There is another, more immediately-rewarding approach to search engine visibility, and that is paid advertising, or Sponsored Links, as Google calls them. These are results listing websites that have paid for their placement, and they can be found across the top of a results page, looking like this:

or down the right-hand side, like this:

Unlike traditional advertising media, however, search engine advertising comes with little bottom-line risk, since the advertiser typically only has to pay for the actual leads generated to his or her website. This can be a very cost-effective way to both generate traffic, and gauge the general success of your sales techniques.

On a basic level, paid search advertising is an auction-place; advertisers decide how much they are willing to pay for keywords and phrases, and put in a bid against their competitors. Like search engine optimization, however, the order in which ads are then displayed by the search engines remains something of a trade secret.

Some factors that likely effect paid search rankings include:
- Your keyword bid
- The click-through rate on your ad
- The relevance of your ad content, including headline and website description
- Google's site Quality Score for your website
- The competitiveness of your keywords

Although you could spend countless hours and dollars on trial and error while building ad campaigns yourself, it takes expertise to get expert traffic results on both an intitial, and ongoing basis.

Our search analysts create accutely-targeted, extensive advertising campaigns geared towards achieving high levels of traffic and sales conversions at lower costs-per-keyword over time. We also focus strongly on long-tail keywords—low-volume keywords that are cheaper and less competitive—with the end-game of increasing their popularity, along with yours.

A keyword advertising campaign can be broken down into three levels:
- Campaign Level
- Ad Group Level
- Keyword Level
(For more information on campaign management levels, we recommend this Google resource)

At the Keyword Level, advertisers can decide which kinds of results they are after:
- Broad Match
- Phrase Match
- Exact Match
- Negatives
(For more information on keyword match types, we recommend this Google resource)

At Mint Chip, the difference lies in long-term optimization: We control your campaigns at the Campaign Level, with a top-down approach. By building multiple campaigns with fewer keywords per, we can allow more room for analysis and optimization. To better insure our work, we include two weeks of monitoring and optimization at the launch of every campaign.

And though we are always available for ongoing or periodic campaign analysis and/or optimization, our aim is to educate you, the advertiser, on how to tweak and monitor your own campaigns and evalute their effectiveness—to save you money in the long run.