Theme HQ - SEO, The Internet & Computers

Firstly this is not a tutorial on Adwords - I am only starting to dabble with it again now after losing a whole load of money back a couple of years ago.

Adwords is the other end of the spectrum of Adsense - this is where you advertise your service on a sponsored listing on the Google searches and on partner sites. You pay only when someone clicks on your advert. If you do a search on google generally you will  have two or three sponsored listings before the results and several down the right hand side of the page.

Web site owners can also choose to put Google adverts on their sites as well and earn money - this is the Adsense -

As an advertiser Google Adwords is a great tool - you can expose you advert to people searching on your specified keyword - and be live on the Internet within a few minutes.

Google Adwords works on keywords and key phrases to advertise. This allows you to target specific searches relevant to your product. An example - say you were selling computers and computer components - you need to think about what words would people possibly type in Google to buy these parts?

So you start to build a keyword list - here are some I can think of straight away

Cheap computer parts

buy computer parts

computer components for sale

Now if we had these three sets of words set up in out campaign when a searcher typed these into Google we would now feature in the sponsored search listing simple right?…

Well there is another massive factor to consider. Where and when your ad will appear is down to how much money you are prepared to pay per click. Adwords works like a bidding system. The person who is prepared to pay the most per click will feature at the number one position, the person offering the second highest amount will appear second etc etc (there are other factors here that determines positioning but that is for another time).

This is where Adwords becomes very expensive - in the market of computers there is a hell of a lot of competion - the number one spot brings in the most amount of traffic - being on the column on page 200 does not - this means you have to pay a lot more per click to get to the top - being in top spot means you get a lot of clicks - the question is, do these clicks turn into sales?

For example - if you bid $1 per click ( and I must say I think you would pay more for these example keywords the majority of the time) - if every time someone clicks your ad you make a sale earning a profit of $10 you are doing something right - in reality the chances are if you make 10% conversion you are doing pretty well in this market - so using these keywords will most likely lose you money.

This is where you need to be clever. Bidding less on the keywords could mean that you pay a lot less per click - obviously you lose out on the top spot but this is not always a bad thing.

Keywords can be added in different ways - this is important to note. Broad matching is the default that Google sets and often brings the most amount of traffic though often the least converting traffic. A broad match keyword would be added like this:

computer monitors

This will show your advert if the words computer or monitor appear in any order along with any other words. Often variations on the spelling and grammar can also show. So for example - “cheap computer monitors“, “computer monitor reviews”, “best computer monitor”, “computers and monitors”.

This can lead to a whole lot of traffic but not always the best converting traffic.

Phrase matching is entered as follows

“computer monitors”

This will mean that only keywords containing this phrase in this order will show - so “cheap computer monitors”, “computer monitors review” but not “computer tft monitors”. This should allow you to try and target better converting words and also helps stop paying for words that are irrelevant to your needs.

The next choice is exact match. This is entered as follows:

[buy computer parts] - this will show the advert only if the user searches on that exact phrase in that exact order and nothing else - “buy computers parts” will not show nor “buy computer part” - it needs to be exactly buy computer parts and nothing more - if you can think of decent keywords and phrases here then your conversion rate should be much higher.

The final option is the negative keyword match - this is handy if using broad or phrase match phrases in your list. Negative keywords are like this:

-reviews

Now this means that if the searcher enters reviews within their search your ad will not show - this is a great way of filtering out traffic that is never going to convert. People looking for reviews aren’t always looking to buy.

I think the most important thing with adwords is to keep on top of your campaign - if there are words you are using that are not converting, dump them or replace them with a different variation. Serious money can be lost if you take your eye off of the ball for too long.

I am about to embark on another adwords campaign and I will let you know how I go, if anyone has any tips or tutorials on this then please share in the comments - there sure is a lot to learn with adwords but I am sure, if used coorectly, can really help boost profits.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.