Top 5 Strategies to Google Adwords Glory!

Posted by Ben Jones on May 10, 2007

Advertising with Google Adwords can be one of the more rewarding methods of advertisement for any campaign. However, using Adwords takes some knowledge and can become very expensive if the correct techniques are not applied. So I’ve created this 5-tip manual as the completion to the few Adwords tips I have been giving out in the past. This manual should help the novice or more experienced Pay Per Click marketer take their Adwords campaigns to the next level.

My initial experience with Google Adwords was not a very good one. I made every mistake possible with my campaign. I simply found out which keywords were most popular and I tried to bid whatever dollar amount necessary to get me into the top spots in search results. Well, needless to say, that method costed me a lot of money and I never got enough clicks because my budget would not allow me to get a high number of clicks at the amount I was paying per click.

After a few weeks of attempting to make this method work, I decided to give up. I knew that I needed traffic to my site but realized that I didn’t have the budget to keep paying high prices for it. So I began to learn everything I could about Adwords and how people utilize it. I read books, blogs, anything I could to get information that would help me to create a successful ad campaign. I the constructed my new campaign using a few simple methods that proved to be priceless. So, lets get right to them.

Method 1: Evening the Playing Field

This first method is one that I have given before. I like to call it “Evening the Playing Field”. This technique is fairly simple and will save you tons of money. The purpose of this technique is to avoid the expensive price of the more popular, broader keywords. So the idea is to find a bunch of slightly less popular keywords that will cost you less per click.

One way that we can do this is to utilize the names of industry competitors as keywords and allow your ads to be seen when someone searches for that company. This method works very well because you are stealing customers from your competitors and you will be paying a lot less money per click because the companies name will not be as popular as a traditional keyword.

Example:

I own an bookstore in North Carolina and want to use Google Adwords to advertise my website. Instead of paying ($1.50 per click) for keywords like “bookstore, books, etc…” that get 400,000 searches per month, I would bid($0.25 per click) on keywords like “Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc…” that get 20,000 searches per month.

As a result, I place much higher in the search engine results page (SERP) because of less competition for the keyword and will ultimately save tons of money while seeing more traffic.

Method 2: Capitalize on Your CTR

To properly understand this method, you need to understand how Google decides where to place ads in search results. Google uses a ranking formula of Cost-Per-Click x Click Through Rate to determine where ads are placed. So, what this means is that even if you bid $1.25 per click, a low click through rate will cause your ad to get low placement in search results. However, the reverse, which is the basis of this method, is also true.

So how do we use this information to our advantage? Well, what I started doing is setting my maximum CPC higher in the beginning of my campaign so that I can place higher in search pages. Once my CTR has increased from the higher ad placement, I lower my maximum bid and still maintain decent ad placement in the SERP(search engine results page). One other thing that I do when using this method is I capitalize the Title of the ad for the first couple of days. Google prohibits capitalization so they will disable your ad after a couple of days until you change them to lowercase. By this time, the capitalization along with the high ad placement has earned you a high CTR. I don’t recommend using capitalization because it is against Google’s “terms and conditions”, but it is something that I did for a day or so just to boost my CTR.

Method 3: Misspelled Words

A lot of people misspell words when typing their search terms. So it is usually beneficial and a lot less costly to bid on common misspellings of search terms instead of the actual term itself. This method is pretty self explanatory so I will not go into to too much detail. However, I will say that some keywords are misspelled so often that they may be searched for jut as frequently as the correctly spelled term. Be sure to do your research and make sure that you take advantage of these blunders.

Method 4: Turn off Content Matching

I found this trick to be very helpful with my pay per click campaigns. Google’s content matching feature will display your ad for searches that Google deems are “relevant” to your site.The problem is that Google will have a much broader idea of what is relevant because they exist to make money. So your ads end up being displayed for searches that have nothing to do with your site. As a result, your CTR (Click Through Rate) and conversion rates will suffer. (High CTR’s are essential to getting better rankings in search results)Who wants to pay for clicks that they have no chance of converting?….No one! Your conversion and Click Through Rates should increase once you turn this feature off. Then your ad will only be shown when someone searches for your keywords.

So log into your Google Adwords account, put a check next to your campaigns and click the “Edit Settings” button. Once your inside the “Edit Campaigns” screen, you will scroll to the right and uncheck the box next to “Content Network”. Save your settings and watch your ad campaigns soar!

Method 5: Exclude Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words that you identify that you don’t want your ad to be displayed for in Serp’s. For example, if you are selling basketballs, you don’t want your ad to be displayed when someone searches for “free basketballs”. So, you would add the word “free” to your negative keywords list. This is just another way to make sure that the only people who click your ads are people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, you don’t waste money on clicks that you have no possibility to convert.

Bonus Tip: Use Exact or Phrase Matches

Google defaults your ads to “Broad Match”. This means that your ad will be displayed whenever someone searches for anything similar to your keyword. Therefore, you will have a higher probability that someone will click your ad that is not looking for your product. So I recommend that you use the “exact” or “phrase match” feature. To use the “exact match” feature you must place each of your keywords inside a [] symbols when selecting keywords. To use the “phrase match feature, you must place your keywords inside quotation marks.

That’s all the tips for now. I hope that you found something to help your ad campaigns. Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed, bookmark us, and leave your comments.