Fundamentals of AdWords Optimisation

The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) paid advertising with the search engines compared with traditional systems is simply this: almost all conventional techniques are broadcast methods to people who have demonstrated next to no interest in purchasing your product. Think order:, :2:4:billboard posters etc. They are all broadcast ads. Sure there some focused than others, if you are selling marketing services to businesses, you advertise in a marketing magazine, but that's a crude process these days.

Search MSN for "software" and on the right hand side, you'll see ads by websites who are paying the search engine to have their link and site displayed there on the main page of results. This is Paid Advertising on the Search Engines and this is why Google now turns over more than $6 Billion per year!

What about someone searching Google for "what is the best car model"? That's a user that right at that moment in time is interested in finding out a very specific piece of information. If you expect to offer a service that can help them, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Yahoo or other. What's its value to you to have that person visit your webpage within a few seconds of typing that into MSN?

You might search engine optimize your site to get you Higher Search Engine Rankings for that keyphrase, but this takes time and a sizeable investment in cash. This is where paid internet marketing really comes into it's own, and is under used as far as I'm concerned. You might be on the first page of your chosen Search Engine the same day for the search term for a bargain budget. In a short time you'd have some inclination of the amount of users that will positively search for that term, go to your site, and purchase your product. This is right on the money, market research for a tiny budget that is impossible to get any other way.

Let's say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your ad making a total spend of 100. Lets say the conversion rate is a modest 1%, so you've got 5 new orders and more importantly 5 new customers that you can now sell to again. All for just 100 outlay! How much is your average consumer worth to you? It's attractive isn't it?

One important thing to know is how Google ranks the sponsored PPC marketing Adverts. In essence it's an auction in real time. The highest bidder wins. If you bid 20p and someone else bids 25p, they will rank higher than yours. In truth it's considerably more complicated than that: if you have a better quality Pay Per Click ad campaign, it's possible for you to rank higher than the 25p advert because the search engine will give performance increases to better performing PPC Adverts. What this means is that if your Pay Per Click (PPC) Company knows what they are doing with PPC bid management, it is probably you will get higher rankings (i.e. additional traffic) for less cash. So your important online marketing budget works harder and you save cash. Conversely, if your Pay Per Click advertising campaign is administered by someone who doesn't know their job, it will cost you more.

Here are some of the tasks a competent Google Advertising Professional should perform (Eg Intrinsic-Marketing.co.uk who offer Keyword Analysis Research) whilst administering your campaign, if yours isn't, we strongly propose you get a Pay Per Click review of your online marketing campaign as soon as possible:

Bid or Don't Bother - The key factor of Pay Per Click bid management is to get on the very first page of your Yahoo etc fast. However, where there is in excess of 8 (in normal conditions) even PPC Adverts can drop to the 2nd page. Where there's competition such as this, there's definitely no point doing a Pay Per Click marketing campaign if you are not on the 1st page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or there is no point.

Tracking for Improved Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not normal marketing, so use that to your benefit. The technology exists to track every sale and from where it comes. You can know definitely which advert converts to sales and which don't. Remember, it's one thing to have significant traffic, it's another to have lots of sales. What would you prefer to have for Pay Per Click paid advertising: an ad that generates a thousand leads and one percent sales, or one that generates one hundred leads but ten percent sales? In each you gain the same sales, but the former costs you 10x as much in Pay Per Click advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A common mistake is not matching the page that potential customers land on when they click your ad, to the content of your ad; which definitely should be targeted at what the user searched for. This simply means that when the user clicks your Ad, they get to see what they want to. Internet users are lazy! Would you believe that did you know that half of all internet searchers exit a website in less than 8 seconds because they don't discover what they expected! Do this before doing Improved Website ROI

Split Testing Your Adverts - This is good Pay Per Click technique and simply involves having more than one ad and testing which one works best. Here is one example, we had 2 ads which were totally the same in every way except the start of the title. One began "Learn to Prevent . . ." and the other began with "Stop . . ." Split testing determined that 5 percent of the users who saw the "Learn to Prevent . . ." clicked it. BUT 8 percent of the consumers who saw the "Stop . . ." advert clicked that one. Guess what, we dropped the first one and got a better quality Ad which in the end Google promoted to the premium ad position on the page, for the same cost!

Several Ad Groups - The basic amateur failing is to group every keyword together to supply a single advert. This is typically bad. Keywords should be divided into groups with Ad text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching/Broad/Phrase - Google AdWords allow three different ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but many advertisers just go for the default matching option. You could double your traffic from clever use of the other options which many lazy Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.