Pay-per-click or PPC advertising should not be treated like media buying. It is not as simple as buying advertisement space on search engines for specific keywords. An effective PPC campaign should be closely monitored and continuous optimization must be done. It is not something that can be set and forget.

The objective of a PPC campaign is to drive targeted traffic to a website that result in conversions. I understand that conversions from PPC campaign go hand in hand with the website, but at least what an effective PPC campaign should deliver is to get as many targeted clicks as possible with the most optimum budget.

In Google Adwords system, there is a something known as "Quality Score". It is a scoring system that Google has implemented to award advertisers for good ad text creation and relevancy. When an agency handles an Adwords campaign for you, if what they do is to buy a list of keywords and write an ad text to put it up online, you will most probably get a very poor quality score. With poor quality score, you need to pay a higher fee for a keyword. For example, your competitor may only need to pay 50 cents per click for a keyword because of good quality score. However, you need to fork out one dollar for the same keyword because you have a poor quality score. So if you outsource your Adwords campaign to an agency, you need to make sure that they are doing the necessary work to maintain good quality scores for your keywords.

To obtain good quality score for keywords, the campaign must be run in a very organized manner. Relevancy is very important. The ad text needs to match the keywords. Also, the agency should conduct continuous split testing of ad text. At any one time, there must always be 2 ads competing with one another. Once a winner is determined (usually by the ad's CTR), delete the loser. Then create a new ad text to challenge the new winner.

So how long should you test your ads before determining who is the winner? Normally, if your campaign is new, the split testing for the first 2 ads should be run for at least 2 weeks. Then look at the impressions and clicks that both ads are getting. If the numbers are very close, leave it for another week. If one of the ads is getting significant high click-through rate than the other ad (provided that both ads are getting impressions evenly), then delete the loser and create a new ad text.

With consistent testing and optimization, your PPC campaign should generate a significant number of clicks to your website.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOM, an online marketing agency that specializes in search marketing, providing search marketing services such as PPC Advertising.

Check out more about Search Marketing at www.optimalonlinemarketing.com