If you haven’t fine-tuned your PPC ad groups, it’s likely that your ad campaign is doing its best impersonation of a leaky faucet even as you’re reading this.  Drip… drip… drip…  That is your ad budget slipping away.

There is good news though!  Implementing these key PPC strategies can stop the leak and give you an edge on your competition.

Step 1: Themed Ad Groups
The first step is to create tightly themed ad groups with closely-related keyphrases. This will enable you to target your customers with precision, leading to a higher response rate.

Step 2: Ads Should Match Keyphrases
Once you’ve created your tightly-themed ad groups, you are ready to re-write your ads so that they closely match your keyphrases. You should be able to make them more specific by making sure they contain the keyphrases in the ad group as much as possible. It doesn’t hurt to create two or three ads and let the strongest one survive.

Step 3: Targeted Landing Pages
Now that you have implemented steps one and two, it’s time to look at your landing pages. Because your ad groups, keyphrases and ads are all more specific to the audience of searchers looking for your products or services, you likely have the opportunity to adjust your landing pages so that they are more highly targeted.

You should be on your way to higher click-through rates (CTR), which eventually will earn you a lower average cost-per-click (CPC). You will likely see improvements in your quality score as well. Most importantly, you should see more conversions at a lower cost than what you are getting now.

Pay per click (PPC) is actually a form of advertising but it accomplishes results similar to search engine optimization. With pay per click programs, you bid on key phrases to determine your ranking. Normally, the more you are willing to spend on a bid, the higher you can rank in the search engines in the PPC listings, which are also sometimes labeled as Sponsored Results.

However, Google Adwords and other search engines also take other factors into consideration such as the quality of your ads and landing pages. Expenses are generated when someone actually clicks on your listing - hence the name "pay per click".

SEO is a more permanent form of optimizing your Web site without paying for your rank position. Both PPC and SEO will allow you to obtain high rankings. It's simply a matter of how you want to go about it.