When you are setting up adwords campaigns, it's very
important to take the time to do it right. Adwords is a fairly
unforgiving advertising method, if you don't know what you're doing and
you don't set your campaigns up the right way you will spend a ton of
money, and you won't make one red cent.
I would highly recommend that you find a course, or a mentor who can
walk you through the complexities of pay per click (PPC) advertising
before you just plunk down your money and hope for the best. This isn't
Atlantic City.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the keywords you choose for
your campaign can make all the difference. Some people make the mistake
of trying to use the highly competitive keywords related to the market
they are in. One or two word keywords will get the most traffic so of
course, they are also the most competitive and the most expensive.
Instead focus your efforts on longer keyword phrases, also called
long tailed keywords. Phrases that have 3, 4 or even 5 words in them.
It's true, they won't have the same high monthly searches (though many
of them will still get a lot of monthly searches) but they also won't
have the competition and the very steep bid prices.
When you have your keywords picked out you want to make sure that you
write an ad that is very relevant to your website or offer, where ever
you are sending traffic. Google will penalize you if your ad isn't
relevant since they don't want their searchers to have a bad experience.
Part of that penalty will be to be charged more per click than
someone who is targeting the exact same keyword but has a highly
relevant ad. How do they determine relevance? Well, for one thing it's
based on the percentage of clicks your ad gets. Let's say your ad is
displayed a thousand times, but in all those times it's only clicked on
once. To Google that means your ad isn't on target and they will
penalize you.
Another thing to keep in mind with all the major search engines is
that they can, and do, change the rules frequently and when ever they
want. So you could have a very effective PPC campaign running one day
and the next they've decided that something you are doing is wrong and
they penalize you. Now, that probably doesn't happen very often but it's
important to be on the lookout for. Make sure you stay up to date on
the terms of service.
It's also very important for you to test your ads. Run several
versions with different headlines, different body, etc. Find which
combinations works best. Only make one change at a time when you are
testing so you can pinpoint what has increased, or decreased, the ads
effectiveness.
Successful adwords campaigns can be a tricky proposition. Just make
sure that you set up a realistic budget and test, test, test. That is
the best way to assure yourself of a profitable campaign.
