To increase your traffic flow and get your share of the Google pie, your first step is to sign up with Google, go to your Adwords login and set up your first campaign. Adwords is Google’s version of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. All the search engines have their own variations of PPC and they are all called something different.
Pay per click means just that: when someone clicks on your ad, you pay. How much you pay can vary depending on several variables such as the quality score of your ad and the competition of your keywords. Since no one really knows just how Google calculates their quality score, it can be somewhat difficult to figure things out.
If you have an ad with a high quality score you can get a higher ranking when your ad shows up in the results. So instead of your ad being shown in the last position on the first page, or not on the first page at all, your high quality score ad will show up within the top ads shown for that keyword.
Quality score is thought to be made up of, at least partially, how many clicks you get per number of views. This is called the Click Through Rate (CTR). So the more times your ad is clicked on the higher your quality score will be since Google thinks that your ad is getting a lot of clicks because it’s highly relevant to the keywords it’s targeting.
For example, you’ve just set up your first campaign and you’re targeting the keyword: dog training. You’ve carefully chosen many keywords that are very directly related to your niche. Your ad is well written and intriguing. Your ad is shown a lot and a lot of people who see it will actually click on it so you have a high CTR. Google will reward you for your high CTR by showing your ad more often and charging you less per click than some of your competitors will have to pay.
This whole process tends to get very complicated. Since you are paying for the clicks you get, and you may be paying a premium since you’ve not had the time or experience to dial it in and get that high quality score, you have to make sure that you have enough money in your advertising budget to be able to stick with your PPC campaigns long enough to make changes and tweak things until you get to the point where you are getting a high CTR and the best price possible on your keyword bids.
With PPC so complicated and having so many elements that you have to keep track of, you may be wondering why people use it at all. The answer to that is because it works. Again, if you can afford to stick with it while you are learning it, you can get a lot of visitors and make a lot of sales.
Adwords Tool For Profitable Keywords
There are other programs online that will help you find great keywords, but most people use the Google keyword tool. This tool will give you most of the information you’ll need to set up successful advertising campaigns online.
Of course, as with everything, the keyword tool is not the do all end all. It’s a really good place to start but you really have to drill down to find as many possible results as you can.
Most people will use this basic approach when doing their keyword research: type in a broad phrase and then take some of the results and drill those down even further.
Enter a general term and make note of the results. Depending on what you are using the keywords for, you may want to set the keyword tool to show you specific things such as the estimated cost per click, or the amount of competition, etc.
Once you’ve gotten a general list of possible keywords to target you can then get more specific in your search. For example, if you’re searching for dog toys you would enter ‘dog toys’ in the keyword tool. You will get back a fairly comprehensive list but you can than take those results and narrow them down further.
So if you got the term homemade dog toys you may be able to further hone that down to wooden home made dog toys. You get the idea. Start broad and narrow your selections down until you’ve got a complete list of highly targeted keywords to use for your online advertising campaigns.
The narrower you make your list the more targeted, and likely to actually make a purchase, your visitors will be. Also, you’ll have less competition for the term wooden homemade dog toys then you would for dog toys. True, you’ll also have fewer searches but the searchers you do have will be very targeted and they won’t cost you as much.