It is important when placing pay per click advertising on the internet that you understand who will be viewing your ads. What is the target market and demographic of the audience of the pay per click provider? Where will they be placing your ads? Will they place your ads on their own search engine site, on their partners search engine sites, or even other content based websites? All of these questions are important to minimize the risk of overspending. Remember your goal is not how many people see your ad or how many people click on your ad, but how many highly targeted consumers will click your ad and purchase from your website. The key is not getting the most clicks, but maximizing your conversions and your return on investment.

Let's look at an example using Google Adwords, since Google is by far the leader in pay per click advertising. By default, when placing your pay per click ad with Google, your ad will appear on Google's search engine, their partners search engines and their content network. Google's partner sites include other search engines such as AOL.com, Shopping.com and Earthlink to name just a few. Both the Google search engine and the partner search engine site should provide good returns on your investment, given of course your bids are appropriate, your ads well written, your keywords are targeted and your sales page is optimized (all of these topics are points that should be researched prior to starting your campaign). If however you choose not to use the partner search engine sites, Google does provide an option to omit these sites from your campaign.

In our Google example above, the third place your pay per click ads will be shown are the content network. These are independent sites that have applied to Google to host Google ads on their websites. Content advertising can be challenging and can be turned off if you are not familiar with it. Again, the key is to know where your ads are going, and who will see them. In the Google example if you choose to use the content network, another option is to build a site-targeted campaign, and target only the specific sites (and even pages within the sites) where the demographics are appropriate for your ads.

This is just one example of knowing where your pay per click advertising is being displayed. Other popular pay per click choices have their own networks and sites. Highly targeting your ads by knowing where they will be displayed is just one more way of insuring that the traffic you receive from your campaigns will produce good results.