With banners out of favor, and link trading a frustrating, hit and miss affair, many a webmaster is turning to the power of Google, too rekindle those traffic numbers. The benefits of PPC advertising are easy to grasp to anyone who has been in the online advertising business for a while.

The mechanics are simple, whenever a user conducts a search on Google, your advert is placed alongside the SERPs in accordance with your chosen keyword/s. For example if a user searches for “jelly beans”, webmasters that bid on that phrase will have there advert listed in descending order alongside the results. Whenever a user clicks on your advert, your PPC bidding price will be deducted from your overall spend.

The benefits in this type of advertising are numerous.

With at least 70% of overall searches conducted on either Google or Yahoo! Search (Using Overture, or now known as Yahoo! Marketing) the scope and reach of this form of advertising is massive, there’s simply no other form of online advertising that has such reach.

When you consider the reach of traditional media, like newsprint and t.v, they don’t even come close to the reach available with the major search engines.

Adwords not only provides contextually relevant ads, it also attempts to provide ads for your country. Accurate targeting is essential for an effective advertising campaign to have any real bite. Essentially when a visitor clicks on your ad, its very likely that user is genuinely interested in your product or service, or at the very least mildly curious.

Combine effective PPC campaigns with top quality landing pages, and good copy and you have recipe for an effective sales strategy that should yield top results time and time again.

One of the best things about Adwords, is the level of control you have over your ads. You can formulate the Adword text, the approximate total spending value, the amount you wish to bid on your chosen keywords, it’s a fairly flexible system.

While offline media, and TV especially, has the ability to wow the audience with high quality visuals, text based advertising can convey a more subtle message, in a neat non- obtrusive package, in fact, when it comes to Adwords, a picture isn’t worth a thousand words at all. It’s been proven that on Adwords, graphics based advertising lags well behind in terms of effectiveness.

PPC advertising is highly efficient. Unlike banner advertising where you often pay based on the number of impressions, with no guarantee a user will click on your banner, Adwords on subtracts from your spend, when somebody clicks on your ad.

While its true that some keywords fetch enormous sums, and its not always easy to get the keywords you want at a decent price, there are many options to overcome this limitation and formulate alternative keywords.

The benefits of PPC are just too big to ignore for anybody wanting to generate traffic, targeted sales leads, or both. It may take a while to gain experience on what does and doesn’t work for you, but its more than worth the effort.