2016年6月16日星期四

Best Practice on SEO for Your Landing Page

Search engines are becoming a very important gateway to your website. Therefore it is important that your key pages are found in various search engines. But how do you then achieve a high position? That is the subject of this whitepaper – in here you will find essential knowledge about the techniques you as a web master can use on your website, to help a high ranking.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is no “shortcuts” to achieving a high position. To be no. 1 in Google it requires some work and planning. But as it will be described, in this whitepaper there are some things that are more important than others.

There have been made a large survey among some of the worlds most well known SEO gurus where various topics has been presented and they have ranked these and added their comments.

Here the 10 most positive factors and 5 most negative factors from this survey are listed.

Top 10 Positive Factors	Top 5 Negative Factors
Keyword Use in Title Tag	Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
Anchor Text of Inbound Link	Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
Global Link Popularity of Site	External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
Age of Site	Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure	Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to site
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
Keyword Use in Body Text
Global Link Popularity of Linking site
Topical Relationship of Linking Page

From this top list it can be concluded that the main focus is around the five areas: finding the right keywords, using them in content, create quality links to the pages, create meaningful URL’s and use the keywords in your Meta data. These are the 5 main subject handled in this white paper.

The top 5 most negative is shown to give you an example of what to avoid. These will only be covered shortly in this white paper.

To this white paper we have attached two “SEO Checklists”. The idea with these is to provide you with check lists that you can use in your daily work, as a reminder of what to do on the website to ensure/improve your ratings.

1. Define keywords for your pages

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be misdirected to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Brainstorming – Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc). Look at competitors website see which keywords they have implemented that can be of competition to you.

Surveying Customers – Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what’s likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates. A way to do this is to use SiteCatalyst (or another statistic tool) to find the previously used search phrases.

Applying Data from KW Research Tools – Several tools online offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection. Also the tools can often offer you some other keywords that resemble or is alike to your keyword. But the most important issue about using a research tool is to find the popularity of a given keyword. Often it is a good idea to incorporate less popular keywords also.

Term Selection – The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable for your business. A starting point can be your websites navigation where you split your keywords up so they are applied to a page in the site structure. A keyword might apply to multiple pages but no pages are allowed to be exactly the same. The recommendation is that each page only has one keyword defined.

Adding keywords to pages – When you have a list of keywords or keyword phrases that apply to the content of your site, you can begin to plan where to apply these. To each page in you site you must define one keyword or keyword phrase and only one! Lets use an example on how these keyword can be used on a page:

Let’s say you have a section/page on the web site with a collection of articles devoted to real estate advice – helpful tips and information for people selling a house. You’ve decided the primary keyword for this page is “home selling tips.” That exact keyword should appear in the following six places:

In the page title.

In at least one, preferably more, text links pointing to the page; i.e., home selling tips >>

In the URLof the page; i.e., http://www.yourdomain.com/home-selling-tips.html

In the header tag of the page text; i.e., h1 = Home Selling Tips

In the page text; i.e., “The following home selling tips will help make the experience of putting your home on the market more enjoyable, and should help you sell your house for the best price.”

In the META description tag; i.e., META name=”description” content=”Home selling tips and advice from John Doe, a licensed real estate agent serving Spokane, Washington (WA). If you have questions about how to sell a home for the best price, this article will help… blah-blah.”

I’ve listed these in order of importance, so if something prevents you from placing the keyword in all six places, you can prioritize them as I have above.

Do you have the need for a page that targets multiple keywords then ensure that other pages that uses the same keyword does not have the same title. This would be duplicate content and it will lower your ranking.

Performance Testing and Analytics – After keyword selection and implementation, use a analytics program (like Sitecatalyst) that measure web traffic, activity, and conversions, these information can be used to further refine keyword selection.

You can find links to tools and other material on the last page of this document.

1.1 Use keywords in the title

The title of a page is the most important factor for search engines and the title of your page is the one that attract the users to click from the search engine to your page.

So it is important to use the title every time a page is edited or created. A title of a page should always describe what the actual page is about – it is not good to reuse the same title on all pages.

Do you have limited time for optimizing your page – title is the one to work with.

When working with the title remember this:

Descriptive text is better for the users than a list of keywords

Use only the keywords expected to be found in this page – there is no need to “stuff” the title with useless keywords.

The search engines can only read a certain amount so try to limit the length of the title tag to max 80 characters (you can add more but it will not be shown in the search engine)

If you want to include your company name in the title place it last on all other pages than the front page

In the search engine the keywords get bolded

Characters like :: takes up characters in the title so use these wisely. They will not help in attracting the users.

Build up your title to contain one main keyword and 3-5 supporting keywords.

Here is and example from a search for “stone wool manufacturer” in Google.com

In the above example you can see that the keywords are highlighted in both the text and the title. The title here is a bit long and perhaps also the Company name is missing. Title tags are never “perfect”, they can always be improved.

Another example:

Page on rockwool.cu.uk about Fire

Current title: Fire :: Fire Section :: Rockwool Ltd

Recommended: Fire – in-built protection, regulations, fire proof, fire-stopping | Rockwool Ltd

The idea is to distil the information in the title, into the clearest, most useful snippet while retaining the primary keyword phrase as the first words in the tag.

In Synkron.Web you can edit the title when editing a page. The title is defined in the Title element, see also example below.

2. Content

A landing page is the page that you have defined that your users should find in the search engine and these should be the main entrance to you website. Other pages might also be found but they have lower priority in your page hierarchy. When optimizing your content pages, it is the landing pages that you should start optimizing first and then remember to link to these pages from other internal and external pages – of course only from other relevant content. Remember that you

Beside the title content is the most important thing on the website. Writing a good text for a page is crucial both to the users and to the search engines. Therefore it is delicate balance between adding as many keywords combinations as possible for the search engines to find and at the same time make the text readable and understandable for the users.

Writing for the web is a piece of art and it is highly debated. There have been several studies of this and in the link list a few of these are mentioned for inspiration.

A few point of consideration when writing content (from www.seomoz.org):

“It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. As engines get more sophisticated, it’s not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.”

“If the use of keywords is overdone it can suppress rankings. I think they are moving more toward topic analysis to learn what is relevant though.”

“Rather than worrying about density, or other such myths, it is likely better to just use the words associated with topics. The use of semantically similar words is much more important than repeating the same word”

“Use an optimized document structure – The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging informational document. Obviously, in situations where this would be inappropriate, it’s not necessary.”

So making a text “search engine friendly” is not very difficult, but there are of course some general mistakes to avoid:

Avoid text embedded in Java scripts or flash

Avoid text embedded in images

Avoid text only accessible after submission of a form.

Avoid stuffing the text with the keyword – use it in a readable way.

Avoid hiding text – meaning setting the colour to the background colour of the page or hide it between other elements. Cheating will never work.

Generally it can be said that the search engine only can read the “clear text” and therefore it can not find text embedded as mentioned above.

Images can be debated also – the search engines can not read the images, but user can. So use images in a meaningful way for the users – but ensure that any “selling point” presented on the image (for example in a banner) also is present in the text. One point to consider about images is the use of the ALT text – this is a good way to inform the search engine about the content of the image. It is debated if the ALT text is providing anything to you rank but we recommend you to always the ALT text – both for your users and for the search engines.

3. Link strategy

One of the most time consuming parts of optimizing to search engines is to build up the link popularity of the page on ones website.

The overall idea is to get external people to link to your pages and preferable having other high ranked pages linking to you. But not all traffic is good traffic the search engines looks at several factors when evaluating the value of an incoming link some of the most important is:

Anchor text of inbound link. If you want to promote a specific page then a link containing that pages keyword is the best. So do you have a page about a fire properties an external link with text “Rockwool products has a good fire resistance” is better than “Go to Rockwool”.

Global link popularity of site. Any website that links to you should also popular, the search engine has big focus on external links – they should come from a related subject on a popular page to help your ranking.

Topical relationship of linking page.Links from pages that concerns the same subject is best. So if you can have a link from a building portals section about preventing fire directly to your fire section then this is better than a link form that section to your front page.

Some companies offers to buy a certain amount of incoming links – this is not a good idea. Trying to “cheat” or “trick” your rankings is never well liked. And often it will result in a ban from the search engine. Generally speaking it can be said that a search engine prefers links that real people have created.

So in creating link relations there is a large amount of work – this involves contacting partners and make agreements with relevant other websites. One of the key things is to be very strict about how people link to you.

There are of course some less time consuming ways to achieve some link popularity, some of the currently most used is:

Catalogues, submitting your link to relevant catalogues on the internet. A catalogue is a collection of links gathered by human editors and placed into various categories. The most famous catalogue is DMOZ which can be found at http://www.dmoz.org/. DMOZ is the “mother ship” for Google – it uses this catalogue to look up results for a given keyword so it is very important to be registred here. It is quit easy to submit a link to these catalogues and there might also be local catalogues that might be of interest.

Wikipedia, has become a large source of user generated information, having relevant links from wikipedia is regarded as high quality links by the search engine and is therefore and easy way to build up the link popularity of a specific section. So if there is relevant subjects in your country version of wikipedia add a link to the specific page in your website. Avoid linking from wikipedia to you frontpage since this will be regarded as low quality links.

Blogs/Forums, becomes more and more used – and since blogs are maintained by real people search engines likes links from these. So either running a blog or contributing to blogs or forums will provide valuable links to your site.

A part of the link strategy is also to consider internal linking. Internal linking is to have your pages link to other relevant pages on your website. Internal linking does not help you achieve high rankings in a search engine but it helps it to find other relevant content.

So the recommendation to you is to think links as a part of your solution – use every opportunity to have other to link to you but control the links to you. But the only way to make a effective link strategy is to have landing pages that are useful to link to.

4. URL strategy

To help both the users and the search engines it is also advised to consider the URL strategy. To some extend our CMS system can limited our strategy here.

Basically there are 2 major strategies that can be used, that is “folder” style and “sub domain” style.

The sub domain approach is where you replace the www in your domain name and replace them with a sub domain name – this could for example http://guide.rockwool.com to your solution finder module or http://fire.rockwool.com to your fire section. This approach is still considered to be a part of your main domain so pages under each sub domain is by search engines considered a part of your site. But for a user the sub domain clearly identifies the top subject for this area. Microsoft is using this strategy.

The other approach is the “folder” approach where you add the navigation structure to your url like this: http://www.rockwool.com/fire/fire-safe-walls. The advantages of this are that you are able to “stick” more keywords into your url. One thing to avoid when using this strategy is very long words – max. 3 dashes (-) in the url. Otherwise the url gets impossible for the user to overlook.

Our CMS system synkron has some limitations to this. In synkron.web it is only possible to use the sub domain approach. In synkron VIA the folder option is the standard implementation and it is based on the folder structure in the site tree.

5. Meta tags

Meta tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta description tag can still be of some importance, as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages.

In the image below, an illustration of a Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) shows the use of the meta description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the # of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher’s query. If a meta tag description is not include the search engine will use the first available text on the page.

In Synkron.Web you find the meta tags when you go to the “properties” of a page then go to the “Meta tags” menu.

One point of failure regarding META tags is to reuse the same tag to multiple pages – this should be avoided since it will have an negative effect on the ranking of your pages. So always create unique meta tags for a page.

6. Links to various tools

General

Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization : http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Defining keywords

“I have my keywords .. now what?” : http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/i-have-my-keywords-now-what/700/

SEOmoz’s KW Difficulty Tool : http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty

Content

Writing for the Web : http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

7. Website checklist

This checklist can be used to check the website as a whole.

Landing pages

Define the landing pages on your website – where do you want the users to enter your site?

Paths / goals

Define the paths your user optimal should follow

Define overall goals for your website

Keywords

Define one keyword per landing page – start by optimizing these pages.

Title

Setup a rule for your title – for example company name last

URL

Define the URL strategy for your site

Content

Setup a rule for your content pages – what is the minimum

Source code

Validate your HTML and CSS at W3C.org (http://validator.w3.org/)

8. Page checklist

This checklist can be used to check a page on your website.

Keywords

Keyword for this page defined

Titles

Selected keyword used in title

Title is unique

Meta data

Selected keyword used in the meta tag “keyword”

Keyword meta tag is unique

Selected keyword used in the meta tag “description”

Description meta tag is unique

Content

Selected keyword is used in a H1 header on the page

Selected keyword is used in text on the page

Selected keyword is used in a keyword combination or variation in the text or sub headers

URL

Selected keyword is used in the URL (if possible)

Selected keyword is used in the sub domain (if possible)

Links

Selected keyword is used in one or more links coming to your site

The page has reference links to other pages of relevance on your website – remember to link more often to your landing pages.

Best Practice on SEO for Your Landing Page

How to Improve Clickthrough Rate and Slash Google AdWords Costs to Maximize Profits:

Determine Price By Position:

The top ad position sometimes loses money. To find out what the top position costs on Google AdWords you use their Traffic Estimator tool without entering a bid price. This price will roughly equate to the bid necessary to rank #1 for 85% of search queries. Keep in mind that since their factor in CTR ads which get a low CTR will need to pay more while ads with a high CTR not cost as much per click.

In mid 2006 Google created a bid to position feature, but typically it is best to use prices to control your position. If you find that the top 2 or 3 positions are cost prohibitive, but positions 4-7 work great then you can bid high enough to where you would normally rank in one of the top few positions and then use the bid to position feature to limit your exposure.

Determine how Competitive a Market is:

Markets may shift quickly. If you notice certain ads appearing again and again over time, they are probably ads that are generating profits. For a quick glance at how competitive a market is you can look at the estimates in the Google Keyword Tool.

You may also want to record the top 10 results every few days for a few weeks to up to a month. If an ad is in around the same position (which is not from a huge corporation) after a month has passed they are probably earning profits.

Listing Your ads on Top of Google Search Results:

While lower ad positions may have a better ROI in some markets they also may not provide adequate distribution to create significant profits. Google AdWords may list the top 1 to 3 ads above the regular search results (versus off to the right side like most other AdWords ads). The top ads usually have a high click through rate which helps lower click costs.

The ad position on the Google SERP right column is determined primarily by the equation max bid times ad click through rate. Before an ad can appear on top it has to be reviewed by a human and the ad has to be deemed extremely relevant. Relevancy is closely approximated by click through rate, so the ads which display above the Google search results factor in click through rate more heavily than max bid.

If you get an ad which is placed above the search results and edit it, your ad may take at least a few days appear back in a top position.

Find the Best Products:

If you see a lot of affiliate ads then typically there is a dominant player or system in that keyword termspace. You may want to try purchasing your competitors product to see the whole sales path all the way through to the backend.

If there are more non affiliate ads than affiliate ads odds are that there is no dominant player / system in the marketplace yet.

Checking Broad Match, Phrase Match, & Exact Match:

Using exact match may drastically improve click through rates. To determine if a person is using exact match do a search for
keyword A adfkafdjsadf keyword B

If their ad still shows up they are using broad match.

If their ad does not show up for broad match check keyword A keyword B dfadfkadfa. If it shows up for this check they are using phrase match.

If their ad does not show up for the phrase match, then they are advertising via exact match. Any time you are checking competitors’ ads you will want to refresh the screen multiple times as sometimes certain ads rotate in and out of the system.

Keep in mind you can use different bid prices to bid on all matching variations at the same time.

Extreme Local Targeting:

Google will allow you to target your ads to:

any zip code or metropolitan area

a radius near your business

the defined coordinates of any polygon you enter

Using Syndication:

Google has various levels of ad syndication explained in the below chart. Google.com is part of all search ad delivery options. You may chose to deliver content ads in conjunction with search ads by setting up separate content bids, or you may wish to deliver some ads just to the content network.

Syndication Type	Where Ad is Shown
Google	Google.com
Search	Google.com + AOL, Earthlink, and other search sites
Content	many contextual AdSense partner sites
Site-targeted branded content CPM	whatever sites you pick; charged per impression

If you set up ad syndication you can bid separately on content ads. Bid whatever you determine to be fair market value for the Google AdWords distribution and then bid a separate lower value for content ads.

Some people like to use different campaigns or ad groups for content and search ads so it is easier to track the R.O.I. Some terms convert far better on search than content, and if these stats are blended it may be harder to notice the trends at a quick glance.

On some occasions it may make sense to make content only ads if you are trying to increase branding without spending a significant amount of money. Content ads are generally clicked on at a much lower rate than search ads.

In some rare cases content ads are worth more than search ads, but in most cases there is not as much implied buying demand when a person reads an article about a subject as when they are actively searching about that topic.

With your content ads you may also want to try using image ads to lock out competition from being able to advertise against you. Some ads disabled from search distribution due to low click price and low relevancy still may appear in the content network.

In November of 2006 Google started allowing advertisers to bid not only on specific sites, but also on specific AdSense channels, so if publishers are using different channels for different parts of a page you may want to bid on the ad unit which most closely fits your goals.

Syndicated ads do not appear on partner sites until they are approved by an editor. Many ads appear on Google.com prior to editorial review.

How Google Determines AdSense Relevancy:

Google reads the content of AdSense publisher webpages to determine what their pages are about. When attempting to match ads with those pages Google considers:

Not a single keyword, but the entire keyword list associated with an ad group.

You want to use well themed keyword adgroups to help ensure your ads are delivered properly. Including generic words like computer can make it harder for Google to understand what your adgroup is trying to sell.

Textual Adgroup creatives are also used to help understand what ads to display.

Max PPC and clickthrough rate play into the order of the ads displayed.

Using appropriate campaign negative keywords can also help further target your ads.

Google offers effective contextual advertising tips in this free 9 minute video.

Google AdSense CPM:

Most AdSense publishers do not make an exceptional amount of money for publishing AdSense since the ads do not usually have a high click-through rate. To help compensate for that, and to make AdSense more appealing to large traditional media buyers, Google also sells AdSense ads on a C.P.M. rate.

Advertisers can buy ads on off-topic sites for branding, but they have a 25 cent C.P.M. minimum, and will have to compete with the revenue earned by other advertisements, which could drive the price much higher. This will eventually cause people to significantly bid up the ads on some of the larger & more important AdSense partners.

Large publishers who do not want to compete with Google selling direct ads can optionally turn off the C.P.M. feature.

C.P.M. ads can also be targeted to a specific page or section if an advertiser does not want to buy ads across an entire site.

A good way to get your ads syndicated to content sites you want to be on without being forced to pay C.P.M. rates is to bid on common page text or names of sites you want to be on and only enable that ad to be displayed on the content network. That should roughly let you target some of your favorite sites and still only pay when people click on your ads.

Google also allows you to target AdSense site targeted ads via demographics data.

Losing Small Money on Contextual Ads:

Sometimes it makes sense to lose a bit of money on contextual ads. In some cases you can get around 5 or 10 million ad impressions for around $1,000 or so.

Those ad impressions give you a brand lift and may cause increased search volume for your brand, which you may later convert on. Just make sure you do not bid so much on contextual ads that click fraud becomes appealing or your ads start getting syndicated to loosely related sites just because your bid price is so high.

Filtering Junk AdSense Clicks:

Click fraud is a huge issue. Google now allows you to filter out sites that you do not want to advertise on. If a site sends you significant traffic that does not convert you can block your ads from appearing on their site.

This tool, which I have not yet tried, tracks which sites your AdSense ads are appearing on. Sometimes low quality scrapper sites actually convert well since people only find them via search and immediately click an ad while still in search mode. You can’t determine how well a site will convert without tracking it, although if you are getting a ton of clicks and suspect fraud then it is best to block the URL.

If you enable content syndication (displaying your ads on AdSense) make sure you filter out regions which have notoriously high click fraud (India and most of Asia) unless you are trying to target those regions.

Why Lower Ads Often have Better ROI:

The lower ads have a lower bid price, which can help save money if the top placed ads are overpriced. Another great benefit of having a lower ad is that a user that scrolls down the page to click is more prequalified to make a purchase. By scrolling through a bunch of ads they have displayed a greater intent to make a purchase.

These two combine such that listing lower often provides a better ROI than listing at the top. If the top ads seem too expensive you may need to test the profit elasticity for your market to see what ad locations will return the highest overall profits.

Lowering Click Price after Bidding:

After you get 10 or 20 clicks and have a decent click through rate you may want to slash your bids in half or by 2/3. Often it is best to start off with your ad near the top to collect feedback and then let it fall back after you drop ad price.

Instead of lowering your bid all at once lower it slowly over time and monitor your ad rank position as indicated in the AdWords interface.

Expanding Breadth:

If you are running your ads correctly the availability of well targeted ads should be what is limiting your spend.

If your ad spend is limited by a budget and you are ranking high for many of the search terms lower your max bid to lower the position down to 3 to 7. In doing so you will be able to show up on more search results and people who are looking at the lower ad positions are more pre-qualified to buy.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion:

If you have a group of similar keywords that could still use the same body text you can enable this feature by writing out your normal body text, and placing KeyWord: default keyword in the title of the ad.

When the keyword matching the search is greater than 25 characters the default ad title will show. Otherwise the ad will show the search term as the ad title. Also note how I capitalized the K and W in keyword. This makes the words in your ad title appear capitalized.

Having keywords in your title can help your title jump out at people and improve click through rates.

Google now also allows you to pass the referring keyword trigger as a variable in the actual destination URL. To pass the trigger keyword as a variable use &kw=keyword. You can also track whether the clicks came from Google content ads or Google search ads by adding the following to your URL referrer=ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearchifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent.

Use Keyword Rich URL’s to Your Advantage:

Often people view the URL as one of the most important parts of an ad. The ad title sticks out the most, but many people factor in the URL more than the copy. By changing your URL to a keyword rich URL you can sometimes raise your click through rate by 50 – 200%. A new throw away domain name only costs $8 at GoDaddy.

Bid on Competitors Names or Products:

I believe this is illegal in France (and maybe some other areas), but trademark laws still have not been firmly set in this field in the US. Unlike Yahoo!, Google allows US and Canadian advertisers to bid on trademark names of their competitors. The competitors trademark names may not appear in the ad, but they can be used as the ad trigger word. I can tell you from personal experience that these terms are often super cheap and convert well.

If you use competitor names as the triggering word then you need to group that in an ad that is not using dynamic keyword insertion or your ad title will put you in trademark violation.

Keep in mind that since the laws are gray in this area you may run into some problems if you push the envelope and do not respond to complaints. I believe in the US trademark owners are required to inform you of the problem and give you a chance to fix it before they have a chance to sue you for damages (whether or not they can sue you is still somewhat up in the air).

I did this particular technique and ticked off about a dozen SEOs who made a few hate threads in forums. I primarily was looking for AdSense ad space in articles, but some SEOs offered nasty comments about the technique (although it is a rather common technique).

You may want to ask people before using their names if you think they may take it the wrong way. Another good way to appear on many content sites is to run your ads on phrase match for some of the more popular article titles in your industry.

A way to avoid the controversy associated with bidding on competitors names is to only bid on their names on content matched ads (ie: disable search ads in the ad groups focused on competing products).

Viewing Geographically Targeted Ads:

You can target ads to a specific country. If you are not in the country you will be advertising in you can view the country specific ads by adding &gl=country code to the search string (ca for Canada, US for United States, UK for United Kingdom, etc).

If Google is mixing in state regional ads, it will list the state name at the bottom of the ad.

Geotargeting can allow you to afford words which may be broader than your globally effective keywords since geotargeting only delivers ads to locations you are interested in advertising.

You may want to break your ads down by different price levels by country codes. One of my friends nearly doubled his ROI by placing ads from low converting countries in their own cheaper ad groups.

Google also offers a free AdWords Local Ad Preview tool to show what ads will appear on search results in different areas.

Sending Users to a Landing Page:

The conversion process works best when you remove unnecessary steps. By sending a user to a focused landing page versus your home page you should improve conversion rates.

Use Capital Letters:

Google will allow you to use capital letters at the beginning of words in the title and in the description. Using capital letters at the beginning of each word in your ad title and ad description may help boost your clickthrough rate. Most people do not capitalize short words like an, or, and a.

Split Testing:

Google will allow you to test multiple ads at any given time. Every week or month you might want to try to make a new ad and place it up against the best prior ad. If you have an ad that is getting an exceptionally low click through rate and another pulling decent you can usually get rid of the bad ad after a few clicks on it, but it doesn’t hurt to let these ad tests run long.

Perry Marshall created a free online Split Testing tool which will help guide you using mathematics to determine whether or not you have collected enough data do stop testing. He said he usually recommends waiting until it is at least 90% to 95% sure of the results (as determined by the software).

You can also make two copies of the same ad and send it to different URLs to test different landing pages. Google also offers a free multivariant landing page testing software program called Google Website Optimizer.

When split testing you will want to turn off the auto optimization tool and you may want to limit the test only to Google so you can get the most accurate data.

More Advanced Ad Testing:

I do not work with large enough accounts to have put extreme effort into some of my tracking, but a few other ad testing options are:

Split Testing:explained above, but you can keep doing split testing over and over again, creating smarter and smarter ads

A/B/C testing:make two identical copies of one of the ads and compare it to another. Run until the CTR of the same ads are nearly identical and then compare that rate to the other ad.

Quadrents:use two title sets and two description sets which make 4 ads. Leave them unoptimized and run the AdWords account until a clear leading ad is found.

Taguchi Method:a bit complex for this guide, as I have not deeply researched it and most people probably will not use it, but the Taguchi Method allows you to set up a large matrix of variables and determine what the best combinations are using advanced mathematics and minimal testing.

If You Are Having Problems with a Word:

For your highest traffic and most expensive keywords you will usually want to make custom ads groups or ad campaigns specific to each one. If you have a word that is giving you problems in an ad group, remove it from the ad group and set it out on its own.

Off the start, you can try to exact match it as well. If you try multiple exact match specific targeted ads for that keyword and still can not get it to run profitably, then that might not be a word worth running an ad for, or maybe you can save it as a word worth trying again later down the road.

Cheap Traffic:

Some AOL users have type search term here in their search queries. Some of them accidentally run the word here into their search term, such as hereViagra or hereYourTerm. Some people search for stuff like NBA Basketball.com. There is a ton of cheap targeted traffic if you are creative.

Affiliate Ads:

Google only allows one affiliate or merchant ad per keyword per URL. This means that whoever has the ad with the highest effective price (CTR * max bid) between the merchant and all of their affiliates gets their ad displayed.

Affiliates can still have their ads show up if they create white label affiliate sites with information about the products.

Creative PPC Techniques:

Mikkel wrote a few good ppc tips in this article. A few pointers he offered were:

Think creatively.

Do not point P.P.C. ads directly at landing pages. Instead, use intermediate pages. This way you can redirect the ads to a page with new sales copy without needing to change the ad URL.

You may be able to cloak pages that the ad editors see.

Do not use the budget function. Your budget should be determined by the amount of relevant profitable traffic you can buy.

Someone at ThreadWatch also mentioned that some of your most creative AdWords ad ideas might be best to try out on a Friday evening so that they may be able to run a full weekend before being spotted by an editor.

If you have the top premium AdSense position and also rank well in the organic listings you can help bump the #2 premium ad position down to the right rail if you edit your copy. It may take up to 3 days for an editor to read your new ad and raise both ads to the top of the results again.

Getting Quicker Business Feedback:

When starting a B2B account it is a bad idea to start an account on a weekend since there will be few buyers over the weekend. Monday is usually the biggest spending day for most B2B purchases and is the best day to start your ads.

Lead generation may be a smarter way to dive into Google AdWords than trying to sell affiliate products. Since it is common to have a lead generation rate of 10-20% the feedback loop is about 10 times as fast as selling a product that may convert at 1-2%.

Google AdWords Competitive Analysis Software:

Google does not give its users tons of information about competing sites. Recently a couple software products hit the market which ping Google and determine the ad display rate and average ad position for your ads and competing ads. You can use this information to see which competitors are most sophisticated and what positions have the most competition and perhaps profits.

AdArchiver is a cheaper lower end product. AdGooroo is a higher end more sophisticated system. Google also released an API which allows people to build similar interfacing software. SpyFu and KeyCompete both allow you to glimpse a list of keywords some competitors bid on.

Bidding on Your Brand (Important):

If you rank at the top for your brand name should you also buy the associated ad? My answer is usually yes for the following reasons:

You can control the branding statement on your ads. You may not be able to do that with your regular listings.

You can point people at your landing pages or make special offers with the ads. Usually your home page ranks in the regular listings.

If you are not advertising there then your competitors may be.

If the top ranking ad is from the same site as the top ranking regular result then more people may click on your regular result.

If you have affiliates make sure you are not getting in bidding wars with them. Create a consistent affiliate marketing plan that makes sense.

Creating Ad Groups:

Your most competitive or most important terms should usually be in their own ad groups (or perhaps ad campaign) so they are easy to monitor and so you can write ad copy that is precisely targeted to those terms.

You may want to create a group for misspelled terms.

You may want to create a group for mistyped domain names.

You may want to create ad groups based on personality types.

You may want to create ad groups for your most important products.

You may want to create ad groups for seasonal or special promotions.

Some people also use different groups for contextual ads due to different ad value and the desire to use different ad copy.

There are many ways you can split up your account. By creating and tracking various ad groups it makes it easier to monitor your return on investment, and adjust you’re your ad spend accordingly.

Deep Keyword Research:

Using deep keyword research is hugely important.

Yahoo! Search marketing places exact matches ahead of broad matches, so if your competitor bids $2 for widgets and you bid 11 cents for buy widgets when people search for buy widgets your ad may list above your competitors ads even though your ad is a lower price. This allows you to get more targeted clicks at a lower price, which increases your advertising return on investment.

There is something to be said for simplicity and ease of management, but using targeted permutations of your most important terms should drastically increase your ROI.

With Google AdWords they allow dynamic keyword insertion (mentioned above), that allows the search query to drive the ad copy. That increases your chances of having a higher clickthrough rate and lowering your cost per click if you bid on many variations of your most important Google AdWords keywords.

Below is a chart of some example term ideas (with the words slightly modified) and the associated conversion data from an actual AdWords account. Notice how the cost per conversion drops off when modifiers are added to the root term. By bidding on these additional keyword phrases I am paying less for higher targeted leads.

Keyword Phrase	Cost Per Click	CTR	Conversion Rate	Cost Per Conversion
abc tires	$0.77	7.8%	1.86%	$41.37
abc car tires	$0.64	10.9%	1.92%	$32.96
[abc tires]	$0.75	10.1%	2.32%	$32.01
abc sports tire	$0.74	12.4%	2.91%	$25.29
abc tire co	$0.59	15.1%	2.70%	$21.73
[a b c tire company]	$0.56	38.2%	11.11%	$5.03
abc tire products	$0.74	17.3%	22.22%	$3.30
misspellings	$0.21	3.6%	1.82%	$11.37

Adding modifiers will split up the traffic volumes to make some terms seem more profitable than they are and make other similar permutations seem less profitable than they are. The math from the above campaign was compiled over a year with hundreds of thousands of ad impressions to help smooth out some of the discrepancies.

You have to consider the cost of building and managing the account when building out your keyword list, but I tend to like using various matching levels and modifiers on my most important keywords.

Pay Per Call:

Google has started testing pay per call. To some businesses pay per call will not have much of an effect, but high end local based businesses (legal, loans, real estate, etc.) will find their competitive landscape drastically different in the next year.

http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html

Google Checkout:

Google is trying to become a leading payment processor to help make their ad market more efficient, gain more market research data, and create another revenue source.

AdWords advertisers who accept payment via Google Checkout have their AdWords ads highlighted, which may cause them to have a higher clickthrough rate, and thus offer more targeted traffic and a better ROI.

Additional AdWords Resources:

Google offers a free ebookto help you get the most out of your Google AdWords account.

Andrew Goodman’s Google AdWords report.

Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.

Greg Heslin’s Google AdWords 123

Google Advertising Professional Program https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalWelcome

Google’s learning center http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

Many of the Google AdWords tips I learned came from Andrew Goodman’s and Perry Marshall’s reports.

How to Improve Clickthrough Rate and Slash Google AdWords Costs to Maximize Profits:

Determine Price By Position:

Determine how Competitive a Market is:

Listing Your ads on Top of Google Search Results:

If you get an ad which is placed above the search results and edit it, your ad may take at least a few days appear back in a top position.

Find the Best Products:

If there are more non affiliate ads than affiliate ads odds are that there is no dominant player / system in the marketplace yet.

Checking Broad Match, Phrase Match, & Exact Match:

Using exact match may drastically improve click through rates. To determine if a person is using exact match do a search for
keyword A adfkafdjsadf keyword B

If their ad still shows up they are using broad match.

If their ad does not show up for broad match check keyword A keyword B dfadfkadfa. If it shows up for this check they are using phrase match.

Keep in mind you can use different bid prices to bid on all matching variations at the same time.

Extreme Local Targeting:

Google will allow you to target your ads to:

any zip code or metropolitan area

a radius near your business

the defined coordinates of any polygon you enter

Using Syndication:

Syndication Type	Where Ad is Shown
Google	Google.com
Search	Google.com + AOL, Earthlink, and other search sites
Content	many contextual AdSense partner sites
Site-targeted branded content CPM	whatever sites you pick; charged per impression

Syndicated ads do not appear on partner sites until they are approved by an editor. Many ads appear on Google.com prior to editorial review.

How Google Determines AdSense Relevancy:

Google reads the content of AdSense publisher webpages to determine what their pages are about. When attempting to match ads with those pages Google considers:

Not a single keyword, but the entire keyword list associated with an ad group.

You want to use well themed keyword adgroups to help ensure your ads are delivered properly. Including generic words like computer can make it harder for Google to understand what your adgroup is trying to sell.

Textual Adgroup creatives are also used to help understand what ads to display.

Max PPC and clickthrough rate play into the order of the ads displayed.

Using appropriate campaign negative keywords can also help further target your ads.

Google offers effective contextual advertising tips in this free 9 minute video.

Google AdSense CPM:

Large publishers who do not want to compete with Google selling direct ads can optionally turn off the C.P.M. feature.

C.P.M. ads can also be targeted to a specific page or section if an advertiser does not want to buy ads across an entire site.

Google also allows you to target AdSense site targeted ads via demographics data.

Losing Small Money on Contextual Ads:

Sometimes it makes sense to lose a bit of money on contextual ads. In some cases you can get around 5 or 10 million ad impressions for around $1,000 or so.

Filtering Junk AdSense Clicks:

Why Lower Ads Often have Better ROI:

Lowering Click Price after Bidding:

Instead of lowering your bid all at once lower it slowly over time and monitor your ad rank position as indicated in the AdWords interface.

Expanding Breadth:

If you are running your ads correctly the availability of well targeted ads should be what is limiting your spend.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion:

Having keywords in your title can help your title jump out at people and improve click through rates.

Use Keyword Rich URL’s to Your Advantage:

Bid on Competitors Names or Products:

If you use competitor names as the triggering word then you need to group that in an ad that is not using dynamic keyword insertion or your ad title will put you in trademark violation.

Viewing Geographically Targeted Ads:

If Google is mixing in state regional ads, it will list the state name at the bottom of the ad.

Geotargeting can allow you to afford words which may be broader than your globally effective keywords since geotargeting only delivers ads to locations you are interested in advertising.

You may want to break your ads down by different price levels by country codes. One of my friends nearly doubled his ROI by placing ads from low converting countries in their own cheaper ad groups.

Google also offers a free AdWords Local Ad Preview tool to show what ads will appear on search results in different areas.

Sending Users to a Landing Page:

The conversion process works best when you remove unnecessary steps. By sending a user to a focused landing page versus your home page you should improve conversion rates.

Use Capital Letters:

Split Testing:

When split testing you will want to turn off the auto optimization tool and you may want to limit the test only to Google so you can get the most accurate data.

More Advanced Ad Testing:

I do not work with large enough accounts to have put extreme effort into some of my tracking, but a few other ad testing options are:

Split Testing:explained above, but you can keep doing split testing over and over again, creating smarter and smarter ads

A/B/C testing:make two identical copies of one of the ads and compare it to another. Run until the CTR of the same ads are nearly identical and then compare that rate to the other ad.

Quadrents:use two title sets and two description sets which make 4 ads. Leave them unoptimized and run the AdWords account until a clear leading ad is found.

Taguchi Method:a bit complex for this guide, as I have not deeply researched it and most people probably will not use it, but the Taguchi Method allows you to set up a large matrix of variables and determine what the best combinations are using advanced mathematics and minimal testing.

If You Are Having Problems with a Word:

Cheap Traffic:

Affiliate Ads:

Affiliates can still have their ads show up if they create white label affiliate sites with information about the products.

Creative PPC Techniques:

Mikkel wrote a few good ppc tips in this article. A few pointers he offered were:

Think creatively.

Do not point P.P.C. ads directly at landing pages. Instead, use intermediate pages. This way you can redirect the ads to a page with new sales copy without needing to change the ad URL.

You may be able to cloak pages that the ad editors see.

Do not use the budget function. Your budget should be determined by the amount of relevant profitable traffic you can buy.

Getting Quicker Business Feedback:

Google AdWords Competitive Analysis Software:

Bidding on Your Brand (Important):

If you rank at the top for your brand name should you also buy the associated ad? My answer is usually yes for the following reasons:

You can control the branding statement on your ads. You may not be able to do that with your regular listings.

You can point people at your landing pages or make special offers with the ads. Usually your home page ranks in the regular listings.

If you are not advertising there then your competitors may be.

If the top ranking ad is from the same site as the top ranking regular result then more people may click on your regular result.

If you have affiliates make sure you are not getting in bidding wars with them. Create a consistent affiliate marketing plan that makes sense.

Creating Ad Groups:

Your most competitive or most important terms should usually be in their own ad groups (or perhaps ad campaign) so they are easy to monitor and so you can write ad copy that is precisely targeted to those terms.

You may want to create a group for misspelled terms.

You may want to create a group for mistyped domain names.

You may want to create ad groups based on personality types.

You may want to create ad groups for your most important products.

You may want to create ad groups for seasonal or special promotions.

Some people also use different groups for contextual ads due to different ad value and the desire to use different ad copy.

There are many ways you can split up your account. By creating and tracking various ad groups it makes it easier to monitor your return on investment, and adjust you’re your ad spend accordingly.

Deep Keyword Research:

Using deep keyword research is hugely important.

There is something to be said for simplicity and ease of management, but using targeted permutations of your most important terms should drastically increase your ROI.

Keyword Phrase	Cost Per Click	CTR	Conversion Rate	Cost Per Conversion
abc tires	$0.77	7.8%	1.86%	$41.37
abc car tires	$0.64	10.9%	1.92%	$32.96
[abc tires]	$0.75	10.1%	2.32%	$32.01
abc sports tire	$0.74	12.4%	2.91%	$25.29
abc tire co	$0.59	15.1%	2.70%	$21.73
[a b c tire company]	$0.56	38.2%	11.11%	$5.03
abc tire products	$0.74	17.3%	22.22%	$3.30
misspellings	$0.21	3.6%	1.82%	$11.37

You have to consider the cost of building and managing the account when building out your keyword list, but I tend to like using various matching levels and modifiers on my most important keywords.

Pay Per Call:

http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html

Google Checkout:

Google is trying to become a leading payment processor to help make their ad market more efficient, gain more market research data, and create another revenue source.

Additional AdWords Resources:

Google offers a free ebookto help you get the most out of your Google AdWords account.

Andrew Goodman’s Google AdWords report.

Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.

Greg Heslin’s Google AdWords 123

Google Advertising Professional Program https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalWelcome

Google’s learning center http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

Many of the Google AdWords tips I learned came from Andrew Goodman’s and Perry Marshall’s reports.

How to Improve Clickthrough Rate and Slash Google AdWords Costs to Maximize Profits:

Google Adwords Tips

Google AdWords gets its own extremely long section because it is exceptionally more complicated and feature-rich than other PPC systems, largely because Google has been more innovative than competitors, and largely because Google wants to be the worldwide advertising platform. Consider the following:

To get a lead in video distribution Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

Google will unveil audio ads before the end of 2006.

Google has tried to sell ads in newspapers and magazines.

Google vs. Yahoo!:

Google AdWords and Yahoo! are in a battle for search distribution. One of the two PPC services is distributed on nearly every major search engine or portal.

Google Bid Prices vs. Click Costs:

With Google you pick a maximum bid price and your click cost will never exceed that. Like all other major PPC providers, their software has a bid discounter built in, so your average bid cost will be less than your bid prices.

Google bid prices are not transparent so your competitors have no way to be sure exactly what your ads are costing (due to factoring in click through rates into effective bid price – which I will explain later).

A few Things you can do with AdWords:

Google AdWords is an advertising medium like no other.

There is only a $5 signup fee (which is converted into bid credits).

You can have ads across Google’s network of sites with some ads appearing in less than 10 minutes.

Google’s broad match technology allows you to receive extremely broad distribution while keeping it quick, easy, and simple to use. Yahoo! and Microsoft now do this too.

Google’s vast distribution network makes it possible to test a business model without fully investing into creating that business.

Google AdWords syndication allows you to reach AOL users, other searchers, and Google’s vast content network.

Google offers Geotargeting, so you can target your ad to a country, state, metro area, zip code, or geographic radius of your choice. Google allows you to preview local ad delivery using their local ad preview tool.

You can run multiple ads for the same words and test them against each other or send them to different pages to A/B split test your site or ad copy.

Google allows you to use a free multivariant testing software program called Google Website Optimizer to test landing page conversion potential.

The Importance of a High Clickthrough Rate:

Google lets searchers determine the relevancy of the ads. Price for Google AdWords is a function of click cost * click through rate (and, in some cases, a couple other mystery meat variables). I believe Google uses the average click through rate from the 1,000 most recent ads in this calculation, though for some markets with low search volumes they may use other quality indicatiors, like CTR for an ad group. This means if you know how to get a high click through rate you can dominate Google AdWords by serving up ads at a far cheaper rate than what your competitors are paying.

The following table gives examples of how the Google system calculates bid prices and ad positions. Observe how some low priced ads appear above high priced ads because they are more relevant. Also observe that actual click cost sometimes varies widely when compared to max bid price. Some clicks are at times expensive and at other times they are cheap. It is the average click cost that matters, since that is what you are paying. Max bid does not matter since sometimes it can widely depart from actual click price. For example, I have seen a $6.00 max bid which had clicks go for 77 cents.

Ad Number	Max Bid	CTR (relevancy)	Effective Bid	Ad Position	Actual Click Cost
1	0.40	5%	$2.00	4	$0.40
2	0.26	10%	$2.60	2	$0.26
3	1.00	2.53%	$2.53	3	$0.81
4	1.50	2%	$3.00	1	$1.31

Distribution buys further distribution. Off the start you will want to overbid slightly as you will be competing against the best ads that have developed over time in your niche.

The bid prices Google suggest are often somewhat high. I usually cut the suggested bid price by 20-50% when I first start an account. I then monitor closely and change it to try to maintain decent ad position and ROI.

Quality Based Minimum Bids:

In the past, Google had a five cent minimum bid price and only allowed ads to display if their Google click-through rate was above 0.5%, but in August of 2005, they shifted to quality-based minimum pricing.

This means that if your ad is deemed exceptionally relevant, you can get clicks for as low as one cent, depending on how competitors are bidding. If your ads are not exceptionally relevant, you will have to pay a higher minimum bid to make up for the lack of ad relevancy.

Google has been making their ad system more blackbox-like. They stated they may include landing page quality in their ad relevancy scores. In other words, we can’t know exactly how it works, but they will create a system that optimizes for maximum internal revenue, while delivering value to trusted advertisers, and overcharging irrelevant or noisy advertisers. If they are vague about their exact ranking criteria, it will be harder for people to game the flaws in their ad system.

Ads which are disabled from search syndication due to low relevancy and bid price, still appear in the Google contextual ad program unless their quality score is too low to appear there as well. I describe syndication later on in the chapter.

The whole point of quality-based minimum bids is to squeeze the margins out of noisy ad campaigns.

Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match:

Google AdWords and Yahoo! both have different levels of word matching. Using [search term] will only return searches ads for the query search term, which is called exact match. Yahoo!’s exact match is a bit fuzzy, matching plurals and some common misspellings. Google’s exact match is more precise, only matching the exact search.

Buying the keyword “search term” will show your ads for any search that has ‘search term’ in the query (in the same order), which is called phrase match.

Buying search term (no quotations or brackets) will show your ads on any search that has ‘search’ and ‘term’ in it. With broad matching, synonyms to search term may also display your ad. If you decide to start off with broad matching you should view the synonyms to ensure none of them are wasteful. This is especially true with acronyms or other terms with multiple well known meanings.

Google offers all three levels of ad control. Yahoo! offers exact match, and groups phrase match and broad match in a category called advanced match.

Examples	Match Type	Will Show Results For:	Will Not Show Results For:
[eat cheese]	Exact	eat cheese	any other search
“eat cheese”	Phrase	eat cheese; I love to eat cheese; you eat cheese	Cheese eat, or anything else which does not have both words together in the same order as the search term
eat cheese	Broad	All above options and searches such as: cheese eating; ate cheddar

Google Ad Status:

If you do not understand something or are frustrated with something in particular feel free to ask at an SEO forum or ask your ad representative. Google AdWords has a blog (which does not want direct AdWords feedback), an online support center, and you can contact Google advertising via phone at 1 (866) 2 Google.

Due to trademark issues some ad copy will be rejected by the automated review. When that happens you can request an exception and the ad will get a human review.

Google usually runs most ads before they have an editorial review, but they review them before placing them on partner sites. I have seen long review times in excess of a few days for Google site targeted AdSense ads.

Ads on Google.com have two states: active or inactive. If an ad is inactive you can make it active by bidding higher. Google also has an ad diagnostic tool which states what needs to be done to make each word active.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool:

The Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) estimates search volume, trends, and advertising competition. You can enter keywords to analyzer or they can extract relevant keywords from a given web page.

The Google Traffic Estimator Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox) roughly estimates the price required to rank #1 on AdWords 85% of the time and the traffic you could expect to get from Google AdWords for a given bid.

Google offers a search term suggestion tool by the name of Google Suggest which auto-completes partial search queries. It does not show search volumes, but search volume plays a heavy role in its output order. The tool is currently only available in some languages. Many Google Toolbars have this feature enabled.

Negative Keywords:

There is a negative keyword option in both Yahoo! and Google AdWords. Any word that you do not want your ad to appear for can simply be blocked by placing “-badword” beneath your keywords.

There are many words which would indicate a lack of desire to purchase anything. Words like crack, free, wallpapers, pic, and mp3 are often money losers if you do not remember to include these in your negative keyword list.

Following is an example keyword list showing a negative keyword: (should be much longer and more detailed, this is just an example)

eat cheese

buy cheese

-free

Thus, your ad would show up for many cheese queries, but for none that included the word free. Google also allows you to filter negative keywords at a campaign level.

Getting Feedback from Your Account:

When opening up a Google AdWords account many people are hesitant to spend much money. In spending a small amount the business is essentially ignoring the feedback loop Google has set up.

Is it better to lose $100 today, than to lose it over three months to finally come to the conclusion that you need to change? I would rather want to know that I need to change now. Not all industries or business models will make money from AdWords. It is not a business model that will work perfectly across the board.

If you spend on targeted keywords your site should have a chance for success. Any marketed internet based business should leverage fast feedback loops to help it improve. Off the start you want to overspend on your ads so you can see which ones are effective. After a while you can regroup your ads by prices and then slash your bid price down. The ineffective ad groups or keywords will be disabled due to quality based minimum bids and the winners will keep displaying.

Google Advertising Professional:

The Google Advertising Professional program is a program which allows marketers to be certified as a Google AdWords expert. The requirements are that you spend at least $1,000 in a 90 day period after signing up, comply with their rules, and pass an online test. After the 90 day period is up you can place a logo on your site which will perhaps make many people assume that Google endorses all of your SEO / SEM services.

This program also allows you to link together up to 500 AdWords accounts so that you can access and manage them from a single login. Google also offers many free online tutorials which can help prepare you for the test and help you learn more about AdWords even if you do not want to take the test.

Google AdWords is Responsible Advertising:

Add all the above features to the fact that Google also offers a free web based conversion tracking tool, and you can see how the AdWords system is a direct marketers dream. Everything is targetable, tangible, and measurable right down to the cent.

Google also offers a program by the name of Google JumpStart where they will help set up your account for you. Likely they will not be able to set up the best account for you, but they might be able to help you get your feet wet. The fee to join JumpStart is $299, and the fee gets converted to bid clicks.

Keep in mind their goal is to have you spend money, which may not necessarily have targeting the best ROI or best keyword buys in mind. Search engines would prefer that merchants get in bidding wars over a select small set of terms and miss out on some of the cheaper terms.

Google Adwords Tips

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