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Optimize Your Ad Campaign Using Google Adwords

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:02:37 +0100

Formulating Google Adwords ad campaigns on exceedingly competitive niche and using keywords already being used by competitors can be tricky.What sets apart one copy from the other is semantics or the distinct manner in which you deliver information and draw interest from the viewers.This is accomplished by formulating and testing different ads, luckily, you will not have to do much of these! Affiliate marketers already know the secrets and strategies for writing ads that actually convert customers and encourage hundreds, even thousands of clicks.

Perry Marshall, the author of The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords explains that customers and viewers of your ads will only convert into prospects or leads when they can truly resonate with the message delivered in the ad.You can absolutely increase your click-through rate and lead to your homepage highly interested prospects when you apply similar tone, language, and conversational style as your customers.

Here are just five ways you can begin writing compelling ads for your Google Ad words campaign:

1. Claim the impossible or unbelievable. Although it may sound unbelievable, individuals are always fascinated by exaggerated claims that captures their attention and are thus expected to click on your ad. Take the time to arouse their curiosity and offer outrageous claims immediately; and watch those clicks come on through!

2. Share a secret. Individuals prefer being informed as it makes them feel advantageous about a specific product or service. Share your ‘secret’ or a special story in your ad to capture this highly-interested group of people. It is essential employing this elaborate scheme when you establish a new product or service in the market.

3. Use the power of ellipses. A good way to solicit more clicks is to add three dots (also known as ellipses) at the body copy of your AdWords ad. This allows the reader to think about relevant information once they click your ad, prompting them to do so in order to find out more. This strategy is especially effective when you are answering a question or suggesting a solution for a certain problem within your ad because it ads mystery, intrigue and helps increase the response rate of your ad.

4. Write each of your leading words in capital letters. In formulating an ad that creates strong impact to viewers, you need to capitalize your keywords, except placeholders like 'in', 'the', 'and'. These ads are easy to read and naturally attract attention when they are sitting next to other, similar ads in your market. Using capital letters also renders professional look on your ad and elicits trust from the audience or viewer.

5. Use powerful take-action words in your headline. In the field of advertising, the strongest and perhaps the most influential word used is 'free' because it gives benefits to viewers. You can also use words such as ‘Discover’, ‘Get’, or ‘Learn’ to increase your click through rates and encourage ‘hungry’ leads to click on your ad almost immediately.

Tips For Monitoring Results With PPC Campaigns

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:24:59 +0100

The number of businesses advertising online has increased significantly in the past several years. Pay Per click advertising is one of the most popular and effective advertisement model in the internet today. PPC ads are mainly published when a user uses a search engine. The ppc network or publisher then shows ads relevant to what is being searched. These ads are clickable and often take people to a sales page or landing page wherein they can read more about a product/service and purchase it outright.

There are many pay per click publishers operating today, however Google Adwords is currently the most popular service and has the most market share. PPC is run in a fast-paced medium wherein information can be accessed instantaneously. This allows you to monitor your ads performance and quickly implement tweaks to increase their effectiveness.

Raw numbers from traffic counts are the basis of measuring ad effectiveness, and will tell you exactly what types of visitors are arriving at your site. While this data will only give you an overview of the total volume of traffic, you will be able to drill down the dates of these traffic counts and match them up to the days that your ad campaigns were run.

Probably the most important data that you have to monitor are your conversion rates. A conversion rate is the ratio between the number of clicks on your ads and how many sales resulted from those clicks. Your conversion rates will determine the cost of how much it will cost you before generating a sale.

Author Joseph Thornton, of the book "The Online Advertising Playbook", states that conversion can also be in the form of a customer signing-up for your news letter, disclosing of contact information, or even downloading a free product from your site.

Another way to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign is to analyze different keywords and keyphrases as they relate to conversion rates. If you are able to drill down exactly which keywords and keyphrases are leading to a sale, you can optimize your website for these words and also use the data for future campaigns.

Finally, determining the rankings of your advertising segment will help you determine which placement is the best for your particular niche or industry. Google Adwords rotates the ads in its sidebar column to ensure a fair advantage for all advertisers, but there are some spots that are considered 'Featured ads'. These spots may have more value for you in a very competitive market, and can make it easier for you to decide where and how to promote your PPC campaign and achieve the best possible results.

Advertising with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most websites can use to attract more customers.Writing quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords - and there are several good training resources available online.

Using PPC Marketing With Your Branding Campaign

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:01:25 +0100

The many advances in the Pay per click advertising industry over the past decade made it now possible to run a PPC branding campaign. Branding campaigns are really just a long-term method for a company to influence customers and PPC now allows companies to do branding as a highly focused and quantifiable effort.

Any business can put up effective promotions for branding using any PPC network. Author Boris Mordkovich, of the book "Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook" gives out some guidelines for managing a branding campaign using PPC marketing.

He encourages all PPC advertisers to monitor their branding campaign regularly and tweak the strategy as they go; varying the ads only slightly can have a significant impact on results, and this is a strategy that many successful PPC and Google Adwords advertisers use regularly in order to optimize their efforts. Some of the best ways to tap into this opportunity for your branding campaign involve:

1. Treat PPC advertising as separate from conventional ad campaigns. Pay per click campaigns are very different from conventional marketing. The goal is to get a response from customers but the information you get from PPC is different. Isolate your PPC campaign from your other marketing efforts to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in PPC advertising.

2. Don't worry about the USP with pay per click marketing. Even though conventional marketing and branding strategies encourage business owners to reach their target market by promoting their unique selling proposition, this is not as effective in PPC marketing. PPC marketing requires understanding the keywords and keyphrases associated with the products and services you provide. Do the necessary research to find out what these words and phrases are so you can create highly compelling and effective ads with these in mind.

3. Adjust your strategy regularly. The great thing about this advertising method is that you can get accurate metrics about your campaign almost in real-time. Take advantage of this by optimizing your ads regularly for more clicks and better results.

4. Develop the right landing page. Customers have very short attention span, especially in the internet. You don't want to send them to your homepage that just talks about your company in general. Consider developing a landing page that gives out detailed information about your ad's subject. This grabs the attention of your customers and makes it easier for you to obtain more accurate campaign metrics.

5. Produce innovative ad headlines and copy. You are just one of the countless businesses that are vying for the attention of your customers through PPC. Stand out from the crowd by writing exceptional ads. Think about the benefits of hiring a copywriter; you can get better results if you let a copywriter do his magic in those few lines of text.

Advertising with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most websites can use to find more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords - and there are several quality training guides available online.

How to Track Conversions from Google Adwords

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:54:54 +0100

Tracking your conversions is one of the most important elements in any PPC campaign. You will not be able to optimize your campaign if you cannot track your conversions accurately.

You have the option of simply using your landing page hits and number of sales from a link to analyze your conversions. But it's also worth looking at the tools Google provide its Adwords users for acquiring conversion data. Here are some tips and guidelines for using Google's conversion tracking tools.

First, you'll need to embed your conversion link using JavaScript. If you are using a shopping cart or other type of setup where the buyer receives a confirmation as part of their checkout process, your best bet is to use some JavaScript code that gets sent back to the Google Adwords tracker.

This tool allows you to track the ads that clicked through and produced a complete conversion; bear in mind that this tool does not allow you to see the number of visitors to the site. Just place the few lines of code into your website, and then access your conversion tracking reports directly on the 'Campaign Summary' page in the Reports Center of Google Adwords.

There are only two conditions for the above method to work and track your conversions accurately. The first is that you should be running approved Adwords ads on your site and the second condition is you should place the code only in your conversion page.

You can verify if the code is working by completing a complete conversion yourself. If you can find out exactly when a user has clicked on your ad and completed the conversion process, you can review your conversion reports within 24 hours and see the click-through on the report summary. Avoid clicking your own ads, as this is a breach of the Google Adwords terms of service contract.

You can still track your conversions if you are using a payment checkout system, like PayPal. PayPal and most other systems offer a conversion confirmation webpage wherein you can insert your Adwords tracking code. You will have a record of all conversions or sales once a customer successfully completes the checkout process.

Authors Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer and Mathew McDonald of the book "Google: The Missing Manual", explain that it's also important to determine your total cost-per-conversion over any given campaign period.

This information will tell you the actual costs of generating a sale with your campaign. To calculate this, match the number of conversions with the total cost of campaign for a certain period.

Marketing with Google Adwords is an effective technique that most websites can use to attract more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the best skills to have when using Adwords - and there are many quality training resources available online.

Improve PPC Ad Campaigns With These Steps

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:43:11 +0100

Optimizing Google Adwords and other PPC campaigns naturally consume time and effort because of all the data gathering and testing you need to do. However, there are techniques that are known to improve any campaign's performance quickly. Running different ad variations is the most popular technique to optimize PPC campaigns. Some of your ad versions will gather more clicks than others do; it's just a matter of discarding low-performing ads.

Still, there are other ways to fine-tune your pay-per-click efforts. Peter Kent, author of the book 'Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies' identifies several techniques for improving your Quality Score on Google Adwords and creating effective, highly targeted campaigns. Here are some simple strategies to help you improve PPC ad performance and increase click through rates:

1. Apply negative match keywords. Using negative match keywords on your campaign can weed out inappropriate clicks and only allow quality leads to your site. Google Adwords does this for you automatically. You just need to indicate your negative keywords and the system will do all the work for you.

2. Change your CPCs for major keywords. Modifying the CPCs of your major keywords may boost your campaign's overall performance. Just click on 'Tools' under the Campaign Management tab to modify your campaign. You have complete control of your ads here and this makes it easier to optimize your efforts.

3. Edit and resubmit rejected ads. Google reviews every ad before running them on their network. Ads that do not pass the review are stored in your Campaign Management tab allowing you to edit and resubmit them at anytime. Don't be discouraged if your ad was rejected. Tweak some words and resubmit it again.

4. Implement 'Dayparting'. 'Dayparting' is a technique wherein you define the time when your ads will run. This is mainly done to improve your click through rates since your running ads only when your target audience is at their most receptive state. For instance, you are marketing restaurant coupons, it would be better to run your ads a few hours before lunch or dinner when people are searching for a place to eat.

5. Study your target market. Writing effective and compelling ads may require doing some basic market research. Why would your target audience be interested in your product? What tone, language style and ads are they already responding to? Read discussion forums related to your niche and find out as much as you can about your customers to write the most persuasive ads consistently.

Fine-tuning an Adwords campaign takes time because we mostly use a trial and error approach. However, the above guidelines have already been proven to improve PPC campaigns faster. Apply them now on your campaigns and see results faster.

Marketing with a Pay Per Click Program is a powerful technique that most websites can use to find more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the best skills to have when using Pay Per Click - and there are several good training guides available online.

Five Ways To Prevent Click Fraud With Google Adwords

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:02:45 +0100

Click fraud is a serious problem on PPC campaigns. Google Adwords is not immune from this problem. Researchers estimate $1.6 billion were lost to click fraud as of 2008. Click Fraud happens when competitors click on your ads to crack your ad budget or when web robots are setup to generate false clicks on your ads.

PPC networks, including Google Adwords, confirm the existence of click fraud and are working hard to solve it. All we can do as PPC advertisers is to tweak our campaigns to reduce the risk of click fraud. Here are some tips for safeguarding your campaigns:

1. Constantly monitor click-through rates. Google allows you to easily review your conversions and click-through rates. It is a good idea to print out a daily or weekly report and check for any strange activity. Check your actual web site traffic report as well and investigate IP addresses and websites that habitually access your site.

2. Set-up a daily budget. Limit your advertising costs on Adwords by setting up a budget. Your budget should be at a reasonable level allowing you to maintain it for several months. If you are a target of click fraud, your losses will only be limited to your specified budget.

3. Lay down a daily click limit. Adwords managers would do well to setup a daily click limit, according to Bruce C. Brown, author of the book "The Complete Guide to Google Advertising". This allows you to track the number of clicks on your ads. Once the click limit has been reached, your ad will disappear from the Adwords network.

4. Use the geographic location feature. Limiting your ad to specific markets is one of the best ways to ensure that you're not making yourself vulnerable to fraudulent activities. Why waste your Adwords budget on countries that you never do business in? Do some research to find out where your best target market is, and focus on showing ads only in those countries or regions.

5. Be careful in singing up with PPC programs that give away free stuff. As a rule, don't sign up with programs that are too good to be true. Most fraudsters entice people to sign up with them by offering free downloadable products and services. Look out for programs that 'monitor' your keyword campaign. Nevertheless, a lot of hosting companies give out legitimate Google Adwords credit when you sign up with them. Just make sure you'll be dealing with Google directly to get these credits.

Google employs its own fraud protection team to investigate click fraud cases. Report your case to Google immediately if you think you've fallen prey to click fraud.

Marketing with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most online-businesses can use to attract more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords - and there are many quality training resources available online.

Create Adwords Campaigns Using Keyword Tools

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:03:14 +0100

One of the most important elements of an effective Google Adwords campaign is selecting the right combination of keywords and keyphrases. There could be millions of keywords associated with your niche and playing a guessing game for the 'right' keywords can be costly. Google offers its own keyword selector tool to make the process of choosing keywords easier, but there's are a handful of other tools you can use to fine-tune your campaign.

Adwords experts follow a three-step method for keyword and keyphrase building. The first step is to use the most common and obvious terms and run them on a keyword tool to find out each keyword's search volume. The second step involves finding out relevant keywords and other appropriate terms being searched by your target markets. The last step focuses on optimizing a campaign by tweaking or removing keywords for better results.

The three-step method described above cannot be implemented without a reliable keyword tool. Howie Jacobson, author of 'Adwords for Dummies' gives out the four most reliable keyword tools that you can use for your campaigns: Google Keyword Selector Tool, Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and a plain Thesaurus.

The most popular tool is Google's Keyword Selector Tool. It is free and you can access it through your Adwords account. The tool allows you to run your keywords on its system and provide you with synonyms or other relevant keywords in your niche. This tool can also compare keywords based on a wide set of statistical data such as search conducted per month, average searches in a year, average cost per click and many others.

Keyword Discovery is a paid service that allows you to manage several lists of keywords, compare data, and produce reports with ease. This is a more robust keyword analysis tool than the free Google Keyword Selector Tool, and is most appropriate for experienced Adwords users and SEO experts. If you're comfortable with paying for the service, Keyword Discovery can help you create comprehensive lists of keywords to help you target very specific groups in your market.

Word Tracker offers both a paid service and a free tool for analyzing keywords. The free keyword tool provides very basic information ,namely, the number of searchers conducted for your keyterm within the month. It's a quick an easy to cross reference search volume for a particular keyword, but the numbers may not be as accurate as the Google Keyword Selector Tool.

Keyword tools are really effective at digging deep into a niche and getting long-tail keywords and other relevant keyterms. Keyword tools are convenient for comparing hundreds of keyword data side by side and even allow you to export all your work into an electronic spreadsheet or other soft document format to back-up and store your data locally.

Understanding what your target market is searching for will help you create compelling and high-impact Adwords ads which in turn can increase click-through rates. If you're just starting out, take advantage of the free tools available and print out or organize the results to build your baseline keyword list.

Marketing with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most online-businesses can use to find more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the best skills to have when using Adwords - and there are several good training guides available online.

How to Write Your First Google Adwords Ad

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:20:20 +0100

The title of top PPC network on the internet still belongs to Google Adwords, and they are expected to remain on top for years. What's great about Adwords is that anyone can setup an account and run a campaign in a few hours. The only thing is, you are limited to just 35 text characters per line so you have to type in a specific manner to get favorable results. You just need to learn how to write ads specifically for Adwords in order to profit from it.

A whole science has emerged around writing effective adwords ads and knowing what to right in each line is just a part of it. If you're totally new with Adwords, here's a strategy you can use to base your first ad on.

1. Use the keyword in the headline. Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd, authors of the book "The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords" explain that more people click on ads when the headline includes the keyword or keyphrase that they were searching on. This means it is to your advantage to include the keyword or keyphrase in that very first line; weave these words into the headline to create an attention-grabbing headline that has the potential to generate more clicks.

2. Second line must describe a benefit. People are more likely to respond and click an ad if the ad clearly states a benefit near the title. Differentiate between benefits, offers and features to make this technique work. Think in terms of 'giving them what they want' first before stating your product's attributes.

3. State a feature or offer on the third line. Your features and offers must support your benefit statement. The idea here is to state your feature or offer in such a way as to back your benefit claim. Remember to keep your feature or offer brief and simple so as not to overpower your benefit.

4. Use the last line for your landing page. Many companies make the mistake of inserting only their website URL on the last line, but you have the freedom to enter in any destination you want in this area. This is a great reason to set up a separate landing page specifically for your Adwords campaign; this landing page URL can be inserted into every ad you run so you can track how well your ad is performing. Inserting a clear destination here may also encourage more clicks.

5. Test results with a similarly written ad. If you want more clicks from each campaign, consider running two very similar ads with slightly different wording. You can still use the same keywords and keyphrases, but tweaking these slightly and measuring for performance can help you generate more clicks on each ad run.

All elements needed for success in Google Adwords can be mastered with practice. Remember to track your performance always so that you can pinpoint areas for improvement. In any case, don't delay your usage of Google adwords and follow these tips to start running ads now.

Advertising with a Pay Per Click Program is a powerful technique that most online-businesses can use to find more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Pay Per Click Advertising - and there are several quality training guides available online.

Tips for Google AdWords Success

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:18:36 +0100

Google Adwords continues to be one of the leading pay-per-click systems on the Internet, and is a valuable way for you to buy traffic for your website or blog. Understanding how Google Adwords works is only a part of being successful with PPC advertising; you'll need to understand how to create effective campaigns, how to develop ad groups, and how to place bids for the right keywords.

No matter what niche you're in or what type of audience you are trying to attract, there are some specific guidelines to follow when using Google AdWords. Here are some important tips for creating a Google Adwords campaign that gets results:

1. Use the wizard to set up your AdWords account. If you're new to Google AdWords, you'll find it easier to get through the initial account set up process using the Adwords wizard. The wizard will walk you through all of the basic account management tools; this is the area where you can select the regions you want your ads to run, and set up your campaigns within a few clicks.

2. Create a compelling ad. Your ad needs to contain certain words and elements in a specific format to be effective. Make sure your keyword or keyphrase is used in the headline, type a benefit in the second line, write your special offer or feature in the third line, and include a destination URL (your landing page) in the fourth line. This is a proven formula for a successful campaign, and the strategy is still supported by AdWords experts such as Perry Marshall, author of the book "The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords" and Peter Kent, author of the book "Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies."

3. Search for the right keywords. You need to have the right keywords and/or keyphrases that will attract your market to your site. Google offers a solid keyword selector tool that will allow you to dig deep and find appropriate keywords for your niche. Utilize this tool as much as possible when creating your campaign or even before building up your website or blog.

4. Learn how to keyword match. You can use the keyword tool within the Google Adwords campaign module to conduct broad matches, phrase matches and exact matches for a given set of keywords. This allows you to broaden your scope of words for a particular campaign. You can also eliminate certain words with the negative match; this ensures that your ads will not show up on search results for users who type in that phrase. Keyword matching allows you to refine your campaign so that it is much more targeted.

5. Set up your budget. One of the biggest benefits of using Google Adwords is the ability to set up your own budget. You can enter in the total amount you want to spend each day and Google will deduct this balance from your account. Start small and slowly increase your budget amount as you start monitoring results from your campaign. As you begin to generate traffic, you'll be able to calculate exactly how much it costs to get the type of traffic you want, and even identify which keywords actually lead to a sale or conversion.

Advertising with Google Adwords is an effective technique that most online-businesses can use to attract more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords - and there are several quality training resources available online.

Common Mistakes When Creating a Google Adwords Campaign

Sun, 31 May 2009 10:29:16 +0100

Establishing a successful Google Adwords campaign can be tough for both beginners and experts alike. Tougher still if you are entering a new niche or just starting to operate in an unfamiliar market. You can always spend a lot of time on market research and spying on your competitor but you will only advance once you create an ad and concentrate on optimizing it. Then again, just placing an ad out there won't instantly lead to success. The truth is a lot of people discover how quickly they can lose all their time, effort and money invested in Adwords by committing simple mistakes.

These costly mistakes are addressed in the book The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords. Written by Perry Marshall, the book is all about getting excellent results from Adwords campaigns consistently.

Below are five common mistakes you must avoid to get you started in raking in huge traffic from your target market:

1. Writing keyword-less ads. By this I mean writing keywords only in the headline of your ad. Posting 1-2 keywords or keyphrases in the body of your ad will make it more relevant in the eyes of both your target market and Google.

2. Directing all traffic to your homepage. Don't ever send your visitors to your homepage when they click your ads. In most cases, a homepage is used to give general information about a company and its products or services. Those who click on ads do so for a specific reason. Give them what they've came for by directing them to a landing page listing your value proposition for them.

3. Using 'broad match' in the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool as the basis of your research and campaign. As the name suggests, the 'broad match' selection is only useful for an overview of your chosen niche or market. The whole point of keyword research is to know the precise words or phrases your target market uses when searching for information in Google. Make use of 'phrase match' and 'exact match' instead to find out the exact keywords or keyphrases that will lure in your prospects.

4. Use of low-performing keywords. Discovering the exact keywords your target market use takes time. Monitor your Adwords campaign regularly to check if your keywords are performing as expected. If they're not, look for other keywords to focus on. The Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool has a 'synonym' feature you can use to produce new keywords and make the most out of your campaigns.

5. An uninteresting headline. Each ad on average only has a second to grab the attention of viewers before they move on. The headline of your ad serves as the hook to reel in visitors. It's the most prominent part of your ad and the quality of it will determine if the reader checks out the rest of the ad or not. State the most important benefit you're giving in your headline to compel viewers to read the body of your ad and click through it.

Marketing with a Pay Per Click Program is an effective technique that most online-businesses can use to find more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Pay Per Click - and there are many quality training guides available online.