by Lynne Carey
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.
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
and so on, and so forth.
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.
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.
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.
For an effective outcome your ad should be shown on page 1 of the search results. If your average ad position is higher than 7 or 8 then you should consider increasing your bid. On the other hand, your ad might be averaging position 1, so it may be more cost effective to lower your bid and rank in 3 to 5 position. Personally I like my ads to rank from positions 3 to 5. If you have an average ad position you want your ads to be displayed in then choose that in the campaign settings tab. This does not guarantee your position but it helps.
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 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 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
Give your campaign at least a week to run, then judge your ads. As mentioned you want to have a high ctr on your ad. Let’s say you have two ads, now write a third ad that you think will beat your highest ctr ad. Leave ALL three ads active for three days before deleting your worst performer.
Now lets look at your campaigns performance, assuming your ads are being displayed and your generating a decent amount of traffic to your site.
For example purposes your campaign stats might read something like this… 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.
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.
Based on this analysis, you’d soon realize that even though the click through rate (ctr) of “xyz” is 5% compared to 0.2% for “wxyz” it turned out to be a non profitable keyword. If this was my campaign, I would delete keyword “xyz”, then focus on improving the ctr on “wxyz” by writing better ad copy.
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.
Good luck, Lynne Carey
About the Author:
Before you start a Pay Per Click campaign you need the right tools of the trade. Spy tools like
Google Cash Detective 2 can be the difference between winning and losing. Check out Lynne Carey’s
Google Cash blog for tips, information and great resources for starting a PPC advertising campaign