Pay per click advertising is a great marketing tool, but it’s one that should be used sparingly, and in conjunction with other advertising techniques, for best results. If you use pay per click advertising correctly, it can enhance your SEO efforts, and could increase your profits. Use it at the wrong time, though, and you’re just throwing money away.

So, when should you use PPC advertising? Here are a few examples of how and when to run a good PPC campaign.

You’re Launching a New Website

If you’ve just completed a brand new website, and it doesn’t yet have any traffic, then a carefully crafted Google Adwords search campaign is a good way to bring in some early visitors. Be sure to support this pay per click campaign by building incoming links and establishing a social media presence. This will ensure that you achieve a steady trickle of long term traffic too.

You’re Marketing to a Defined Audience

Social websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook have their own PPC advertising systems. If you advertise to a clearly defined audience on those websites, you can be confident that most of the people you’ll reach will be interested in your message. This means that you should see a much bigger return on investment than you would with more general PPC advertising.

You’re Running a Social Media Campaign With a Clear Message

If you have a good idea who your audience is, and you’re promoting a clear message with a strong call to action, then it makes sense to augment that campaign with some pay per click marketing. Don’t spend too much money on driving traffic at this stage, though. Try running a limited budget campaign, and see how well it converts before you commit too much money.

The above are some examples of when you should run PPC campaigns. This is not an exhaustive list, though. If you’re not sure if you should run a campaign, then ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is my website ready for traffic?

If your site is visibly “unfinished”, then don’t spend money promoting it. Wait until you’d be proud to show off your website before you start paying for people to visit it.

2. Do I have a clear monetization plan?

Are you sure you can make money back from those clicks? If you don’t have a way to monetize the page views that you’re getting, then you’re probably wasting money paying for visitors.

3. Do I know who I’m trying to reach?

Having a clearly defined idea of who your target audience is will go a long way towards improving your conversion rate. Don’t be tempted by offers of large amounts of traffic at a low cost. That traffic is probably low quality, untargeted traffic from all over the world. The chance of a random visitor being interested in your product is unlikely. Stick to high quality, targeted traffic to get the best results from your pay per click marketing campaign.

Written by Amy Fowler of pay per click experts, Boom Online Marketing. For more from Amy, follow her on Twitter.