Seven Strategies to Bolster Your AdWords Campaign

By Roger Willcocks

So, you’ve tried all the different marketing techniques you have read about, and you’re ready to dabble in some pay per click (PPC) magic. But this form of online wizardry needs more than just a sleight of hand, it requires careful planning and a good sense of what should be expected.

We’re talking about AdWords, that Google program that allows you to advertise your site through a link that is displayed prominently in every page of a search performed on keywords relevant to your business. The way it goes is that people would bid or certain keywords. The winner of the bid would have the link to his site attached to every query that contains the said keywords.

The bid price is not the only consideration in awarding keywords. Your Click Through Rate, or CTR, also plays an important factor. CTR is acquired by dividing the number of times a user clicks on your link whenever it appears on search engine results. Whenever your site’s link appears in a search query, the event is called an impression. To illustrate, supposing your site’s link appears 200 times in several searches. Your impressions would be 200. If you further suppose that 2 users click on your link during this period, your CTR would be 2/200, or 1%.

The best thing about AdWords is that the winner of the bid only has to pay when a user actually clicks on his link. This method has given birth to the term Pay Per Click, or PPC.

Here are some strategies to help you develop a strong AdWords marketing campaign:

1. RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS WELL. If you have an existing business, make sure that the keywords you will choose are widely used words or phrases that people type in their search queries. If you have yet to setup a business, make sure that the keywords you are considering are actually profitable, meaning, they cater to a market with a high demand.
2. CONSIDER CREATING MULTIPLE ADS FOR EVERY KEYWORD. By having several ads appearing for the same search query, you would be able to determine which works best. The ad that performs best should be used as a model for subsequent ones.
3. DO YOUR ACCOUNTING AND SET A BUDGET YOU’RE WILLING TO SPEND PER DAY. Google allows you to set a cap on the number of hits you could generate in a day. Study your finances and come up with a ceiling that would not eat up a substantial portion of your projected earnings.
4. WRITE YOUR ADS WELL. Make use of words that would attract the readers’ attention. The words should be powerful without being flamboyant. The ad should also read nicely, with a good flow and accessible character. Do not write more than what is needed nor less than what is required.
5. FREQUENTLY REVIEW YOUR ADS. Even if they are prominently being published on Google’s search pages and producing passable CTRs, you should always take time to study and refine your ads. Changing their structure from time to time would also help in winning back the attention of those who have viewed them before. Dispose of the ads that are not performing well and design new ones.
6. TRACK YOUR ADS. There are many tools available on the net that would allow you to track which of your ads produce the most visitors. These tools would help you a lot in weeding out non-performing ads and discovering a pattern that makes your successful ones tick.
7. DESIGN NOW, ADJUST LATER. Since Google considers CTR before awarding a keyword, it is required that you produce a site that is rich with informative content. Content is what attracts visitors and increases your site’s CTR. Once a keyword has been awarded and your ads are producing a consistent number of hits, you could adjust your landing page to include a sales copy that would convert your visitors into successful sales. A good sales copy can also be informative despite being a sales pitch.

It has been said the Google AdWords is a fair playing field where the system does not choose between the rich and poor webmasters. But you could always play it smart and get the most out of AdWords.

This is how I carry out the process. Firstly, I usually prompt products as an affiliate this way. So I pick a product I like which pays reasonably well. Then I build up a list of keywords using Overture and other tools. I take those keywords and run them through a 'stemming' programme I wrote to introduce synonyms and common spelling mistakes to the list, and generate all possible variants of word order and specificity, which helps reduce the cost of clicks (higher CTR usually). I filter those through the Google Keyword Estimator to reduce it from ~50,000 phrases to < 5,000, and use those for my campaigns.

Because I've picked an affilate product, I have a good idea of the payment I will receive. But I prefer to promote via my own website where I can use testing on promotional material. So I write a sales page, and use that as the destination for my ads. To start with, I'm willing to lose money in order to make a decision fast. So I pay a premium to get high listings in AdWords to see if sales actually happen, and to provide a boost to my CTR early on.

I NEVER run a single ad, always at least two. Usually I start with 4, and filter down to 2 after a few days. If one proves superior, I delete the other, and create a new ad slightly different from the best ad.

Once I've got some figures on sales per click, I decide on a maximum cost per bid, and use that, or dump the campaign.

On the page on my site, I use some split testing and tracking software I wrote to track which ads people came from, and whether they clicked through to the product site. I tweak that to improve the conversion rate, and also monitor and improve the rate on my ads.

This page is a demonstration of the use of a ClickBank search engine to generate website content