A business should have a vision of the domain it is operating in and then design its products and services according to the needs of the target group of that domain. Once the above is in place, the next step is to reach out through marketing efforts. In a purely online business, the marketing effort is often carried out through a PPC Advertising campaign.

The broad strategy can be devised by componentizing the advertising campaign into different areas like gaining visibility among users, keyword optimization, advertisement management, website content management and allocating dollar resources. These broad areas have to be in sync with the objectives and goals of the advertisement and business respectively. Hence, working backwards, the first step is the clear articulation of the goals (increasing sales volume by 20 %) and objectives (higher conversion rates).

Positioning strategies involve deciding the rank of the appearance of the advertisement in a search portal result page and placing the advertisements in those advertisements related to the contents of the advertisements. It is seen that the top 10 rankings get the maximum click-thru-rates. Hence an advertiser can decide the budget to maintain or let go of the ranking. Further he/she can choose websites that is related to the products/services, for instance, a business offering MBA preparation service can place its advertisements in say, Businessweek.com and also the search portals where the number of searches is high.

Keyword optimizing strategies involve bidding for maximum number of keywords, niche keywords. Contents of the advertisement and website can be strategically managed by professional service providers (by self, if the advertiser is proficient). Dollar resources can be managed by observing the burn rate i.e. how fast the account is depleted by the service provider and by allocating resources for other components of the campaign like positioning, keyword optimizing, etc.

These strategies are effective only by tracking the course of the campaign by measuring the metrics and taking action. Some of the key tools available for the execution of the strategies are employment of Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) consultants, software tools like Wordtracker that mine logfiles for finding the rate of keyword usage that has led to the click-thru-website, and tracking the number of visitors.