There are hundreds of websites, blogs, and tutorials available on the internet. All of these blogs promise to help you increase sales, and optimize the efficiency of your AdWords campaigns. While AdWords can be a confusing, and complicated service to use, it is also imperative to a successful internet marketer to have mastered using paid search effectively. Many people end up learning about paid search with trial and error, and to an extant such learning may be unavoidable, but here are some simple tips to help improve your return on investment for the time and money you spend mastering PPC.
Stick to a budget:
It can be easy to let adwords campaigns get away from you. One common error for new AdWords users is forgetting to set a budgeted limit to both your daily spend, and your ad group/campaign spends. Obviously, it doesn’t take a ton of money to get a feel for how profitable certain key terms, or campaigns may be. Keep careful watch on your numbers and your bottom line, always calculating your gross profit for any products sold and subtracting your ad spend to keep track of how effective your advertising campaigns really are.
Create targeted landing pages:
Google has recently changed the importance of your ad’s “quality score” when considering placement of AdWords advertisements. By optimizing the landing page for the same keywords that you are targeting with a specific ad group, you can significantly increase your campaign’s quality score, which in turn can lead to cheaper clicks and higher profits. If you plan on running a campaign for longer than a few weeks, it is usually worth it to take an hour or two and write 500-600 words of keyword rich content for your landing page. Google will now see your landing page as being more relevant, and increase your paid search rankings without forcing you to increase your bid.
Utilize “Long Tail” keywords
Long tail keywords are typically searched much less frequently, but occasionally can be cheaper, and usually have a higher conversion rate if they are relevant to the products you are trying to sell. Broad key terms are expensive and rarely convert.
Bad example of a broad key term:
“Basket balls” = Too broad! This will be expensive, and have a very low conversion rate!
Good example of a long tail key term:
“leather nike basket balls” = Should have a higher conversion ratio because people that search that specifically know exactly what they are looking for. Customers that type in broad key terms are merely window shopping.
Successful pay-per-click advertising requires constant time and work spent researching, experimenting, and researching. By continuing to change your approach you will have the best chance of finding that “sweet spot” where you will not only make profits with PPC, but you will begin to spend much less time on the managing of your campaigns, and can concentrate on other important aspects of growing your business.
