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This article highlights two very different pay-per-click campaigns. One company spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, a rival chocolatier sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads (figures not quoted).

The moral of the story is that the difference was an employee who took the time to learn about how to get the best from Google Adwords, all driven from a highly restricted budget:

With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.

Pay Per Click, like any online marketing, requires a hell of a lot of optimisation but a lot of new advertisers still see it as a quick and easy way of attracting traffic - and it can. The problem is, the looser the advert, the less likely you will attract a serious buyer. No pain, no gain - a lot of time and effort is required setting up an Google Adwords Campaign:

• Choosing the appropriate keywords - quality, quantity and the way you bid on them (generic, phrase, exact)
• Writing adverts that attract clicks - the actual words of each individual advert and the number of specific adverts you create
• The landing pages - the actual web pages your adverts point to

What many new people to Adwords do, is create generic adverts with generic keywords pointing to generic pages (usually the website home page).

Unfortunately for them, a web user, when performing a search, will type in a much more specific requirement. ie. They wouldn’t be looking “web design agency” when they can type in “web design agency in Hampshire” and get a more specific result.

So, as users becomes more sophisticated, less patient, and whilst they have abundant choice, when it comes to pay-per-click, advertisers surely need to put a hell of a lot more time and effort to get their attention, and, make the whole ‘click-through’ process as logical and straightforward for the user.

Fortunately for those who do put the time and effort you can attract more relevant traffic with better adverts and lead a buyer into a page on your website that is further down the selling process, increasing your chances of a sale. The flip-side of better optimisation is actually reducing your advertising costs, not wasting time on ‘loose search phrases’.