Using PPCs (pay-per-click engines) to get visitors to your web site can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your web site and increase your profits.

If you do it right, the profits you receive will far out-weigh the costs.

But if you do it wrong, you can end up spending a lot of money for zero profit.

This article demonstrates the correct way to use PPCs for maximum benefits and high profit levels for your web site.

There are three golden rules for using PPCs effectively, and this is in common with all online advertising - track, track and track.

Seriously, you need to track absolutely everything scrupulously. You need to know exactly how many sales, and therefore how much profit, each link from the PPC generates for your business. This is the only way to know whether a particular keyword is bringing you a profit or not.

You'll need some software to help you do this. The software I personally use at http://pro-analyzer.com allows me to set up any number of tracking links (eg. one for each keyword in each PPC), and for each one I can see detailed statistics on click-throughs, sales, and even 'actions' such as subscriptions.

It gives me detailed reports on which campaigns are profitable, tells me what my ROI (return on investment) is on particular campaigns, and even allows me to do split- testing by sending traffic to differing URLs.

This allows me to maximize the effectiveness of all my PPC expenditure (and I can use it for all my other tracking purposes too).

It's fairly unsurprising that different keywords and keyword phrases can have a huge difference in the number of sales they generate, and therefore their profitability.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that different PPCs can bring you very different results even when you are using the same keywords.

This only underlines how important tracking is for your business. To use PPCs for the maximum profits, you simply focus on the profitable campaigns, and stop those that aren't profitable.

But tracking is only one side of the coin - you also need to maximize the profitability of every click.

One way to do this is to try to capture the details of as many of your visitors as possible, via the use of popups (with certain exceptions) and subscription forms on your web page, with proper incentives for your visitors to hand over their name and email address to you.

This not only means you can follow-up with them in order to drive more sales home; but you are also increasing what can be a very targetted and therefore profitable list, and you'll be able to make other targetted offers to them in the future.

If you have popups on your site normally, and are using, or you intend to use, Google Adwords or other PPCs where popups are not permitted, the easiest way to remove the popups just for these particular PPCs is as follows:

Copy your main page (eg. 'index.html') and save it as a separate file (eg. 'index_nopop.html')

Remove all trace of popup code from your new page

Send the PPC traffic to this popup-free page

And remember, it doesn't matter if popups are elsewhere on your site, the only restriction with PPCs like Google is on the page that the visitor arrives at (the 'landing page') after clicking on the PPC link.

This means that you could also use a technique where the landing page is just a teaser page for the main site, containing some information directly related to the ad, but its primary focus is to encourage visitors to click through to your main site, where of course you can use popups as normal.

Another option would be make lead generation the primary objective of the landing page - try using a mini sales page that simply invites visitors to leave their name and email address, rather than trying to directly sell them anything, and then direct them to your actual sales page via your follow-up messages.

In brief, to maximize your use of PPCs, track carefully, and maximize the value you get from visitors that do click through - remember, you're paying for them to visit your site, and it's up to you to recoup this investment and make it work for you.

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