Clicks are effective viewers, completely targeted and ready to be entertained. You pay google, yahoo or one of the other world dominating company’s to dice up their success and give you a billionth of a billionth of the result.

It almost annoys me that I use google adwords, although with competition as strong as it is you need to use all the tools available to you. Anyway I was not part of the now legendary 1p a click generation - I was online then I was probably just doing something less useful - like command and conquer or writing qbasic. But I am online now, trading and making money. So to get these bums in seats, get people there and looking, snag them into using my sites I use a range of tools - one being pay per click. Pay per click is not by any means my favourite type of advertising. Its effectively well over priced in comparison to the other alternatives, should you know where to look. But for new projects I usually allow a certain amount of play money and some of that gets thrown down the google hole.

But to get the most out of your pay per click, that is spend 6p on a good viewer as a pose to 30p is not actually that hard. First I would recommend diversifying. If your target audience is not essentially british (mine usually are but if yours are not) then you have a vast amount of choice in pay per click sellers.

I would recommend trying a variety of different ppc operators to see which works most effectively for your target audience and keywords. Definitely start with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing (£60 free coupon if you click this link :D) and Looksmart.

For me Looksmart provides very cheap traffic, although I am not to sure at this point how relevant it is in comparison with more british targeting equivalents. Yahoo IMO is quite expensive but only relatively.

Google Adwords - if your not paying attention will be very expensive - prepare to pay 80p per click in a mass market for open keywords and still only hit 2nd place. However I suggest the following to get much cheaper adwords clicks (works with all ppc):

Long tail your keywords - that’s it - simple you say - well yes actually. By longtailing my keywords I am now paying 2p-8p for 2nd/3rd/4th position, more specific relevant clicks. This works in most markets, but requires some time and a regular adjustment. Essentially you want to create 3 or 4 word lines in adsense - e.g. instead of “used cars” you want to get “2nd hand cars in uk” - Depending on your localisation (or Hyper localisation) you can then intersect your locations to provide you with a huge list of 3/4/5 word keyphrases. These longer keyphrases will be used less often but as a result will be a lot cheaper. Spend the time to set yourself up with huge long tail lists of phrases relative to your target.

Here’s how I recommend going about getting cheaper adwords clicks:

• Get a database or list of your products/locations/keywords/descriptives. I say get a database because its a lot quicker if you do so.
• Create a php (or whatever language) script to write you keyword lists. Aim to have each line use at least 3 words. Phrases like “used cars west london” rather than “used cars”, other good examples would be “second hand cars west london”, “cars for sale west london” etc.
• If you have a good list of locations you may end up with a very long list of variated keywords. This is only good, just don’t create 20mb files - that’s too many.
• Stick them into google and run them in line with your current broader ads e.g. run “used cars *AREA*” as one campaign in google and another campaign with just the keywords “used cars”. The used cars one will likely get as many hits as you could want, but at a much higher cost. The more long winded list will achieve modest numbers but for a 2nd position it will cost you pennys.
• Do this with all your static keywords, ones that don’t change with time.
• Monitor them - Some will work well others will be no shows, but eventually almost every one will probably be typed in, depending on how long tail your going! Adjust the bid prices in as much detail as possible. If you have lists of thousands build this into the php script to output the bid value on the line *bid*.
• Sticking at double the minimum bid of 3p or 4p will usually get you top 3 position in my experience (with long tail adwords.)

There are numerous advantages to this, but depending on how much your spending it could be more cost effective to just use the broad term. Factor in your hourly wage in creating the files.

If you manage some low cost per clicks - Post them in the comments here - what’s the lowest cost per click you can get in google adwords?