Don't Let AdWords Get Out of Control

AdWords can be a very difficult thing to master.  A lot of people have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars before they learn to make a profit.  Some people are never able to become profitable, and give up after losing a considerable amount of money.

 

In order to have the best chance at being profitable, you have to learn to be extremely vigilant about your campaigns.  You have to monitor them carefully, and always end campaigns that stay unprofitable for a long period of time.

 

One of the first things you should monitor is your CTR.  If your click through ratio is very poor, your ads will cost more.  It will take more money for the same number of clicks your competitors might get if they have a better CTR.

 

If your CTR is too low, you need to tweak your ad.  You need to look at the text your competitors are using, and attempt to make it better.  Try to get inside the minds of your visitors, and think about what they’re looking for when they search for a particular word or phrase. 

 

Use AdWords’ split-testing setting to test multiple versions of your ads, and use the best ones.

Keep an eye on your quality score (QS).  If your score is too low, then you need to do a few things to get your quality score up. 

 

The higher your QS is, the less you’ll have to pay for your clicks, and the more profit you can potentially make. The quality score takes several factors into account for its ranking algorithm, and Google doesn’t release the details of every single one. 

 

They give you a little general advice, but it’s not really enough for most people to dominate AdWords right out of the bat.  After a lot of experimentation, many experts have come up with some guidelines than can help improve your quality score.

 

Make sure you have each campaign’s keyword phrases on the landing page itself.  Don’t use the keyword “golf carts” if the word “carts” doesn’t appear anywhere on the page.  That could bring your quality score down. 

 

Your landing page shouldn’t be a single page with no internal links.  Google doesn’t seem to favor single page landing pages.  Add links to relevant products, articles related to the niche, or pages such as a privacy policy, terms of service, and a contact page.

 

Keep your campaigns to a few highly related keyword phrases each, such as one for the product name only, another for long tail phrases, and a third for more broad keywords.  You should make sure you target those keywords in your ad. 

 

If you have “golf clubs,” “golf bags,” and “golf club warmers” as your keyword phrases, you should try to use at least one of those phrases in your ad.  You might have something like “Golf Clubs, Bags, and Accessories” in your ad.  The words people search for will appear in bold in your ad, so the more you have in your ad, the more likely it is to be clicked.

 

Finally, you should carefully track conversions.  Make sure you have a way to track which traffic came from AdWords if you’re sending traffic from more than one source.  Conversions are ultimately the most important factor in the success or failure of your AdWords campaign.