March 7th, 2009 by Lynne Carey

By now you have launched a campaign on Google Adwords, so lets look at your keywords. Ideally your keywords should have a high quality score, Google will determine your score based on the “relevance level” your keywords.

When selling a product or service, you’ll probably find your most lucrative keyword phrases are ones that include the following words:

get

rid

buy

buying

purchasing

purchase

how to

how

cure

fix

repair

order

ordering

help

treatment

solution

etc etc etc. You get the idea.

Acknowledge the amount you are prepared to spend. Choose the amount for your default keyword bid, this amount covers all your keywords. This will establish your rankings in the paid search results. Your keywords will begin to get impressions, that’s when you should start adjusting you keywords individual bid. I’ll cover more on that topic later. Don’t forget to set your monthly and daily spend limit.

As a general rule, the more advertiser competition within a niche, then the higher the cost of your clicks. But this is not necessarily the only measure by which your cost per click (cpc) is determined.

Pay Per Click advertising is not a plug and play form of marketing. I’d suggest you check your Adwords account every day, especially after setting up a new campaign. You’ll find you might have to adjust various settings to help get the best out of your advertising.

Once you start seeing impressions you’ll start to get an idea of what tweaking you’ll need to do. Impressions are the amount of times your ad has been displayed by the search engine. With impressions comes average ad position, this is where your ad is ranking in relation to each keyword. Go through your average ad positions and adjust your bids accordingly, depending on where your ranking and your overall strategy.

If your ad is not shown on page 1 of the search results your wasting your time. If one of my keywords has an average ad position of 7 or higher I either stop bidding, or increase the bid on that keyword. I apply a similar theory for keywords that have an average position of 1 to 3. Now, I don’t stop bidding on those, but more often than not, I find it more cost effective to lower the bids in an attempt to rank slightly lower. Average ad positions of 3 to 5 have most times been the ultimate for my campaigns. You can also change the ad position preference in the campaign settings tab of your Adwords account.

Your ad’s need to be written in a way that captures attention and provokes action. There are limits on what words, i.e trademarks, and how many words you can use when writing your ad copy. You can change your ads as often as you like, so I suggest you play around with this to find out what works. Google will prompt you to change your ad if it is against there guidelines.

I’m not a professional ad writer, so to get the best out of my ads I always split test, and you should to. I run a minimum of two ads at a time to get an idea of what ad converts into clicks. Keep an eye on the click through rate (ctr), the higher, the better.

A simple well known writing technique for your ads is to make each word start with a capital. You can see the effect of capitalization on the ads below.

Buy Pansies Online Buy pansies online The Freshest Pansies Online The freshest pansies online Buy One Pansy Get One Free Buy one pansy get one free YourDomain.com yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com

Let your campaign run for a week, then assess your advertisements. Your goal is to increase your ctr. Write ads with the intention of trying to beat the ctr of your best performing ad. Do NOT delete your lesser performing ad. Let it continue to run for 3 days after you launch your 3rd ad then Pause it.

So your ads are up and running and your getting traffic to your offer. You should now start to assess how your campaign is performing

Here is an example of what your statistics could resemble… KEYWORD: xyz IMPRESSIONS: 2000 CLICKS: 100. KEYWORD: wxyz IMPRESSIONS: 5000 CLICKS: 10.

You will begin to get an idea of what your customers are searching for and also what ads they are clicking on. You want clicks, clicks are good. But conversions are better. Now we need to take your stats and work out what they mean.

This is where the importance of tracking is paramount. Lets assume we have tracking on our keywords. We can now see what keywords, if any generated sales. Now for example purposes, keyword “xyz” generated 100 clicks but NO sales. But, keyword “wxyz” only generated 10 clicks but 2 of those converted into a sale.

Even though the keyword “xyz” had a 5% ctr compared to 0.2% ctr for “wxyz” the results show us that “xyz” is not a profitable keyword. It would then be a case of deciding weather to delete the keyword “xyz” or not, and focussing on increasing the ctr of “wxyz”.

PLEASE NOTE: Once you learn how to track you can then analyze, assess and increase your chances of running a profitable campaign. You will be able to access data that indicates which keywords are converting and which are not. But be patient, give your keywords a chance to prove themselves, I like to let my keywords get at least 100 clicks worth of data before I decide what action to take.

As we all know Pay Per Click marketing is a cut throat business. To succeed you need to level the playing field between you and the super affiliates. If you don’t have the right tools, you will struggle to make it. You can save yourself hundreds of dollars by making use of tracking and “spy” software. Google Cash Detective 2 is one of the latest and greatest “spy” tools on the market. With Google Cash Detective 2 you can quickly identify your competitors profitable campaigns and replicate them.

Be willing to spend money to make money when it comes to PPC advertising. Find info products and get “spy” and tracking software to really improve your chances of success. Pursue your goals, be focused and don’t give up.

Best of luck, Lynne Carey

affiliate marketing, Google adwords, google cash detective 2, Home based businesses, Internet Marketing, making money online, pay per click advertising