When you think of your pay-per-click ads appearing in the search engines, it is natural to assume being listed in the top position is the best placement for success. Think again!

This is one of those areas of life where what would seem to best in reality is not. It seems people often click on the ads in the middle or towards the bottom.

This is great news for you because it means you can save a ton of money on your bids.

You dont need to be listed first in Google! There is often a significant gap between the first and second or third position bids for Google pay-per-click ads. This is where you save. Let others pay the top dollar to be listed firstor even second or third. By stretching you advertising dollar this way you will not only save money on your pay-per-click bill but you may very well get better traffic to your website by being further down the list of Google ads in the search engine. Go figure!

Use the Google tools in your Adwords account to figure out the top bids for the keywords you are using. The fastest way is to start with a bid of $50 and you will then see the first bid under that which is actually the current highest bid for that keyword. Keep entering the next lowest bid to see how much you must bid to be fifth or sixth on the list. Then bid this amount. Youll save a lot of money this way.

Another thing that will help you get better results with your Google Adwords campaigns is to study your competition. If you are using pay-per-click to advertise an affiliate program and someone else is competing with you, study their landing pages. If they are running their ad on a regular basis, it means what they are doing is workingso you should study what they are doing.

Do they send people to a pre-sell page or directly to the program they are advertising? This is where you usually can separate the amateurs from the pros. Affiliate marketers who stay in the game have learned to use squeeze pages to capture contact information to build the all-important list.

Hardly anyone will buy a product the first time they go to the website. Follow-up is vital to converting your pay-per-click traffic. If you dont capture contact information, you cannot follow up with benefit-laden emails that convert your prospects to buyers. If you send people directly to the product page, you are losing hundreds and probably thousands of dollars every year. Capturing contact information is not difficult and can make the difference between success and failure of your overall Internet business.