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.
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.
But before you head off to Google to do a search there are a few things you need to keep in mind:
1. Adwords is a fairly complicated method for generating traffic. If you follow advice from someone who really isn’t qualified it can cost you more than money. If you disobey the terms of service Google has established you might well get banned and that would be very, very bad for business.
2. In order to really master Adwords you will need to find not only the training but you will need to be able to spend money while you are testing your ads. The truth is that no matter how good the training you get is, it will still take time for you to tweak and perfect your ads. During this time you will almost be guaranteed to spend way more money than you make.
3. Google is always making changes to their Adwords platform. In order to get the most out of any tips or tactics you may find online it’s important that you make sure that whoever is providing the tips has the most up to date information. You will really screw yourself if you follow outdated information.
Now,when it comes to managing your own Adwords accounts you need to keep some things in mind too. For one thing, you will need to track your results. Many people seem to think that this step is a hassle and they ignore it, but the truth is that you have to know where your clicks are coming from and how much they are costing you. If you try to guess, you will waste a ton of money.
It’s important to test all your ads to find out what combination of headlines and body work the best. To do that you will have to make changes to the ad until you can pinpoint the exact right combination. Make sure that during the testing stage you only make one change at a time. If you change more than one element during your test you won’t have any way of knowing which change actually worked.
Don’t go into your Adwords account as if you were in Vegas. What I mean by that is don’t place all your eggs in one basket, don’t blow all your money on one campaign. That never really works. Since you will need to test ads and you probably will make very little, if any, money during the test it’s imperative that you set a realistic ad budget and don’t go over that budget. That way you’ll have enough money to follow through and find the ads that work.
If you really want to do an Adwords campaign the right way you’ll probably be better off skipping the adwords for free hype and find a legitimate course that can explain the complexities of pay per click to you.