Adwords Pay Per Click Survival Tips

Many businesses that use Google Adwords for their advertising needs often describe the experience as operating in a hostile environment. While this search engine giant makes $15 billion dollars annually on their paid search business, they don’t necessarily do anything to make it easy to work with them,

In Google’s defense, it has to balance two customer bases that can’t exist
without each other. On the one hand, there are the searchers. They want
good information, relevant search engine (and paid search) results, fast
answers, quality content, and no spam (definition open to interpretation). On
the other hand, there are the advertisers. They want traffic, as much as they
can get and as cheaply as they can get it. There are also some “bad apples”
out there that try and get away with underhanded techniques and get rich
quick schemes. These are the ones that Google is the most concerned about.
The problem is that the very measures that Google puts in place to protect
itself and its searchers from these types of advertisers are the ones that can
make it difficult for the well-intentioned advertiser from making Adwords
work for them.

Adwords can be a very profitable place to use your advertising budget. In fact, this is how I make a good portion of my living. However, to be profitable you have to understand the rules, tricks and tips, many of them unwritten, which must be used to keep Google happy. When you learn how to keep Google happy you will see your pay per click costs dropping and your traffic steadily increasing. This usually translates to higher profitability for your advertising campaign as well. Google will be the happiest when you place an Adwords ad that consistently gets a high click through rate (CTR). The people that are clicking on your ad are happiest when they find exactly what they are looking for on your website. This scenario makes Google makes more money just as it should for you. Google can measure exactly how happy site visitors are by how quickly they leave the site.

Here are some tips that can rescue your Adwords campaigns:

Tip #1 Keywords

You don’t have enough of them.

If you don’t have at least 300 – 500 keywords in your campaigns (and I don’t care what
market you’re in), I can guarantee that you’re leaving profitable keywords on the table.

Make use of a good keyword research tool like Keywordtopia or Wordtracker. These tools are easy to use. Simply plug in most general term, or “root” term, that describes your targeted market or product into the chosen tool. You’ll likely be very surprised by the terms that will be delivered. Many times keywords are uncovered that you would have never considered on your own.

Don’t forget about using the plural versions of your existing keywords.

Increase your keyword list by looking for combination multipliers like cities and states. For instance, rather than using just one keyword like “weight loss center”, use that term along with each city and state. Next, use each city and state along with plural version of the term.

Brainstorm a bit with friends and colleagues and add in these ideas. You’ll have thousands of
keywords in a very short period of time.

Tip #2 Proper Usage of Match Types

With Google, there are three different match types; broad, phrase, and exact. You will find plenty of information is Google Adword’s help documents about how each of these types works.

Many people that are just getting with Adwords make this mistake. They make the mistake of bidding on only the broad match keywords. Google has this as a built in suggestion to use only this match type, but this is not always the best idea.

I recommend bidding on all three match types (this also effectively triples your keyword list).
There is almost no way of knowing which match type will be the most effective for you. You
need to try them and track them, then adjust accordingly.

Tip #3 Keyword Grouping

Many advertisers start with just one ad group and stuff hundreds, maybe even thousands of keywords into in. This practice will not make Google happy. They automatically think that there’s no way to write relevant ads for this many keywords and provide relevant landing pages. As a result they Google will give you a low quality score and your clicks become very expensive. You may never even get your ads running using this strategy.

The key is to make tightly focused adwords groups. The way that most people do it is by a
“theme”. Generally, if all the keywords or phrases in an adgroup can be served by one highly
targeted ad and landing page…they are in a good grouping. However, my suggestion is to
have one adgroup for EVERY keyword (include all three match types, so every
adgroup really ends up having three keywords or phrases). This is a lot of work, but there are
tools out there that can help. Google’s own Adwords Editor is free and will help a lot.

Tip #4 Landing Pages

You absolutely must have targeted landing pages that address each of the conversations your customers have when they start searching for something.

For example, if you are advertising a service and trying to capture leads from people that are trying to sell their San Francisco home, you should send them to a landing page that gives them reasons why they should choose you as their listing broker. If you’re trying to capture leads from people that will be relocating to London, send them to a landing page that talks about your expertise in helping people purchase home and handling relocations.

Many times advertisers capture completely different types of customer leads and send them straight to their home page. This rarely makes a person happy since they would like to continue the conversation they were having and quickly get the answers they are searching for. The last thing they want to do is navigate their way through your website to find what they’re looking for. Since they are unhappy about landing on a page that doesn’t help them, they almost instantly hit the back button. Not only does this not please Google, but you’ve lost a sale, spent money on a click, and will likely be penalized with higher charges for future clicks.

Tip #5 Writing your Ads

While this topic could warrant writing an entire article about it, I’ll just highlight the most common mistakes to avoid.

Use the keyword in the ad. This is why it important to group keywords as I’ve recommended. Google assumes that if your ad repeats what the searched typed in, your ad is relevant. You will be rewarded with lower bid prices.

Never carry a thought or sentence from one line to the next. Most people don’t really read the ads, but skim them quickly and click on one that attracts them.

Capitalize the first letter of every word. This is scientifically proven to increase clicks. Why? I
don’t care, and you shouldn’t either…it just works!

Make proper use of the display URL, especially if it contains the keyword. Don’t use www.weightlossclinic.com, but WeightLossClinic.com. It’s easy to see which one draws more attention.

Tip #6 Split testing

When you set up an adgroup, always write two different ads. You must then monitor them to
see which one is performing better. You can literally increase your clicks 3x or more by doing
this. It doesn’t matter what you change and make different in your ads. Just change something
and always test and monitor.

When one ad is declared the winner, ditch the ad that under performs and write a new one immediately. Strive to write one that beats the one that was previously declared a winner.

Tip #7 Use of the Content Network

I recommend turning the content network off at first, and then taking the terms that have
been profitable for you and starting another campaign that ONLY advertises on the content
network.

If you run both types of ads from one campaign, it can be very hard to track your keywords and ads’ performance as well as monitor your return on your investment.

Tip #8 Geographic and schedule targeting

If these options make sense for your market, use both.

In the London real estate example, you would run two different campaigns in an effort to get listings in your area. People searching on “Sell house London” not paying attention to
geography, and people searching on the more general “sell house”…targeting only those
people in London.

Use the scheduling feature to examine all the metrics. There will be some campaigns that will only be profitable to run on weekends for example. If you are able to determine this, it would make sense to only run your ads then.

Tip #9 Conversion Tracking

If you do nothing else, you must do conversion tracking.

If you have no idea what you’re getting for you’re advertising dollar, you wont’ be able to make good decisions?

If you’re selling a product online, the best way to do this is to use Google’s own conversion
tracking. This works very well. It’s a simple bit of code that you, or your web designer can add
to your sales confirmation page that tells Google that, for this keyword or phrase, a sale was
made. Google stores and reports on this information so that you can go to one place and see
what you spent on keywords, and what the return on that investment was.

There are several ways to do this, and it can be more difficult to do if you’re not selling
something; however, it’s absolutely mandatory.

Tip #10 Bid Adjustments

You have to remember that every keyword is not created equally. You have to examine your spend and your conversions for every keyword and adjust the bid (individually) for each of them.

Bonus Tip – Learn the Adwords editor…and use it.

Find out more about AdWords, by visiting www.internetmarketingeureka.com to find the best advice on internet marketing for you.