Pay per click advertising, at least these days, is dominated by Google Adwords. Yahoo has a very similar program they call Sponsored Search. In these programs, an advertiser creates a small text ad and assigns keywords to it. When a searcher enters one of the selected keywords, in addition to the main results (often referred to as organic or natural results) text ads appear at the top of the page and in a column on the right. If a searcher clicks on one of the text ads, he or she is routed to the advertiser's landing page and Google (or Yahoo) charges the advertiser for the click. The maximum rate is determined by the advertiser when he creates the ad. People who agree to pay higher rates may appear higher up in the list of paid text ads. That is essentially how it works.

Some advertisers are wildly successful with Adwords advertising. And other, probably a LOT of others, find it to be somewhere between unprofitable to slightly profitable. As with any product you are trying to sell, there are a lot of factors. There is rarely a single issue that separates failure from success. But assuming that you have a product that people want to buy, there is one issue that can have a huge impact on your ability to get clicks. Testing. And strangely enough, it's probably the one thing that is most often ignored by advertisers.

Adwords-style ads are so basic, testing is a really simple procedure. Your goal is to find the best headline and the best body copy. Because Adwords keeps precise statistics that you can monitor, it is a trivial procedure to try different combinations of text and see which work best. Take a look at these three Adwords ads:

All three have identical body copy and link to the same page. The only difference is their headlines. By running all three of these ads consecutively (only one will appear on any search), you would get approximately the same number of impressions for each. Adwords statistics would then show you exactly how many times each was clicked and would give you a CTR (click through rate) as a percentage. Run the ads until you get a few thousand impressions, then evaluate the CTRs. Identify the ad with the lowest number of clicks and rewrite it's headline. Get more impressions and evaluate again.

Continue this process until you either tire of the procedure or, better yet, run out of ideas for new headlines. This process of elimination will cull the poorly performing headlines from the good performers. You are left with the best headline for your ad. Once you have that, keep the headline but repeat the process with body copy. Systematically sifting down through your ad variations like this will allow you to create the ads that get the most clicks.

Getting clicks alone won't guarantee you of making sales. The possibility exists that your ad is attracting tire-kickers instead of buyers. And enticing people to join your mailing list or purchase your product is largely a function of the effectiveness of your landing page. Ideally you will want to test it just as you test the Adwords ads. But getting the traffic is the first step. Don't skip over this important step of optimizing your ads so that they get the best response.