AdWords also known as pay per click is thought about as one of the top systems for online marketing. If you put together a complete AdWords strategy it will help you in Sending targeted traffic to your website, thus boosting your margin of profitability, and improving your search engine rank. Below are two tips to crush your pay per click competition.

Tip #1: Identify your keywords: Your AdWords strategies should always be based around keywords. You will have to put a lot of time towards investigation of keywords. By the end of it, you ought to have 250-300 very targeted but low cost keywords or keywords which could be made use of for your AdWords campaign. You can use keyword research tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions tool, you could also use Keyword Suggestion Tool, Good Keywords, WordTracker, and Misspelled Keywords.

Tip #2: Always use good descriptions and Headlines: Every one of your ads have to contain a headline which has to be desirable enough for the surfer to click on the classified ad. So way before you incorporate a few of the keywords into a headline, you need to try a number of different headlines. You can design headlines making use of important keywords and search and look at ads when using that keyword. Unearth keywords which attract the most number of ads. This system will assist you to make use of the appropriate keywords within your descriptions so your classified ads will own a superior visibility.

Always remember that your AdWords strategy must concentrate on using good keywords.

According to Google, Adwords cost is as much or as little as you would like to spend. In reality, it may not work out that neatly to get the results you are hoping to get, but there is a wide variety in spending options.

The basic costs are a $5.00 activation fee (US dollars) and the minimum cost per click (CPC) on your ad, which is $.01. The minimum cost per thousand impressions, or thousand times your webpage is loaded by a user (CPM) is $.25.

Google offers two options for payment. One is to prepay a certain amount, set up your campaign, then let it go until you have reached the end of the money. In this way you know your Adwords cost before you begin, and can control it easily. The minimum amount for a prepayment is $10.

If you are less concerned with the budget, you can opt for the post-pay method to pay your Adwords cost. With this method, your campaign runs, then at the end of the billing cycle, you are charged the amount that has accrued.

For either type of payment, you´ll need to enter an appropriate credit or debit card or bank account information to activate the account. Google only accepts U.S. bank accounts for bank transfers.

They accept American Express, JCB, Mastercard, and Visa credit cards, and any debit cards with a Mastercard or Visa card logo on them.

Fees per click or per impression can go much higher than the minimum. Google gives you tools to control that aspect of the Adwords cost by allowing you to set either limits on the amount you´re willing to spend each day, or a limit on how much you´re willing to pay per click or per thousand impressions, or both.

It´s possible to project Adwords cost by using the Google keyword tool and get a general idea of how much things will cost.

You can see if you will be able to get the results you´re hoping for with the amount you´re willing to spend, and if not, can find out what you need to spend.

It is easy to predict the amount you´ll spend each day, since you can post a maximum budget for daily spending after establishing the framework for costs.
After that, you´ll want to evaluate your keywords, adjust text, look at ad placements, and generally tweak your campaign in order to make the most of the program.

Using tools can add to your Adwords cost if you choose to utilize third party tools, but some of those may pay off for you by increasing revenue.

You´ll need to know enough about how your campaign is going and what it needs to improve so that you can evaluate what tools will best help you have a successful experience with your Adwords campaign.

Keeping a careful watch on your search parameters and keywords, controlling the amount you´re willing to pay and setting a daily budget can help you keep your Adwords cost under control.

I won’t go into what makes a successful PPC ad campaign because this topic is better covered by experts like Perry Marshall.

My goal is to describe seven specific aspects of a Google AdWords campaign that you can control, which I will go over in more detail in a minute. These are the limits or benchmarks you can set for your campaign results. They are based on your financial goals –That is, the numbers of leads or sales results you want to aim for.

These benchmarks will vary depending on what your price point is, the type of market you are pursuing, the keywords you choose and whether you use Search or Content marketing. That’s already a lot of variables and it doesn’t even take into account the following list from Noble Samurai, (They make a nifty keyword research tool.)

What the competition is in your market.

What your visitor-to-sales conversions are.

How many competitors exist in the market.

How easily you can achieve high rankings

How strong the competition is in that market.

How hard you work.

How easily your can dominate your niche.

All that being said, what CAN you control? Consider establishing these benchmarks before you even set up an AdWords campaign. With these controls you will be able to optimize your adgroups as you see results and improve your keyword scores, CTR and positioning. Optimization is part of “speaking Google” so it’s a good idea to learn the language.

From the start, decide what position you want to “own.” Are you going for the very top (1-3) of the first page, or are you happy to be in the middle, or just anywhere you can afford on the first page? The quality of your traffic will vary and so will the price, so keep an eye on how your positioning affects results. “Owning” a position is the only way to get consistent traffic, and consistency is the only way to build a business. So keep track of which keywords are producing conversions and cut out the ones that are not giving you adequate results. Focus on keeping your keyword quality scores high-at least 5-7. When a keyword score falls below a 5, the cost per click goes up 15+ %. So watch those scores! Profitability in a competitive market can be tough when keywords are expensive, so set a limit on your CPC (Cost per click.) Never pay more than $1 a click average. Depending on your niche, you may pay much less, but low cost clicks don’t always mean quality traffic. You also may pay more at first. Your goal is  to find a price that works in your niche. Always aim for a 1% CTR (Click through rate) or more on Search keywords. Google likes relevancy and they score it based on your CTR. Again, you get a better position and pay less when your ad is relevant (It gets traffic and clicks.) However, high CTR doesn’t guarantee sales. Conversion rates for leads or sales will be a factor that varies for each market and price point, but generally speaking, shoot for at least 5% for Content, and 10% conversion for Search keywords. Don’t waste your advertising budget on keywords that don’t convert to sales! And finally, decide what you are willing to pay for those conversions. (Also called Cost per Acquisition or CPA.)  Whether it’s a visit to your website, a lead, or a sale, what is the average price that works for your metrics and produces a profit on the back end? You may go above it or below it, so find an average profitable conversion price, and stick to it.

Obviously this all requires a lot of surveillance on your part. It also means becoming intimate with the “Reports” tabs and other tools on Google that provide the information you need to evaluate your returns on each keyword so you can cut out the “weeds” and only keep the best.

Does optimization take a bit of work? Yes it does, and you can skip it if you want to…. It’s your money and your business.

Here is Why:

If you are serious about making money online, you are perhaps looking for ways to drive traffic to your blog, your web site, or other online offers you are going to promote. One of the most trustworthy methods to find targeted traffic and bring it to your online site is through a accepted method system called pay-per-click marketing.

In pay-per-click (or PPC) programs, advertisers pay a planned rate when someone clicks on their ad. These rates are |customarily are legalize through a bidding process, with the highest bidder receiving the best position. There is only one PPC program that is operated by the Web’s number one search engine, and that is Google.

The Google Adwords PPC program is extensively used pay-per-click program between Internet advertisers, and if you would like to compete for advertising space by way of Google’s PPC program you will certainly want to make certain by protecting your Adwords money.

Battling for the best keywords:

On Google’s search pages is strong. The top bids on the most well-liked keywords can run as much as $60 or $70 each, or more. It is painless to see that hit and miss bidding on unproven keywords is a swift way to eat through your Adwords money, and exhaust your advertising funds income fast.

There are a number of customs to guarantee that you acquire the large amount out of your Adwords money, and one of the finest ways to protect yourself is to only pay for the top converting ads. Ads which hand over the best ratio of sales to clicks are well thought-out the highest “converting”.

How can you be confident which ads will win?

As a result how can you be confident which ads will win:

over the best for your efforts? One superior approach is to find the best converting ads is to manipulate a process known as “split testing”. Split testing works similar to this: you devise numerous ads for each set of keywords you anticipate to bid on. Using the Google Adwords management interface, you can schedule these ads to be rotated evenly.

That means if you have two ads for a set of keywords, and your ads are given away one hundred times, every one of the two distinctive ads will be exposed about fifty times each. By embedding tracking rules in your link or squeeze page, you can safeguard your Adwords funds by identifying which of the ads gets the largest clicks and which of the ads generates the largest amount of sales. After you have decided which ad that sells the best, make certain that the best use of your Adwords money by dropping the poorer performing ads.

A faulty management of your Google Adwords advertisemen battle can cost you a bundle of money. Chance bidding and failure to test your conversion rates for each ad can be critical mistakes that will trigger you to burn through your Adwords capital all too rapidly. If you’ have scheduling to advertise using Google’s PPC program, make sure you do not plummet to become a victim to a costly slip.

There is an Internet Marketer by the name of Abid Shaikh,

in my opinion is one of the few expert on exposing the adwords, and adsense maze, he has configured a websites that is unbelievable simple to use and has automated it to run 24/7 and he has duplicated the site to make money for others.

The only question I have is he charges $197 to get his proven adsense system, there is one thing I notice when I went to the his  site recently and the price had changed to a very $20, I had to stop and do a double take as to why he is changing the $197 such a low price of $20, I know the economy is hurting, and almost everyone is, but $20 bucks? he is pretty much giving it away.

Then, I asked my self what is the catch here, ther is always a catch right? Why was he reducing it to this low price, and then I got the answer,  I went back to the website and what I notice at the bottom of his website is a timer, that’s the catch it is only good for the next 24hrs. All the best on what ever you decide to do….

If I had a pound for every time I saw a Google Adwords account stuffed full of broad match keywords, I would be lazing around on a tropical beach.  Before entering into advertising on Google Adwords it is a must to understand the differences between the keyword match types as well as the amazing scope for serious money making long-tail keywords.  This system for finding the best Google Adwords keywords can be applied across all PPC advertising campaigns on other search engines.

If you are setting up a new campaign or a brand new account start with your own website using the Google Search Based Keyword Tool.  This tool is excellent as it scans the content of your website, picking up keywords and providing data on monthly searches, competition, suggested pay per click bid amount, and shows your ad and search share where appropriate.  These will be keywords that are not already in your account so if you have an existing account it can highlight these ideas.

This tool can be found at http://www.google.com/sktool/# – you need to enter your website name if it is not already there and you need to be signed into your Google Adwords account to access the fullest information.

There are numerous keyword tools available but as this is free and as it scans your website it is a logical starting point.  There is the option to save the draft keywords and export into a spreadsheet format.  They can also be added directly into your adwords account, however if doing it this way put them into a temporary ad group so that they can be split properly later.

Apart from associating with your website the Search Based Keyword Tool has a command which is found at the bottom of the page called “Or see top keywords across all categories”.  Click on this blue writing and choose the box at the top of the page which says “Words or phrase”.  Here it is best to start with a core competitive keyword such as “bingo” as then it will come back with a lot of information.

Drill further down into important keywords next by using the Google Insights for Search tool. This gives an expansion of whatever keyword you enter providing more keyword ideas but importantly you can see at the same time geographically where these keywords are most popular.  Additionally this tool gives the historical trends of the keyword currently going back to 2004.

Google Insights for Search can be found at http://www.google.com/insights/search/# .When using it for the first search in the filter leave it as Worldwide as this can supply you with some surprising trends.  Then do the search again but choosing United Kingdom or whatever territory you wish.

When you have exhausted the research using these tools, saving the information on a spreadsheet as you go, then the next step is to split the keywords into core competitive keywords and long-tail keywords.  Core competitive keywords being the obvious ones that everyone bids on such as “car insurance” and the long-tail keywords being more specific versions of these such as “cheap car insurance london”.  The reason for doing this is so that when it comes to allocating budget it is possible to ensure that it will be done more profitably.  

Next you need to divide them up into related keywords that can be developed into the ad groups of one particular campaign. So an insurance company that does many types of insurance will have car insurance, motor insurance, commercial insurance all as separate campaigns.  In retail it should be according to either brands or stock type, such as dresses, jeans, shirts etc.

If you have enough space in the Google Adwords account ideally there should be a separate campaign for Exact Match keywords, another one for Phrase Match and another one for a period of time for Broad Match keywords.  The official limit is 25 campaigns within the account.  The reason for doing this is again budget management.  The exact match keyword is the ideal situation as this word or phrase of words is all the potential customer has typed in, therefore the keyword and ad text can be 100% controlled to mirror the thought process of the potential customer.

When campaigns have been set up very well then budget can be allocated appropriately to long-tail Exact Match keywords and core competitive Exact Match keywords.  The Phrase Match keywords means that someone has typed in something either before or after the keyword, which in some cases can be fully relevant to your products/services but in other cases not.  By adding in negative keywords this can be controlled to some degree.  In the case of Broad Match keywords these can sometimes be dangerous, as this match type is more of a loose association with the keyword or phrase you have entered.

Finally make sure you develop more long-tail keywords by adding words such as “cheap” at the beginning and end of the keyword phrase, unless of course this is not appropriate.  The same applies to “online”, “buy” and “sale” to name a few.  Developing the best google adwords keywords this way will both save you a lot of money and increase profits.

This part #3 of the “how to Google Adwords” series. In the last 2 you should have learned the basics. Now we get to do the fun part! Here is what we are going to cover…

Signing up for adwords Preparing Your Keywords Preparing Your Adgroups Writing Ads That Work

Pretty simple right? Yeah I can hear it now…”sounds to complicated, I don’t have a technical background!”  Your going to have to figure it out, and if you don’t, your never going to make any money as an entrepreneur. So Take Charge!! I will give you the general guidelines but actually implementing them is up to you.

Signing up for Google Adwords is really simple. Go to google.com/adwords, on the right hand side click on “start now”. It’s then going to ask you which addition you would like, pick “standard” and press continue. You will then pick an email and password, if you already have a gmail account pick the option to use that account. It’s good to have all your Google services within one account. Now go ahead and sign in.

It will then ask you “how would you like to pay for this account?” Go ahead and select the currency that you use(USA would be US Dollars). It will then give you a notice that your account has been created. Now just go to your email and click on the confirmation link they sent you.

Now we have to prepare our adgroup and keywords. First thing you do is set-up your “Base Keywords” which will be what you name your Adgroups as well. So consider them your foundation. I use Google Docs to keep track of everything. Its a note and spreadsheet online service, it keeps all your records for you. You can then in-turn use any computer and have access to all your records…AWESOME!!

Use the spreadsheet feature, I would start with 5 Base Keywords and keep them very short, a good example would be “make money” or “home business”. Put them across the top of your document. Now you are going to get additional keywords that include your “base keywords” in them. Exp: “make money online fast” or “home business online opportunity”. Notice how they both have the base keywords in them? Add 5 additional keywords to you base keywords list.

Use the Google Keyword Tool or Free Wordtracker, these are the tools to help you find your long tailed keywords(Google These Tools If You Aren’t Familiar With Them). The longer the keyword the more serious the prospect. Someone looking for “home business” is less serious than someone searching for “online home based business opportunity”…Specificity Is Important!

Now lets add them to your Google Adwords Account…

You have different of ways to enter them: Broad Match, which is just the word itself. This means that when someone searches on Google you will show up for any of the words in your keyword. Its not ideal way to get high quality prospects. So for example if one of your keywords is home business, you will show up for any search that has business or home in it…Hence the name “broad match”…

The other type is phrase matched. This would be a keyword with quotes around it, “home business online” would be one. This mean that whenever someone searches for a keyword that has this exact phrase, your ad will come up. A few keywords your ad would appear with are: “best home business online” or “legitimate home business online opportunity”. Making sense?

The third type is Exact Match. This is when you put brackets around your keywords, [online home business]. Then the only time your ad will show is when people type in this exact keyword. No additional words and in just that order.

Now putting the quotes and brackets into all of your keywords can be time consuming. But not anymore, there is a tool that does it for you, just put in your words and it spits them out with brackets and quotes…Go to mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwrapper.cgi and play around with it. When it spits them out just copy and paste them onto a text document and name the document according to your base keyword.

Now lets create your first campaign!!

Log onto your account. Pick a country to target, I would stay with the US until you are more advanced. In your ad you are only allowed three lines, so make them count. Learn to write persuasive ad copy, go to an online bookstore and buy books on writing sales copy, you will need it for almost everything you do online.

We will use the keyword home business for our example. In your headline make sure you put your base keyword, Google will make it bold when it shows up on searches.(When Your More Advanced You Will Know Of Other Ways Then Putting The Keyword In Your Headline To Get Attention)

Your headline might read: Lucrative Home Business

Then you have the second line which is your first description, which should be a benefit of some type your offering to the person searching. “Learn To Market Online Fast” Could be considered a benefit to people looking at your add.

In your third line which is your second description you will add a feature that describes what you are advertising. In this example it could be, “Step-By-Step Instructions”… The last step is to add your URL. Make sure to make it pretty and even. You can either add the www or take it away. I like not having it. I also add my base keyword sometimes to the end of the URL so it gets more bold in my add…

Here is how our add would look like:

Lucrative Home Business

Learn To Market Online Fast

Step-By-Step Instructions

UnlimitedEntrepreneur.com/HomeBusiness

Now go ahead and add your keywords at the bottom. Just copy and paste them from your text document . Set your daily budget high enough but low enough that it won’t break you. Now bid for your clicks, bid high at the beginning so more people are clicking on your add. And in-turn Google will reward you and cut your prices or you can cut them yourself. Now just press continue to get it posted.

There is a lot more to Google Adwords but these are enough to get you started. I recommend, if you are serious about this advertising method, that you read everyday for the next week on how you can improve your skills with Adwords. I personally have spent thousands of dollars and hours figuring out this advertising method, so if you feel overwhelmed or maybe even scared its a good thing, I was too at one time. The most important thing as an entrepreneur you can do is just dive in with a positive attitude and keep learning everyday.

If you have any questions you can email me directly or post a comment down below and I will try my best to answer what I can.

Pay-per-click ads like those available through Google Adwords can be a powerful, regular source of prospects for your products and services. However, whenever new clients have asked me to look at their Google Adwords campaigns, I begin to understand one element in Google’s growth to more than a $6 billion market value.

Many entrepreneurs fail to take advantage of Google’s mechanisms for making sure that their search engine ads get shown only to those who are logically potential buyers and that the ads encourage such people to click through. As a result, they pay much more than they have to for the exposure, get discouraged about the return on their investment and yet leave the ads running for lack of ideas about how to improve performance.

Don’t let it happen to you! Use these tips to keep your costs down and your rewards high.

1. Eliminate countries and languages that do not match what you offer. For instance, if you sell U.S. foreclosure listings, your ads should show only to Google users in the United States and probably only in English. On the other hand, if you have a translation service whose clients can live anywhere in the world, define the countries and languages your ad gets shown to much more widely.

2. Activate Google’s ad tracking. It costs you nothing, and enables you to keep an eye on not only your cost per click and click-through ratio, but also which keywords and which ads best lead to your desired result, whether that’s a sale, an inquiry for your services or a signup for your newsletter. That way, you can eliminate or try to improve elements that get a lot of clicks or cost a lot but do not get results.

3. Set up negative keywords. If your goal is selling something, why pay for tire kickers and freebie seekers? By defining “free” as a negative keyword (Google has a special button for this), you can keep many of them from clicking on your ads.

Equally important, think through alternate and unwanted meanings of your keywords and add negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing to wildly inappropriate visitors. For instance, type “cattle branding” into Google and you’ll see ads for business branding services. Those advertisers’ click-through rates will improve when they add “cattle” as a negative keyword.

4. Delete keywords and ads that are not working. Because Google’s system rewards a better click-through rate with higher ad placement and lower costs, you are paying Google more than necessary when you leave poorly performing elements running. Periodically clean out your losers.

5. Send people to a landing page that makes perfect sense. People click on search engine ads to learn more about whatever was featured in the ad. It seems logical that they’d look around from your home page for whatever interested them in the ad, but that’s wrong. Searchers are impatient. So if your search engine ad mentions a software demo, do not send them to your company’s home page. Send them to the exact page from which they can access the demo.

When you manage your Google Adwords campaigns according to these guidelines, you’ll be paying less to get a much more satisfying response.

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What is Google AdWords?

If you type “AdWords” on Google, you will find Google AdWords. You can create an account to have a better idea about what it is. Creating an account is free. When someone uses google AdWords they have one of these objectives: promote a product, service or website.

If you have an account, then log in. You will see that you can create campaigns. These campaigns are fairly easy to set up. All you have to do is follow their steps, and you have your campaign to promote whatever you want. If this is getting confuse to you, don´t worry. As you are reading, this things will get clear.

Google AdWords is a biding system. Who bids the higher gets the better spot. Go to google and type “weight loss”. See those sponsored adds on the right? You can put your adds there. The higher you pay, higher is your position on google. This is the
basics. Now you need to understand the 2 types of campaigns that you can set up.

Google Search Network

If you ever used AdWords before than you know what this is. You choose keywords related to what you are promoting, and bid for them.

If you still don´t get it what bid is, there is no problem. Let me give you a quick example. You go to an auction looking for a car. Lets suppose you want a Ferrari that they are selling. Being a Ferrari, many people will want to get it too. The
Ferrari comes out, and a lot of people start biding. Since there is many people interested in that car, the person you buys it at then end, will have to pay a lot of money. Now, comes out an old and kinda ugly car. Since you did not got the Ferrari because you could not afford, you are interested in buying that one. Since is not a good looking car, almost no one will want that car. This means you will buy it very cheap.

The example above was to explain you this: If you choose keywords that many people type on google, advertisers will be all over those keywords. This means you will get more competition, and have to pay more. On the other hand, if you go for those keywords that few people type, then you will pay less. Choosing these keywords will make you pay less, but will also give you less impressions and clicks.

Just to make it clear, if you choose this kind of campaign your ads will pop up on the Google search engine on the Sponsored ads section.

If you do not know how to choose keywords, then type on Google “google keyword tool”. Click on the first result. There you will find all the keywords related to your topic. This tool can save you a lot of time.

Google Content Network

By choosing this kind of campaign, your adds will display on websites instead of the google search engine. It is still a biding system, but this time you are not biding on a keyword, but in a placement. If there are 4 spots to advertise on a website, the 4 higher bids will be there. You can advertise in 5 website, 50 websites, 500… You choose how many you want.

Hope this could help you somehow. Until next time. Take care.

Google Adwords is far and away the most popular PPC advertising platform on the internet. The reasons for this are simple: a well designed user interface, a large number and variety of publishers to show the ads and, most importantly, a long history of positive ROI rates for advertisers. Adwords can be intimidating to new users, but it really isn’t very difficult to learn the skills you need to get started.

This article is meant to be a basic introduction to Adwords. So if you are already very familiar with it, this might be review. The first problem most people have with Adwords is setting to and sticking with a budget. Most people get frustrated because they haven’t bid enough for their clicks, resulting in their ads having a low position. After a couple days of poor results, most new advertisers quickly increase their bids and the results is a pile of expensive traffic that brings back little, if any, return. When you make your Adwords account, set a small budget. Use keyword tools (many of which are available on the links page of this website) to determine which searches are most popular and try to find searches that other advertisers haven’t thought of. This is the best way of getting cheap traffic to your website(s), since less competition means lower cost per click.

However, cheap traffic is not necessarily good traffic. Let me repeat that again, just because you are getting cheap clicks from Adwords does not mean you are using your advertising dollars effectively. Targeted traffic is the key. If your website is selling software tutorials and you bid on phrases such as “free software” or “download photoshop” you might very well get many, many visitors (very inexpensively), but I can guarantee that your conversion rate (sales/visitor) will be horrible. Even key phrases like “free tutorials” will fail to create a positive return. Generally, never use the word “free” in your ads, unless you are actually giving something away for free. Users will click, costing you money, but are almost never interested in shelling out cash for a product.

Conversely, using key phrases with the words “buy” or “purchase” will decrease the number of clicks you receive, but will certainly increase your conversion rate and ROI. Going back to my previous example, bidding on key phrases such as “buy dreamweaver tutorials”or “professional photoshop tutorials” will give you visitors that are interested in buying the product you are selling and willing to spend money if your product matches their needs. In my next article on Adwords, I will discuss strategies to write high quality ads to help improve your click through and conversion rates.

Reducing your Google AdWords costs and increasing response rates requires a range of creative, trading and technical skills that few possess:

Creative skills are needed to increasing your clickthrough rate (CTR) by writing compelling and focused ad copy that more searchers will click.

Trading skills are needed to keep costs per click down by managing your bid amounts and bid types.

Technical skills are needed to effectively organise the keywords you bid on into different ad groups with matching ad copy and landing pages.

Offline, the equivalent work is often done by specialists. A creative department or agency might look after ad copy and design; a media buyer might be the trader negotiating price for media space and time; whilst techies look after the production of print, radio and TV adverts.

With AdWords, most of us have to do the lot

Although they maybe quite different in the real world, most AdWords users become either Creatives, Techies or Traders – personnas that match just one of the required skill sets. The result is that most people play to their strengths and neglect their weaknesses. They fail to use all tools and metrics available to create higher clickthrough rates, lower costs and better response.

Below we’ll look at some techniques to help you develop your creative, trading and technical skills.

Google Adwords comes with Clickthrough Rate (CTR) and Quality Score (QR) – two key metrics you can use to measure your development.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the % of those that see your ads and click on them. It’s a measure of your ads attractiveness and appropriateness to searchers.

Quality Score (QS) is based on your advert’s click clickthrough rate, the relevance of your ad’s copy to the search terms you’re bidding on and the relevance of your landing page.

Google gives lower costs and higher positions on its results pages to ads with higher clickthrough rates and Quality Scores. So let’s have a look at how you can increase them by developing your creative, trading and techie skills

Develop your creative skills

The most important creative technique to practice is writing ad copy that matches the keywords you are bidding on. It’s as simple as this …

If the Search is green tea then bad ad copy might look like this:

Despite the search being for green tea but keyword is not there. The text is too general. A good ad reads more like this:

The keyword green tea is in the ad title, the body copy and the URL. There’s is a call to action (‘Buy’), a promise of good tea (‘Quality’), you will find what you want (‘Specialist’), at a good price (‘From $0.99′) and with great service (‘Free Next Day Delivery’)

Develop your trading skills

By becoming a better trader you’ll get more value for your clicks. You can gain greater control of your bids and you lower your bid costs by mastering AdWords different match types. Each match type uses its own punctuation to let AdWords know your bid type:

Broad match keywords have no punctuation like this: keyword
Phrase match keywords are surrounded by quotation marks: “keyword”
Exact matches are shown with square brackets: [keyword]

A positive broad match will show your ads for the greatest number of possible searches. With a broad match your ads will match any search containing your bid keyword. For example, if you bid on brew tea your bid will match (and your ads show for):

brew tea
brew loose tea leaves
brewing a cup of tea

However, broad match contains a little sting in its tail – it includes ‘expanded match’. Expanded match will display your ads for plural versions of your bid keywords and any relevant keyword variations. For example our brew tea broad match bid might match with:

brewing teas
brew teas
brew tee

Those examples seem harmless enough – perhaps even useful. But expanded match can find matches that don’t even contain your keywords and you might think are little to do with the product you’re selling. For example brew tea might match with:

tea infuser
brewing coffee
brewing iced coffee

For this reason, broad match bids are us usually accompanied by negative match bids.

Adding negative keyword bids stops your ads showing for irrelevant searches, allowing you to greatly increase your profits by … … increasing your clickthrough rate (CTR) which leads to a better Quality Score and paying less per click (lower CPC).

A negative broad match will stop your ads showing for any search containing the negative keyword. For example, if the negative keyword -coffee is added to an ad group then your ads will not show for any search containing coffee and therefore including:

coffee
brew coffee

However negative broad match bids do not ‘expand’ like positives so you have to add plurals and related keywords. For -coffee this might include:

-coffees
-grind
-grinds
Develop your techie skills

Only if you first organise the groups of keywords you’re bidding on can your ads and landing pages match your bid keywords. Ad groups are the techies tool for this job. An ad groups is a group of keywords you are bidding on, with matching ad copy and the landing pages those ads link to.

The most important thing to do with your ad groups is keep the keywords focused on a very narrow subject. The diagram below shows poor ad group with a wide range of keywords, very general ad copy and landing page (how else could they be with so many different keywords to satisfy).

By contrast, the strong ad group below is focused on a small set of keywords about one subject (green tea) with closely matching ad copy (all about green tea) and a landing page also all about green tea.

Only by organising your keywords this efficiently can you use your trading and creative skills to increase clickthrough, reduce costs and increase response.

Summary
To save money on Google AdWords you need to develop the differing skills of a Creative, a Trader and a Techie.
As a Creative make sure your ad headlines and body copy use the keywords they serve. Do this and your ads can move higher up Google’s results pages without the need to increase bids – that means less cost and more profit.
As a Trader you will master both exact match and broad match types. With broad match you bid on all keywords containing the specific word you are bidding on. As broad match can include irrelevant keywords that will deliver no response, you must combine it with negative keywords to stop your ads showing for those irrelevant searches.
As a Techie you can learn to segment your keywords into tightly-themed ad groups with different match types, bids, matching ad copy and landing pages.