Adwords Campaigns - Beginners Tips

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.

Michael Diffin
[email protected]