Best PPC - AdWords or the other?

As those who know me that attest I am a great supporter of Pay Per Click Marketing. I think it's the fastest single rocket a successful online business and if you have an offline business you can use PPC Marketing to massively increase sales and exposure. One question that pops from time to time, however, is what is the best PPC program?

To answer this question we must first look at what the goals of this marketing method is. First, the primary objective is to drive sales. Both the front or back end is irrelevant, the primary aim of pay per click is to convert a prospect into a paying customer. Another goal and a requirement that the best marketing platform PPC must face is generating traffic. A good PPC program must be able to drive lots of traffic to your landing pages, but can be any type of traffic. Has to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. The last requirement that every good pay per click program is to provide leads for a reasonable price click. In other words, the CPC is absolutely necessary to provide the best platform leads to a price that does not absorb all of your profit.

So who are the contenders in this arena? First, there is Google AdWords. They are the 1000 pound gorilla in the room that dominates the search market. Then there are smaller competitors such as Miva, Yahoo and Adbrite. So who to choose? Which of these PPC companies offer the best solution for your company? In a sense it does not matter. They are all perfectly capable of driving traffic to your site.

However when you look at the size of each program there is no doubt that Google AdWords give your company a lot more exposure than all other networks together. Google search engine market share is just that great, but actually make it the best PPC program? Not necessarily. If you can get a more favorable with other CPC ad networks then perhaps the additional exposure you get with Google did not matter much. Eventually you should be more concerned with the conversion rate, ie how many people click your ad to go to become a paying customer, and the total CPC or cost per click. This calculation far exceeds the importance of scale in terms of volume of the search network.

When push comes to shove the only way you can really understand what marketing platform is the best PPC program for you is to run some real tests. The easiest way to do this is to structure an ad campaign in Google and bring over to a competitor of Google. Determine which program is giving more favorable conversion ratio of CPC and that is the program you should be focusing your attention. For the vast majority of people than we usually see is that the difference in cost per click is so slight that there is little reason to use an ad network of small size instead of AdWords. This is however something you should determine for yourself ....