For small business owners, one of the biggest worries about using pay per click advertising to build their business is that people who aren't likely to buy their products or services will click on their ads and drive up their advertising costs. The auto repair shop owner in Peoria, IL doesn't want people from Lansing, KS clicking on his auto repair ad, and the hair salon in Ontario, California, isn't likely to want a lot of women from Ontario, Canada clicking on pay-per-click ads it buys on various search engines, either.

Fortunately there's an easy way to solve the problem. Optimize your pay per click campaigns to deliver ads when and where the customers you want are most likely to see them.

The first thing to optimize is what parts of the country or the world will be allowed to see your ads.

Choosing specific regions that will be allowed to view your ad is called geo-targetting, and all the major search engines give you the ability to geo-target your PPC ads.

On the broadest level, you can limit your ads by country, making them show up only in your own country if your business isn't international. If your business is regional, you can narrow your ads by state, or choose specific cities or zip codes in which your ads will appear.

Yet another way to optimize your ads for maximum performance is to specify the days and times you want the ads to appear. If you run a restaurant in town and you want to boost lunch traffic, you might want to test running ads between 10 AM and 1 PM. If you sell to corporate customers, you may want to limit your ads to display only during business hours.

Remember, though, like anything else you do with advertising, you need to test and monitor the results to get the most bang for your PPC bucks.

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