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

In this article we are going to examine many 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|Obviously you are an expert in your industry. Your goals are to grow 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 advertise on Google are a totally different issue.

Search engine marketing/PPC advertising is a very specialized form of advertising. Strategies that worked just last year are no longer effective. The search engines change as fast as the stock market and if you lack the expertise to create a effective pay per click campaign, you will overpay for clicks and amidst tremendous opportunities.

2. Keyword Selection

For years, we’ve run campaigns with vast amounts of keywords. All the way back in 2001, we created 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. To be successful in search, 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 most likely put yourself on the highest cost, high traffic, low converting keywords that are out there. To find the right keywords at the right cost is a critical skill in developing a successful 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 computerized systems that analyze the data you capture, review the actual success on the individual keywords, and make decisions 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 section, we will discuss development costs, ROI analysis,how much time it takes to be successful and the learning curve involved in operating a successful PPC program.