Adwords Pay Per Click Survival Tips

Advertising on Google’s Adwords can best be described as operating in a
hostile environment. Even though the search engine giant makes $15 Billion
a year on this “little” paid search business they have, they don’t go to any
great lengths to make it easy for you 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 pay per click ads can be a very profitable way to use your advertising budget. In fact, I make a majority of my living doing so. The real key to success with Adwords is to understand the tricks, tips, and rules (sometimes unwritten) that must be used in order to keep Google happy. You will quickly find that if Google is happy, your per click cost goes down and your traffic increases. The added benefit to keeping Google happy will usually result in better profitability for you. Google is the happiest when the ad you place gets a high CTR. The people that click on the ads are happiest when they are satisfied with what they see on your website. This will make the most money for Google and should work the same way for you as well. Google measure how happy a site visitor is by how quickly they leave the site after landing on it.

Here are my tips to rescue your Adwords campaigns.

Tip #1 Keywords

You probably don’t have nearly enough keywords in your campaign.

Regardless of the market you’re in, you should have no less than 300 to 500 keywords in your campaigns. If you are using less than this, you are undoubtedly leaving profitable keywords on the table.

Use one of the good keyword research tools like Wordtracker or Keywordtopia to get suggestions you may have never even considered.

Don’t forget to use the plural versions of your existing keywords.

Look for different combination multipliers like cities and states. For example, rather that using just one keyword like “weight loss center”, use that term along with each state and then with each city.

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

There are three match types to use in an Adwords campaign; exact, phrase, and broad. You will be able to find information on how each of these match types work in help documents provided by Google Adwords.

Adword’s help documents for a discussion about how each one works.
Most people who are just starting out with Adwords make this mistake. They only bid on the
broad match. That is, putting the keyword or phrase by itself with no quotes or brackets
around it. In fact, Google has a built in suggestion to start out only using this match type.
That is not always sound advice.

In my opinion, the best strategy is to bid on all three match types, which will also triple the size of your keyword list. Since there is no definitive way of knowing ahead of time which of the match types will be most effective for each campaign, you will have to try them, track them, and make any necessary adjustments.

Tip #3 Keyword Grouping

The majority of Adwords advertisers stuff hundreds or thousands of keywords and keyword phrases into the just one ad group. This is a practice that doesn’t make Google happy. They immediately assume that there is no possible way to write ads that are relevant to all these keywords and have landing pages that are relevant. The result will be a low quality score that makes your click price very expensive. There’s also a good ad you’ll never even get your ads running.

The best way to approach pay per click advertising is to make tightly focused ad groups. The way most advertisers accomplish this is with a theme. Basically, if all the keywords in an ad group can be served by a highly targeted ad and relevant landing page, they are considered to be well grouped. However, I recommend using on ad group for each keyword. Since you are using all three match types, each ad group has just three keywords or key phrases in it. Yes, this can be a lot of work to set up, but there are some good tools to help with the job. In fact, you can use Google’s Adwords Editor which is free.

Tip #4 Targeted Landing Pages

There is no way around it, you have to create targeted landing pages for each of the customer’s “conversations” that are taking place when they start searching for something.

If you are advertising for the purpose of capturing leads from people that are trying to sell their home in San Francisco, you should send them to a page that tells them why they should retain you as their listing broker. If you are capturing leads from people that are interested in relocating to London, send them to a landing page that highlights your expertise in handling relocations and helping people purchase homes.

Too many times, advertisers capture totally different kinds of customer leads and send them to their home page. This doesn’t make people happy that click on these ads. They want to continue the conversation they were having and get the solution to their problems and the answers to their questions as quickly as possible. They don’t want to land on a website just to have to navigate around the site looking for what they are after. If they don’t see what they want right away, they will hit the back button. As a result of this, Google becomes unhappy, and penalizes you with higher click costs. You become unhappy because you’ve lost a sale and are paying more for clicks.

Tip #5 Writing your Ads

This could be a whole article in itself. 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 continue a sentence or thought from one line to the next. Most people never really read the ads; they just skim over them and click on an ad or something that attracts them.

Capitalize the first letter of every word in the ad. This has been proven to increase click. Why? I have no idea and don’t care and neither should you. I just do it because it 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

Every time you set up an ad group for pay per click advertising, write two different ads. You monitor your results to determine which of the ads perform better. It’s possible to increase your clicks by 3 times or more if you do careful split testing. It really doesn’t matter what you change about the ads. Just constantly make changes, test, monitor, and tweak.

When one ad can be declared as the winner (search the web for split test calculators to get the
statistical answer), get rid of the under performing one and immediately write another new
one to try and beat the one that just won.

Tip #7 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.

Using the earlier London real estate example, you would run two separate campaigns in an effort for trying to get area listings. People that are searching for “Sell house London” are not paying attention to geography, and people searching for the more general term “sell house”, targeting only people in London.

Study all of the metrics that are available for the feature. There are campaigns, for example,
that are only really profitable on the weekends. If you are able to determine that, then obviously it
makes sense to only run your ads then.

Tip #9 Conversion Tracking

If you do nothing else, you absolutely have to track conversions!

If you don’t know what you’re getting for you’re advertising dollar, how can you 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

All keywords are not created equally. You must examine your spend and your conversions for
each and every keyword and adjust the bid (individually) for each of them.

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

Want to find out more about AdWords, then visit Robert D’Arcy’s site on practical tips to set up and run yourinternet marketing strategy.