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

Below we are going to review several of the factors that you should look at when deciding whether or not to outsource your pay-per-click campaign.

1. Search Marketing Expertise

Obviously you are an expert in your industry. You are growing your business based on your knowledge and skills and have achieved a certain level of success. That, however, does not make you an expert 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.

SEM Advertising/pay per click is a very specialized form of advertising. Strategies that worked justsix months ago are no longer effective. The search engines change as fast as the stock market and if you lack the knowledge to run a profitable pay per click campaign, you will overpay for clicks and amidst tremendous opportunities.

2. Keyword Selection

For years, our company has run campaigns with vast amounts of keywords. Back in 2001, we developed campaigns with up to one million keywords. No one had heard of “long-tail keywords” and no one was developing extensive keyword lists. Today, the landscape has changed. Many people have built tremendously large 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 services, products and audiences. Unless you know how to develop these keyword lists, you will very likely place yourself on the most expensive, high traffic, low converting keywords that are used in your industry. To be able to research and locate 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. The Internet 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? Let’s say 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 number of keywords required to maximize the results of your search campaign.

In the next section, we will look at development costs, ROI analysis,time requirements and the learning curve involved in operating a successful PPC program.

Christopher Ulrich is the CEO of the Direct Response Group. Since 1996, his group has been consulting with all sizes of companies with Pay-Per-Click Optimization to market themselves on the Internet with Search Engine Marketing. For information, visit http://www.DirectResponseGroup.com