With the incredible success of Google AdWords, the market is a flush with other companies offering paid advertising through PPC (pay per click). Is it best to go with AdWords or is it best to try others?

Competition is ever increasing online, and as it does, the price increases with it. There are only a limited number of spots to advertise, and as such, the person willing to pay the most will generally win.

Google AdWords is the most used PPC Engine. There are advertisers paying as much as $ 100 a click for certain keywords. Thankfully (for us as Affiliate Marketers/Small Business Owners) the big businesses haven’t really started to understand how powerful internet marketing is. However, when they do, expect the price to skyrocket.

So, with that said, should you use the cheaper lower tier PPC companies? Keywords costing $ 5 a click could cost as little as $ 0.05! Surely only a idiot would spend 100x the price. However, there is a reason Google is so expensive, and why so many people use it.

Imagine if I offered to advertise for you. I will go to a shopping center and speak to people about your product. You pay me 10 cents for every person I speak to, but you don’t get to see me doing it. You have to totally trust me when I tell you how many people I have spoken to. Would you do it? Of course you wouldn’t! Why would you trust me? I could spend the time lounging around smoking and say that I spoke to a million people.

When you advertise on websites, rather than using a Search Network, you are trusting that people aren’t having their friends and family click your ads to make them money. While Google spends a fortune analyzing all clicks, smaller companies don’t have the resources to do so. Also, a fair few companies have been shown to use “bots” to generate clicks.

Quite often I receive refunds from Google because of suspicious clicks. I have never received the same discount from the smaller companies without me literally threatening to never use their service again.

Now, I’m not saying that you should never use other PPC companies’, however, until you have a lot of experience under your belt, you should stick with Google. You need to have the experience to know when high clicks but low sales are because of your ad copy, rather than a con artist taking your money.

There are ways to make AdWords cheaper. Perfecting your advertisements through split testing will allow you to massively increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio). Google rewards effective advertisements with cheaper prices. Instead of trying to find cheaper places to advertise, spend the time perfecting your art. If you are having a very hard time making a profit because a keyword is just too expensive, then use another keyword. Long Tail keywords are keywords with relatively low monthly search traffic, but combined with many others can give you huge traffic for a very low price. Long tail keywords are generally much more targeted that the broader, more expensive keywords. Use them!

To Your Success!