPC is best suited for small to medium sized businesses and also for the sectors like the hotel and travel industry and consumer goods.

The Pay per Click process thus can be defined as the guaranteed placement of a small advertisement on the search results page for a particular keyword or keywords; the payment is made only when the visitor clicks on the ad and is guided to the advertiser’s website. No amount is paid by the advertiser to appear on the results page.

A Pay per Click or PPC ad on the search engine results page will usually consist of a heading that mentions the name of the website with some brief introduction; this should however not exceed 50 words or characters. It can also contain a concise explanation (not more than 200 words or characters) of the products or services offered. While there are a few PPC search engines that monitor the text which appears in the listings, others are more open to using the advertiser's own text.

So what are the benefits of using a PPC business model?

The advantages of using PPC search engine marketing are:

The results are quantifiable or calculable – As the payment needs to be done only when the visitors click through the site, it is easier for the advertisers to measure the outcome.
Targeting – The advertisers will only receive pre-qualified and targeted leads.
Full control over the finances – It is up to the advertisers to decide how much they want to pay.
Flexibility of managing the account – The advertisers can manage their account online 24/7.

By using the ‘pay-per-click’ model, it is possible to track down each and every click right to its completion. So, it is possible to view that for each keyword how many clicks were received, the cost, how many orders were attained and eventually how much profit was made. Since the whole process can be analyzed precisely, it is advisable to try and check what will be the best method to drive the traffic to the website. Following are the few things that a marketer needs to consider when managing a PPC campaign:

Making a list of the keywords that includes all the possible words or phrases that a potential buyer may type in.
Arranging the keywords around ad text that will show when those keywords are searched.
Fix the budgets so that the costs do not go up very fast but at the same time maximum numbers of conversions are attained.
It is important to closely track and monitor the impressions, clicks, conversions, costs and profit for each and every keyword.
Change is a variety of life and hence it is recommended that things like the text of the as, the bid prices, landing pages, match types and all other variables are changed from time to time to increase the performance of the whole campaign.

However, following all the above is not an easy job as even a small campaign selling one or only a few products can easily initiate more than thousand keywords.
Another important point that needs to be considered is language. A simple translation of the English text is not the solution – it is necessary to have a good keyword list that explores all colloquialisms, common misspellings and all terms for all items.