One of the largest challenges with Internet Marketing is operating a successful pay per click advertising campaign. Competition is fierce and the costs to advertise at Google are steadily climbing.

Below we are going to review several of the factors that you should look at when deciding whether or not to outsource your pay per click campaign.

1. Search Marketing Expertise

It should be stated that you are an expert in your industry. You are growing your business based on your knowledge and skills and have achieved a certain level of success. That, however, does not make you an knowledgeable at search marketing. While you may know your business inside and out, the marketing strategies required to successfully promote on Google are a totally different issue.

Search Marketing/PPC is a very specialized form of advertising. Strategies that worked justsix months ago are no longer effective. The search engines change as fast as the stock market and if you lack the knowledge to create a effective search marketing campaign, you will overpay for clicks and amidst tremendous opportunities.

2. Keyword Selection

For years, our company has run campaigns with large amounts of keywords. All the way back in 2001, we developed campaigns with up to one million keywords. No one had heard of „long-tail keywords“ and no one was developing detailed keyword lists. Today, the industry has changed. Many people have built tremendously extensive campaigns to the point that long-tail strategies had to change.

The search engines no longer allow you to bid on every keyword you can imagine. Today, you need a strategy that casts a net that is surgically targeted to specific products, services and audiences. Unless you know what to do to develop these keyword lists, you will very likely place yourself on the most expensive, high traffic, low converting keywords that are used in your industry. To be able to research and locate the right keywords at the right cost is a critical skill in developing a profitable campaign.

3. Tracking Capabilities

For decades, companies used newspaper, print, radio and TV ads that were hard to track. Online advertising changed all that, making most actions highly accountable. To be successful today in search you have to implement a system to track all actions; otherwise, how will you know what worked? Even if you are tracking, what will you do with that data?

4. Optimization Algorithms

Optimization systems / search optimization algorithms are the automated systems that analyze the data you capture, evaluate the actual success on the particular keywords, and make determinations as to which keywords should be bid higher, lower or eliminated completely. This needs to be an automated task to analyze the amount of search phrases required to extract full value from your search campaign.

In the next part, we will discuss development costs, ROI analysis,how much time it takes to be successful and the learning curve involved in running a successful PPC program.

Christopher Ulrich is the CEO of the Direct Response Group. Since 1996, his team has been assisting small to large groups with Pay-Per-Click Optimization to market themselves on the web with Search Engine Marketing. For information, visit http://www.DirectResponseGroup.com