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.

If your trying to sell a product or service, I recommend you look for search terms that include the following “money” words:

get

rid

buy

buying

purchasing

purchase

how to

how

cure

fix

repair

order

ordering

help

treatment

solution

etc etc, I’m sure you get the message.

Have a firm idea of how much you are going to spend. You’ll need to make a default bid for your keyword phrases, this bid covers all of your keywords. This gives your keyword a value, and will establish where you rank in the search results. After you start getting impressions, you can then assess where your keywords are ranking and adjust the individual keyword bids accordingly. Remember to have your daily and monthly spending limits in place.

If your chosen niche happens to be a very competitive, then it’s likely you’ll pay, on average a higher cost per click (cpc). Advertiser competition is not the only thing that determines how much your clicks cost.

Pay Per Click marketing is not a set and forget method of advertising. It is a good idea to check your campaigns on a daily basis (depending on how much activity there is in your Adwords account). You’ll no doubt need to adjust variable factors to optimize your campaigns.

It won’t take long for your keywords to get impressions. These are the number of times your ad has been shown in a search result. Your impressions will build up and you’ll start to see an average position for your advertisement is placed for each keyword. Now you need might need to change each keyword bid, depending on where you want to rank for that keyword and your marketing 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 advertisement should be catchy and relevant to the search term (keyword). There are limits to what and how many words you can use in your ad, so have fun with it, split test a few ads and keep trying to beat your best converting ad. Don’t stress about Google’s guidelines too much, If your ad does not comply, they simply prompt you to change it before it can be saved.

I’m not an ad writing expert but I believe by split testing your ads you can improve your ad writing skills. By pitting two different ads against each other, after time you will see one ad starting to get a higher click through rate (ctr). Obviously that is the better performing ad. Now write another one and try to beat the ctr of your best ad.

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 Cactus Online Buy cactus online The Prickliest Cactus Ever The prickliest cactus ever Buy One Cactus Get One Free Buy one cactus get one free YourDomain.com yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com

After a week your ads should have impressions, clicks and a ctr percentage. You should aim to increase your ctr by writing more ads. Take what you have learned from your best performing ad and write a third ad that you think will out perform it. Wait three days before deleting the lessor of the two original ads.

Now lets look at your campaigns performance, assuming your ads are being displayed and your generating a decent amount of traffic to your site.

As an example, lets say your account had the following statistics… KEYWORD: xyz IMPRESSIONS: 2000 CLICKS: 100. KEYWORD: wxyz IMPRESSIONS: 5000 CLICKS: 10.

Now you will get a much better understanding of what your potential clients are searching for and what they are actually clicking on. Clicks are one thing, conversions are another. So lets assess the example campaign statistics.

Keyword “xyz” has way more traffic, in fact ten times more traffic than keyword “wxyz”. Great, now lets assume we have tracking in place (a subject for another day) you then see that keyword “xyz” has no conversions but keyword “wxyz” has generated 2 sales.

You can clearly see that even though the keyword “xyz” had a better click through rate, it has not converted into sales. You can’t make money if your keywords don’t convert. So keyword “xyz” has not been profitable. There would now be a case for deleting the keyword “xyz” and improving the ad copy for keyword “wxyz” in an attempt to increase the ctr.

KEY POINT: Assess your campaigns thoroughly, you don’t want to be running a “blind” campaign. You need to be able to see keyword conversions so you can manage your costs. Unfortunately PPC marketing is not black and white, let your keywords get at least 100 clicks worth of data to get an idea of performance.

The Pay Per Click playing field is not necessarily a level one. To be successful you need the right tools of the trade, like tracking software and “spy”software. One of the best “spy” tools is Google Cash Detective 2, being released March 10, 2009. This software can save a heap of cash by eliminating the need for testing a niche. With Google Cash detective 2 you can identify a competitors niche, the data will tell you if it is a profitable niche or not. Priceless…

You have to be ready to invest in your online Pay Per Click business, if you are going to succeed. Be prepared, buy the right tools for the trade, “spy” and tracking tools are pretty much essential. Chase your dreams, be determined and never give up.

Good luck, Lynne Carey