Adword Tips

Promoting your business with your own website is a great way to reach a vital part of the buying community, the online community.
One of the easiest and most popular ways to get your product and branding out on the internet is to use Google Adwords.

Adwords is a pay per click advertising method in which you, as the promoter of your product or service can build, maintain and specify how you want your internet advertising to be controlled.
Adwords adverts are placed on websites (and Google) when the keywords specified by your advertising campaign are searched for by a web user.

Adwords allows you to control the keywords or key phrases for which your advert will be shown, the amount you are willing to pay for each click of the advert, and how much you are prepared to spend per month on your advertising campaign. Advertising has never been as straight forward and cost effective.

Having been responsible for promoting websites over the past few years, and running Adwords campaigns for my own site as well as promoting for other site owners I thought I would share a few of the tips and tricks I have picked up along the way.

1. Try to always link directly to the product that you are selling. Sounds pretty obvious but a lot of larger sites send the user to their home page, this has a distinct disadvantage. The user has already searched for the product they require, and having to search from the index page to find the product all over again reduces the chance of a sale. If the advert goes straight to the correct web page and product the chance of a sale is dramatically increased.
Within the settings of Adwords is the URL destination, always make sure the destination is the page specific to the advert. Sales will increase.

2. Try not to use highly sought after keywords (unless you have bags of money). If the keyword(s) you are bidding on have a lot of competition from other websites, try and use a specific key phrase instead. If for example you are selling “graphics cards” many other companies (big ones at that) will be willing to pay top dollar for such a highly used phrase placing your advert lower down the search results. The other drawback of such a broad key phrase is that a high percentage of your clicks will be people not wanting to buy graphics cards but using those two words in their search for other reasons than buying. I have found that using key phrases specific to the product had a much higher chance of a sale than a generic phrase, this is because the person searching is looking for that particular product and found it at your site through specific key phrases, its basically a targeted visitor, you advertise exactly what they are looking to buy. The other huge advantage to this method is you pay a lot less for the clicks in the first place.

These are just 2 quick and easy ways to improve your sales and reduce costs through Google Adwords. By ensuring the traffic you receive is the right traffic, and that the buyer can find what they are looking for straight away, your sales will increase and cost you less.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing and publishing more articles about how to get the best out of both Google Adwords and Google Adsense campaigns.

“Roger Copley” is an associate webmaster to the website http://www.ezpcshop.com A website dedicated to computers including their own online store. Your comments & feedback will be highly appreciated at email info@ezpcshop.com

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A few days ago, I was setting up my latest Google AdWords campaign. My brother was watching me work through the process, and he asked me:

“Why do you put quotation marks and square brackets around some keywords?”

I was a bit surprised to realise that I couldn’t actually answer him - not in any definite way, at least. So, I set to work finding out what the matching options mean, and how they affect results.

First up is the default, Broad Match. This is where a keyword phrase is written as is, for example: google adwords

This method means that your Ad will potentially be shown to anyone searching for ‘google’ and ‘adwords’, in any order and possibly with other terms. So, anyone searching for ‘adwords google help’ could see your Ad.

Next is Phrase Match. This is where a keyword phrase is enclosed by quotation marks, for example: “google adwords”

This is essentially the next step up from Broad Match - your Ad could be shown to anyone searching for ‘google’ and ‘adwords’, but only in that order, and possibly with other terms included in the search. So, ‘how to start a google adwords campaign’ could trigger your Ad to be shown.

The last in the ‘positive’ matching options is Exact Match. This is where your keyword phrase is enclosed by square brackets, for example: [google adwords]

This is the most specific of the three types. In this case, your advert will only be shown if somebody searches for ‘google adwords’ in that order and with no other terms.

These options each have their own merits, but generally, the more specific the search term, the higher your CTR (Click Through Rate).

If you have a small niche to start with, then Broad Match will give you the most exposure. The downside is that the large number of triggering phrases could push your CPC (cost per click) up, as a result of competition.

Larger markets require highly-targeted Ads, and this is where Exact Match (and Phrase Match, to an extent) comes into play. Imagine trying to get clicks from keywords such as ‘car parts’ compared to ‘ford fiesta rear wheel bearing’. Obviously, the more specific your keyword terms, the more likely you are to get an interested visitor to your site.

The last of the keyword matching options is Negative Keyword. This is where a keyword is precluded by a minus sign, for example: -tricks

This stops your Ad from being shown if somebody searches using that term. For example, ‘google adwords tricks’ would stop your Ad from being shown.

This is useful for prequalifying prospect clients - if you are trying to sell something, then ‘-free’ would be a good term to include in your Keyword list.

Of course, as with any marketing campaign, which of these methods will work best for you is unpredictable, so always remember to test, test test!

If you need more help with setting up your Google AdWords campaign, this particular resource is one that I found useful when starting up:
Adword Equalizer - http://www.rob-barrett.co.uk/recommendations_marketing/google-adword-equalizer.php

Best of luck with your Google AdWords campaign!

Rob Barrett is a professional web designer based in Dorset, England.
To read more free articles on Internet Marketing and Google AdWords, visit:
http://articles.rob-barrett.com

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I could write a lot of pages, maybe even a book explaining what pay per click marketing is and what it can do for your business, but I will keep this short and to the point. Pay per click (ppc) marketing is an advertising platform in which you bid an amount of money that you are willing to pay for a click.

When a searcher does a search at Google all of the ads on the right side of the screen are ppc ads. Google calls them sponsored listings. When a surfer types in a keyword, the advertisers who have bid on that keyword have their ads displayed. When one of the ads is clicked by the surfer they are taken to the advertiser’s website. The advertiser is charged at maximum, the amount they’ve bid. Most of the time they are charged less than what they have bid. But they are never charged more than their maximum bid.

The bids can start at 1 cent and depending on the market and the ppc search engine, go up to $50 or more per click. When starting off I suggest bidding very low. Ten to fifteen cents per click or lower is a good start. The higher you bid the higher in the rankings your ad is shown therefore increasing your ad’s visibility and your potential visitors. The downside is bidding high can cost you a lot of money and in some cases bring you way over budget. Be very careful when bidding.

Bidding low might not get you as much traffic as bidding high but it will bring you traffic for much cheaper thus increasing your return of investment (ROI). One way to increase the amount of times your ad is shown (visibility) while bidding low, is to bid on a high volume of keywords. Some marketers bid on hundreds and up to hundreds of thousands of keywords.

This method will take some time. Putting together hundreds or thousands of keywords can be time consuming, but it is an effective strategy for getting quality traffic, without paying a lot of money. The more you work with the ppcs the faster you will get at putting together lists of keywords.

In case you’re not sure how to generate that many keywords there are many tools on the net that will help. Some are free and some charge money. One of the best free tools is offered by a company formerly named Overture, which has been bought out by Yahoo! This tool can be found here. http://inventory.overture.com

What can ppc marketing do for your business? Depending on your market, ppc marketing can be a great way to get quality traffic inexpensively, increasing your ROI and profit. It is also a great method for testing products because your ad can “go live” in as little as 15 minutes and up to 5 business days. Depending on which ppc search engine you use.

Advertising your business at free search engines a.k.a organic search engines can take weeks or even months for your website to be indexed in their directory. It can take a lot longer than that to get a decent ranking on your search terms. The more competitive the keywords you are trying to get listed, the harder it is to obtain a decent ranking. This is one reason why ppc search engines have a huge advantage over organic search engines.

I, as well as thousands of other marketers think the best two ppc search engines are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Google claims your ad can “go live” in 15 minutes but it usually takes a couple of hours. This is really fast. Yahoo! Usually takes a couple of days.

There are thousands of smaller ppc search engines. Some of them are good and some are not. Some will take your money but will not have many searchers. Google and Yahoo have hundreds of millions of searchers every day. If you think about using a smaller ppc do some research and find out what experiences other marketers have had. There are thousands of forums, newsletters, ezines and info sites dedicated to educating people about ppc marketing. You can learn a lot about Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and a lot of the smaller (2nd tier) ppc search engines at these places.

Robert Walter has been marketing online for 5 years. He has successfully marketed products in competitive and niche markets. Find out how you can master Google Adwords http://hot-product-reviews.com.

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