Lets say you’ve got your first Google Adwords campaign up and running. Assess your keywords individual quality score. You want to aim to have a quality score of 5 or higher. Google gives you this score based on how relevant they rate 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 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.

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.

Try coming up with an ad that’s catchy and to the point! Google has limits on what words you can use in your ad copy and the size of your ad. Trial and error is probably the best method when writing an ad, you will be prompted to make the necessary changes if your ad is not within Google’s guidelines.

I’m not an expert ad writer but one thing you should always do is split test your ads. Always have two active ads for each keyword to determine the best performer. The click through rate (ctr) is the measurable factor. The higher the ctr the better performance of the ad.

A well known ad writing tip is to capitalize the beginning letter of each word. Here are two ads, you can see how capitalization makes the ad stand out.

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

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

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.

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”.

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.

In today’s PPC environment the competition can be fierce. You need the right tools of the trade to succeed. As I’ve mentioned tracking is an essential “backend” tool for your advertising, you need to track. One of the best tools I’ve seen for helping you set up profitable PPC campaigns is Google Cash Detective 2, this spy tool will potentially save you hundreds of dollars on testing a niche.

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.

All the best, Lynne Carey