Search Engine Diva

Pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising is one of the most effective methods of driving targeted traffic to your website. Fortunes have been made and companies have created huge communities through effective PPC ad campaigns that are in sync with their target audiences. With PPC, you can generate targeted traffic to any web page in a matter of minutes. You’re only limited by your imagination and your advertising budget.

But, as the PPC marketplace has matured, competition has increased and costs have risen. Gone are the days when you could grab a few keywords, slap up a hastily-written ad, and experience PPC success. Today, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can quickly spend a lot of money with very poor results. To put it another way… Smart advertisers win. It’s time to take PPC seriously. Combining the tools Market Samurai for keyword research with

AdCenter has an area to help you figure out the commercial intent of a word or website:
This tool can be used to find keywords that are commercial but have low ad coverage. From a SEM point of view, it is useful to find these keywords as they have low bid density (low price), but high commercial value. Similarly, for an advertizing engine, this can help increase ad relevancy by displaying fewer ads if a keyword has low online commercial intent.
Commercial Intent Tool

Demographics Prediction
This tool predicts a user’s age, gender, and other demographic information, based on their online behavior, such as what queries they search online and what web sites they visit. It lets merchants learn more about their customers before bidding for keywords.

http://adlab.msn.com/Demographics-Prediction/

 Yahoo and Google both offer pay per click advertising across content,  search partner networks and search engine page results. There are distinct differences between each and not knowing the difference can syphon cash from your bank account. 

Search Networks for Google examples include AOL.com, Ask.com, CNN. your ads will appear in search result pages on those networks.

Partner/Publisher Network examples for Yahoo! include iVilliage, USA Today, NBC your ads will appear in search result pages on those networks.

The advantages of having your PPC ads appear in the partner networks is the immediate increase in reach for your ads.

Content partners usually offer contextual ads. Your ads appear on a page with a story or content, not search results.  In this setting the search engine determines if the content of the page is relevant to your ad and keywords.  The user is not necessarily in “shop mode” when viewing contextual ads.

The worst example of this type of advertising gone wrong