Google Adwords

7 Great Ways To Lose Your Shirt Using Google Adwords!

2007-02-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

Google Adwords is a great tool! Careful use can lead to legions of highly targeted visitors breaching the moat around your site, and demanding to pillage your products! On the other hand Adwords is also a great place to drain your advertising dollars if you're not careful. Like any other automated system, it requires constant feeding and attention to keep you from wondering just why you spent hundreds of dollars and received a paltry return on your investment. Here's 7 great ways I've found to do just that, (and yes I've been guilty of several of these to one degree or another.)

1. - Not getting enough keywords, and I don't mean just numbers. Good ones. A lot of people run a search on their favorite keyword tool and pick the top ten or twenty words or phrases getting the most traffic, thinking somehow that THEY will beat all the others using these keywords. There is a reason why these keywords are so popular: everybody and their grandmother are bidding on them! A much better approach is to come up with at least a couple hundred, better a couple thousand words that you have a shot at getting a high ranking for. After all, if you have 1800 keywords and can get a top 8 (first page) position for most of them, you'll see a lot more clicks than you will chasing the top dollar words. If you get a hundred of the lower tier words giving you a couple of visitors a day, well, you do the math. Not only that, but often the less expensive words are altogether more specific, delivering far more targeted visitors.

2. - Not creating adgroups. You should use this function! It can help you focus your advertising much more effectively. By arranging your keywords in tightly focused groups of 10- 30 phrases, and writng a keyword-specific headline for each of them, you have a much greater ability to see what's working and what's not. Also gives you a chance to test different headlines and text copy.

3. - No negative keywords. This you gotta do. And it's so easy. Simply add -free (or whatever else you don't want associated with your searches) and you won't end up paying for a lot of clicks for people who weren't interested in the first place.

4. - Using only broad keyword searches for their keywords. When you're paying for this stuff, you want to be as specific as you can, particularly if you're playing in a very competitive market. Why hope that a broad search will return someone interested in what you're selling? Better to get as focused as you can on the words they may be searching for. Google helps you with this by giving you more information on the impressions and click-throughs than you can handle, but be pro-active, and prune the dead wood after 100 or so impressions. If they haven't produced by then, the odds of them improving by leaps and bounds are not great.

5. - Not testing and rotating your ads. Even a small change in a headline or ad text can make a HUGE difference! Particularly headlines. Your ad text won't be read if the headline is boring or uninviting. Learn to write killer headlines, and do not be afraid to test and rotate your ads. Also don't be shy about deleting ad groups if they're not clicking through enough. Remember, you've got a list of several hundred words; either these aren't right or the headline/text need tweaking. Test, test, test!

6. - Not using the content targeted feature wisely. This is a tricky one. Google, in it's infinite wisdom, seeks out alternate avenues to show your ads, thus delivering substantially more clicks to your campaign. Trouble is, though, you have no control over this, and it IS your money. If you are attempting to run a tightly focused campaign on limited funds, this one is a potential budget buster. It can easily rack up a lot of clicks, but are they of worth to you? In my experience, the CTR is ALWAYS a lot lower. I guess it could make sense for large campaigns with a very popular product, but for the most part, you'll want to be very careful. Which leads me to my last, and most important dollar-drainer of all.

7. - Not having a GREAT sales page. This one is the hardest to fix, but without doubt the most important. All the clicks in the world won't mean a thing if the sales page you're sending your hard-earned visitors to doesn't get the job done. If it's your product, there's hope! You can address these issues, and after testing and more testing, can correct and come up with a page thst sings! If you're an affiliate, you might consider a separate landing page, where you might offer a sincere testimonial in an attempt to presell the product more effectively. (That is not a bad strategy even with a good sales page, as personal recomendations go a long way!) There you have it. 7 Great ways to lose infinitely more than your shirt!

Webmasters feel free to publish this article in its entirety in your ezine or site, so long as none of text or links are changed.

Get the latest and best in internet marketing tools and reviews at http://www.internetmarketinghere.com
Contact the author at: keith@internetmarketinghere.com

6 Strategies To Get The Most Out of Google AdWords Advertising

2007-02-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

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.

Every time 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

6 Steps To Picking Profitable Adsense Keywords

2007-02-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

Knowing how to find the best keywords for use in your Adsense ads is not a straightforward process. Finding and implementing high profit, low competition keywords in your ads really is the trick for making Adsense payoff big.

The following process should yield profitable, low competition keywords for your Adsense ads. This process is not perfect, but when you analyze it and try it for yourself, you can see that it makes sense. Adsense that is.

Step 1: Research some keywords for your niche that have a high CPC value. To do this, first find your keywords using the Google Adwords keyword tool or another tool that will give you niche specific lists of keywords. Save those keywords into a spreadsheet program as a csv file. Copy and paste those keywords into Google's Traffic Estimator (you will need an Adwords account). The traffic estimator will give you the estimated clicks per day and the average cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. Copy and paste this information back into your spreadsheet file for later reference.

Step 2: Multiply the average CPC by 30% to get an estimate of your maximum earnings per click. The higher the average CPC, the more likely the CPC for the 2nd - 8th positions are high as well. You want this higher average CPC to start because if the CPC starts to drop off significantly after the

3rd position, your chance of getting high click earnings as an Adsense publisher will be diminished.

Step 3: Use any one of many tools available on the internet for helping to estimate the 1st - 8th position CPC values. These tools will estimate the CPCs for each position and allow you to see how much the CPCs drop off after the first position. This dramatically helps your analysis for picking the most profitable keywords. If the CPC values stay close to the each other and to the value of the first position, then you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

Step 4: Now determine which Adsense ads occupy which positions. You can do this by searching on Google for your keyword and looking to see which Adsense ads are generated in the search results and in which order they are. Another way to estimate this is to use the Adwords Accelerator tool. It has a feature whereby Adwords ads are dynamically displayed for a given keyword you input into the tool to check. If the Adwords advertiser has used "Adwords for Content" in his advertising, these ads will be the Adsense ads someone else is displaying on their website.

Step 5: Compare the ads you found in step 4 to the results of using a keyword check function tool (available on the internet). If the advertisers you find by doing this closely match

those you found in step 4, you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

If the advertisers are not he same, then the advertiser is possibly not using the "Adwords for Content" mode of advertising in his campaigns. This means that the keyword may not be the basis for the Adsense ads and may not be profitable.

Step 6: Now you must get the traffic. If you decide to get traffic using the Adwords approach, then just use the keywords in your Adsense ads that scored well from the above evaluation. Then, use lower cost per click keywords in your Adwords ads. The difference between the earnings from the click you get on your Adsense word from the cost of the click you pay on your Adwords word will be your profit.

If you are planning to use search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to the website where your ads are, make sure the keywords you choose have the highest KEI possible. KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword to the number of competing sites having the keyword. The combination of a high KEI and a high score from the above evaluation will yield the best profit results.

About the author:

Chris Curtis is the owner of C-Double Web Development and has been doing web design and development since 1997. http://www.c-double.com

AdSense: Make Money Online Without Selling

2007-02-18T03:54:00.000-08:00

I think the title of this article gives the best definition that can be found for the AdSense program of Google.

Through its AdSense program Google let you earn without the need for you to sell anything at all to anyone anywhere.

Many persons, including who is writing this article right now, are making money and receiving checks from Google month after month.

And there are many internet entrepreneurs that are generating higher incomes from participating in the AdSense program than from the direct sales of their own products or services.

All right, you are thinking that I told you something that simply has no meaning as earning money without selling. How can it work?
The answer is simple, you are paid per click and not per sale.
The AdSense program of Google is a service that let you, and anyone else that provides some kind of content online, to become a publisher for the Pay Per Click advertising program they run.

You can see it as a triangle, where three different subjects are involved:
- Advertisers - Google - Publishers

The advertisers join Google PPC service (named AdWords) in order to promote their services or products to the huge audience that this giant search engine has each day.
They bid on specific keywords that are relevant to the services or products they sell and have their ads displayed on Google when searches are made for the chosen keywords. They pay to Google for every visit to their sites that comes from this promotion, so they pay for each click.

Google then opened another service called AdSense that is an addition to AdWords. It is a service for online publishers, and let you display on your web pages ads of the AdWords advertisers targeted to the keywords of your web pages. It is all done automatically when you add the simple code that AdSense gives you once you are approved for their service.

Once a visitor of your sites clicks on one link of the AdSense ads that your site displays the AdWords advertiser is charged by Google for the click, or visitor that is delivered to his site, and you are credited by Google a share of that money in your AdSense account.

So you are paid for selling nothing at all, but just for the click that the AdSense ad received in one of your web pages.

Of course the Google AdWords advertisers are very interested in selling the products and services they promote paying for every visitor sent to their site, and I sincerely hope that the clicks that increase my AdSense income benefit the advertisers that pay me through Google, but this anyway is not my concern or something I have to worry when I create my sites and add the AdSense code to them.
I am more interested in creating web pages that are interesting for my visitors and provide them useful content. I worry to provide them with explanations and links of good resources if I don't have directly the opportunity to offer them a product or a service, and the ads displayed by Google are an addition that can be interesting and useful for them and can increase my income.

I think it seems all very simple from the above explanations. One thing that is very important to know is that the Google AdWords program is extremely crowded and there are really a lot of keywords and key phrases with big competition and very high bids. This means that advertisers pay a lot of money for every single click for those keywords.

Of course also AdSense publishers can earn a lot of money if they have sites related to those keywords that receive many visitors and many clicks to the Google ads.

About the Author
Gian L. Ruggeri and Michael Crownley teamed up to run a site dedicated to Earn With Google. You will find useful info and resources related to AdSense, AdWords and SEO. http://EarnWithGoogle.com

Adsense & Adwords: A Beginners Guide

2007-02-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

First a brief glossary of terms:
Adwords: The program advertisers use to make their adverts.
Adsense: The program Website owners use to display the adverts
CTR: Click Through Rate (the number of page impressions/the number of clicks on a advert)

The most effective methods of advertising on the internet are Google's Adwords program and Overture which is now officially called Yahoo Search Marketing but still universally known as Overture. This method of advertising is called Pay per Click or PPC. The concept is incredibly simple; Google and Yahoo provide listings on a Per bid basis. You bid a certain amount of money for your specific keywords when someone types in a keyword and you have the highest bid then your advert shows up. On Google the adverts show up in the Adwords column on the right hand side of the page whilst Yahoo shows them as sponsored links at the top of the page. If someone then clicks on your advert, they arrive at your web site and you are charged the amount you bid. So, for example if you bid $.10 per click on 'widgets', and that's the highest bid, you'll show up at the top if It's the second highest bid you'll show up second etc. If 100 people click on your advert, then the search engine or PPC service will charge you $10.00.

Using Adwords to your Advantage

So now that you know how Adwords work you can use this to your advantage when building websites. If you build a site about a specific subject you can then use specific keywords to attract adverts. The best way to ascertain which keywords to use are by signing up for an Adwords account you will then have access to Googles Adwords tools which will show you which keywords are highest paying for a particular subject. In addition it will suggest alternative keywords.

At this point it is probably wise to point out it is against Googles Terms of Service to specifically create a page just to target Adsense, Obviously if the site has lots of unique content then you are entitles to tweak the keywords to maximize your revenue.

Making Adsense pay

There is very little point adding Adsense to a page with no traffic. It is best to build your site and spend a couple of months driving traffic to the site, once you have a regular amount of people being driven to your site by the search engines then it is time to add Adsense. It is not just a case of putting Adsense on your site and waiting for the money to roll in. You should place the adverts carefully to maximize exposure whilst not impacting on the browsing experience of your viewers. Leave the Ads in position for a week or 2 and monitor the performance known as CTR. The change the position of the ads and the color and monitor this for any improvements. Publishers have been known to improve their CTR by up to 4 times by employing small changes. So time spent tweaking Adsense is time well spent.

About the Author: Mark Thompson has spent a number of years traveling the World and Racing Motorbikes, when funds got low he worked as an IT consultant In London. He now lives in Spain and runs a number of Websites Including http://www.WorldoftheWeird.com and http://www.Links-Factory.com
Source: www.isnare.com

Guide to Google Adwords

2007-02-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

Google had established its supremacy amongst the ranks of search engines being the most preferred and most popular search engine on the web. I remember the instance when the son of a friend of mine refused to accept the information we gave him about Christmas, until he was convinced that the content had indeed been pulled off Google. In 2000, as Google won the race over the other search engine it was also involved in creating a program that would catapult its position as a viable advertising medium and generate more revenue. The initial advertising model that Google had developed was primarily for the use of big companies however, it later also developed the Google Adwords program which offers beneficial results to all companies, big and small.

Google's Adwords is a keyword targeted advertising program. The original Google Adwords program was discontinued because its basic idea was to pay per impression which did not guarantee traffic to the advertiser and was not so popular. With the overhauling that the Google Adwords received in 2002 changed all of that. Google's Adwords is advertising model that works on the principle of pay per click advertising. It is keyword targeted which means that when a user searches for certain keywords that are related or present on your site then Google Adwords automatically display your site along with the results of the search in a column right next to the search results.

With Google Adwords, you choose which keywords you choose to advertise and hence when your ad is displayed on the search page it will display what you feel is your most relevant content. This way you are guaranteed a click if your domain name or the content appears relevant to the user. It is PPC advertising which means that you only pay if the user clicks on your domain name and hence visits your site. Adwords also makes sure that your ad stays at its position on the search engine page because the program Discounter reduces the price you pay per click to one above your competitor which also means that you are not required to constantly check on the position of your advert, Google Adwords does that for you.

Another plus point for Google Adwords over others is that Google Adwords maintains the position of your ad through not only Pay Per Click but also Click Through Rate, this is essentially important because this way even the small fish have the chance to stay alive. The company with the bigger bank balance does not win hands down; each company must strive to stay at the top. If your content is good, and your CTR is good then you can keep your place on the search results page easily.

About the author:

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.