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Author: Jean Lam Article source: http://www.selfseo.com/. Used with author's permission.
Paid advertising such as Google AdWords is a lucrative way to bring targeted traffic to your website fast. You just need to set up an account with a small activation fee of $5 and you can start bidding on keywords and gain ranking in the SERPs on the right side of the organic search engine listings instantly. Everytime someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google a few cents or dollars depending how much you are willing to pay as maximum cost per click(cpc) for your different keywords.
While it's easy to start advertising on Google AdWords, it's not easy as just creating an ad, get clicks and sales start pouring in. Always remember this so that you don't get deceived. Below are 6 strategies for you to get the most out of Google AdWords advertising.
(1) Getting Clicks
I've experienced it before and the problem most people are confronted with is to get sufficient amount of clicks that can convert into a sale for instance. The key to get clicks is to give people a compelling reason to check out your offer. You don't have enough room to write a long ad so your primary objective is to get people to click on your offer among all the rest. Some people might not even know you are selling something until they click and get to your site and they don't need to know that because your sales page is going to do the rest if it has attractive and powerful sales copy.
(2) Higher Bids
Next important thing is you need to bid high enough so that your ad appears among the top. I've found that you can still get a decent number of clicks even though you are on the second or third page of the search engine results for highly competitive terms. For less competitive, more targeted and cheaper keywords, you can appear on the first page, usually the most recommended. It's very important to test which keywords are most profitable for you in terms of clicks and conversions. If a keyword isn't getting clicks at all and you have bid high enough, most probably, your ad is not attractive in generating clicks. On the other hand, if you are getting many clicks and no conversion, your sales letter might not be doing its job properly. Perhaps, you need to tweak it. A sale for every 50 or 100 visitors is generally considered good on the Internet. That's a 2% conversion for every 50 visitors and a 1% conversion for every 100 visitors. Everything above that is very good.
(3) Creating Different AdGroups
To get the most out of Google AdWords, you need to create different AdGroups for each keyword and ensure that your keyword is highly targeted, hence improving your conversion. It's much work than just slapping one AdGroup, one ad and one maximum cost per click(cpc) for say 100 keywords. With different AdGroups, you can have different ads, different maximum cost per click(cpc). One of the main reason to create different AdGroups, is that you can add your targeted keyword phrase in your ad, be it the title or the description. It has been proven that people are most inclined to click on ads that contain the exact keywords they are looking for, so this is a good reason for you to create keyword-rich ads.
(4) Keyword Status
With Google AdWords, you no longer have disabled status keywords, on hold status keywords, trial status keywords and normal status keywords. You just have active or inactive keywords now. For inactive keywords, usually you will see a message like this "1 keyword(s) are currently inactive.
These keywords are marked in the status column below. Improve their quality through optimization, delete them, or raise the keywords' maximum CPCs to the minimum bids indicated. (Raising the bids will activate the keywords.)"
Next to the inactive keyword, you will see something like "Inactive Increase quality or bid $1.00 to activate" or "Inactive Increase quality or bid $5.00 to activate" but it can also be other bid values. Usually, I just leave it inactive if it costs too much to activate and I delete it. This new method of keyword bidding evaluation is much more interesting than the previous method because most of the keywords are active and showing now, hence better advertising.
(5) Keyword Matching Options
If you are selling specific products, use exact match and phrase match for your keywords. With exact match, you just need to put square brackets between your keywords for eg [sports cars], hence your ad will only appear to people searching for that exact keyword phrase. Phrase match is a bit the same as exact match but double quotes are used instead of square brackets, for eg "sports cars". This keyword phrase with double quotes will only appear to people searching for that exact keyword phrase plus any other keyword combined with sports cars at the beginning for eg "red sports cars" but not "sports cars red". You also have negative keywords where you just put a minus sign in front of the keyword that you don't want your ad to appear for eg -free. All people who type the word "free" in their searches won't trigger your ads. The negative keywords applies mostly to phrase match and broad match which we are going to discuss.
The last one, the broad match, using keywords with nothing around it, is usually not recommended if you are selling specific products because you might not get very targeted visitors. For eg, if you use the keyword phrase "sports cars" as broad match, your ad might appear for people searching for "sports" or "cars".
(6) Google Search and Content Network
You can also use Google search network such as AOL, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, Earthlink, Compuserve amongst others to get your ads appear on them too as well as Google content network, which represents all the sites that have Google AdSense on them.(You can read more about adsense at http://www.zineguru.com/article54.htm and open an account at http://www.google.com/adsense.) To enable these options, you just need to put a tick in the checkbox next to your campaign number and click on "edit settings" at the top of the campaign list. Then you can put a tick in the checkboxes for search and content network.
In fact, all the AdWords publishers that have allowed their ads to be syndicated in the content network, will appear in the form of adsense ads on other webmasters' sites. If your ad is related to a specific topic, it can appear on some of them. If people click on the adsense ads, you pay Google according to your maximum cost per click(cpc), generally a bit less and Google pays a percentage to the webmaster. This is how it works. Generally, if you let your ads syndicated on the content network and if your ad is good and your bid, high enough, you can get interesting clicks. You might even be the only ad in the adsense space of the related site just because with the new Google AdSense rules, sometimes the highest paying ad can be the only one displayed even in a block usually comprised of 4 ads. Hence, it will fill the entire unit giving your ad more space and exposure. Less competing ads means more clicks for you.
How To Get Started With Google AdWords
If you want to get started with Google AdWords, sign up an account with them at http://www.google.com/adwords and conduct an extensive keyword research related to your business and start bidding on your keywords with your different AdGroups. You can use Yahoo! Search Marketing keyword research tool previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
Due to the fact that your ad is new, you will have to start generating clicks and increasing its value because Google looks also at the click through rate(ctr) to help determine your positions. Your maximum cost per click(cpc) might not be the highest but if your ad is getting more clicks than your competitors, your position will shoot up. So a bit smart marketing if you want. You might try to put a higher bid initially and generate clicks and after awhile, lower your bids to a reasonable amount because your ad might still be in a decent position due to the click through rate(ctr). In addition, I advise you to have a daily budget above the recommended one to ensure that your ads are displayed everytime. If Google recommends say $5 daily budget, put it $10 or even $20. This does necessarily mean that you will spend that amount of money daily although you can. It's just a precaution to make sure that your ads are delivered well. You might not even meet the initial $5 if you are not getting clicks.
Conclusion
Google AdWords is a lot about testing and tracking which campaigns, AdGroups and keywords are working better for you and in the end, if you have a working campaign, stick to it and monitor it. Patience is important in pay per click advertising like AdWords. You might not see instant results but don't give up until you see some results be it a sale or an ad producing clicks. But be prepared to blow a few bucks because this is how you are going to learn ie by testing and tracking. Google AdWords is an additional source of valuable traffic and can't be ignored.
Good luck and happy advertising. This article can be freely published on a website as long as
it's not modified in any way including the author bylines,
plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.
Jean Lam is the webmaster of
Email Autoresponder which provides autoresponder review,
article and courses to boost your marketing efforts.
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