Pay per click seems to be treated like some esoteric practice known only to those who divine the power of Google Adwords, Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo Panama; a dark art that yields great profit, but is rarely understood.

The thing is... it's really not that complex.

This month we're going to go over a handful of ways to implement, analyze, improve, and analyze-some-more your PPC campaigns, including several of the "Lost Google Analytics Power User" chapters-pieces left out of the "Google Analytics Power User Guide".

Note: Due to our usual formatting, our article order this month isn't exactly "most basic to most complex", so I suggest starting at the bottom with SEOMoz's "10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research".

The Top 3 Pay-Per-Click Tips from SMX Advanced

From SMX Advanced '09, Adrian S reports the top 3 pay-per-click tips talked about at the show, including controlling ad copy impression share, resetting quality score and dynamic keyword insertion.

From the Google Analytics Power User Guide: without an analytics platform, properly optimizing and understanding your PPC account is all but impossible. This post takes you through the creation and setup of a Google Analytics account, including how to connect it to your Adwords account.

Traffic Sources: AdWords - optimize ROI: Google Analytics Power User Part 10

From the Google Analytics Power User Guide: John Hossack explains how to use and understand the Adwords Campaign report, including the ability to determine how campaigns and keywords are contributing to your over all conversions.

Traffic Sources: AdWords/Keyword Positions - to optimize bid position

Our first entry from what we're calling "Google Analytics Power User Guide - The Lost Entries". Linking Adwords and Google Analytics can provide reports not available with other analytics platforms. One such report is the Keyword Position Report. This report lets you see what position your ad was in when it was clicked, helping you discover why your high position keywords might not be converting as well as you'd hoped.

Next in "The Lost Entries":This post explains how to use and understand the Ad versions report, allowing you to compare visitors that have been driven to your site via your AdWords campaigns to how many total visits were delivered via the number of different ads you have. This will quickly give you a sense of how much you have to manage in terms of the number of ads.

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10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research

Finding good keywords isn't as hard as it seems. SEOmoz walks you through the ten steps to finding better keywords.