Testing Your Google Adwords Search Engine Ads

I’m not sure why, but many of my clients who place pay-per-click search engine ads like those on Google or Yahoo become obsessed with finding the best keywords and totally neglect other factors in creating a profitable search engine advertising campaign. Often they install so complicated a keyword empire that they can’t psychologically manage any other changes and leave their campaign running in such a way that it costs them way more than necessary.

Don’t let this happen to you! Keep your advertising costs down and your momentum moving toward profitability by following these guidelines for prudent, manageable testing.

1. Compile a small collection of keywords (key phrases, probably) to test for each grouping of ads – let’s say, up to ten. Likewise, before getting started, stockpile a number of different ads to test against each other – let’s say, three to eight ads.

2. Set up the campaign with two or three ads tested against each other for each set of keywords. Google lets you do this automatically. Simply create additional text ads and they’ll rotate them for you until you say otherwise. Google also shows you the click-through rate, cost per click and number of clicks for each ad.

3. You don’t usually need your ads to show up on top, so put in a bid per click that according to Google’s keyword traffic estimator puts you at about the #7 position – showing on the first page of results, but not at the top. Set your maximum spend per day rather high, however, which according to the experts tests better than the opposite.

4. When you have at least 100 clicks on your best performing ad, delete the poorest performing ad and insert another ad to test in its place. Keep testing three ads in rotation until you have a clear winner.

5. Then, when you’ve arrived at a better performing ad, begin fiddling with and adding and deleting keywords to your heart’s content.

6. Whenever you’re stuck on what else to do about your keywords, test other elements, always just one change at a time. For instance, try turning “content ads” on and off, changing your maximum bid, modifying your ad copy by changing a word at a time, reversing the order of words or lines, and so on.

While this advice may differ a bit from the mathematically correct procedures of testing, it’s easy for a novice to implement. Search engine advertising conveniently allows you to watch your results and adjust each campaign for optimal performance, so long as you have a system of testing that doesn’t let you feel overwhelmed.

Creating A Cost-Effective Google Adwords Search Engine Ad Campaign

Pay-per-click ads like those available through Google Adwords can be a powerful, regular source of prospects for your products and services. However, whenever new clients have asked me to look at their Google Adwords campaigns, I begin to understand one element in Google's growth to more than a $6 billion market value.

Many entrepreneurs fail to take advantage of Google's mechanisms for making sure that their search engine ads get shown only to those who are logically potential buyers and that the ads encourage such people to click through. As a result, they pay much more than they have to for the exposure, get discouraged about the return on their investment and yet leave the ads running for lack of ideas about how to improve performance.

Don't let it happen to you! Use these tips to keep your costs down and your rewards high.

1. Eliminate countries and languages that do not match what you offer. For instance, if you sell U.S. foreclosure listings, your ads should show only to Google users in the United States and probably only in English. On the other hand, if you have a translation service whose clients can live anywhere in the world, define the countries and languages your ad gets shown to much more widely.

2. Activate Google's ad tracking. It costs you nothing, and enables you to keep an eye on not only your cost per click and click-through ratio, but also which keywords and which ads best lead to your desired result, whether that's a sale, an inquiry for your services or a signup for your newsletter. That way, you can eliminate or try to improve elements that get a lot of clicks or cost a lot but do not get results.

3. Set up negative keywords. If your goal is selling something, why pay for tire kickers and freebie seekers? By defining "free" as a negative keyword (Google has a special button for this), you can keep many of them from clicking on your ads.

Equally important, think through alternate and unwanted meanings of your keywords and add negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing to wildly inappropriate visitors. For instance, type "cattle branding" into Google and you’ll see ads for business branding services. Those advertisers' click-through rates will improve when they add "cattle" as a negative keyword.

4. Delete keywords and ads that are not working. Because Google's system rewards a better click-through rate with higher ad placement and lower costs, you are paying Google more than necessary when you leave poorly performing elements running. Periodically clean out your losers.

5. Send people to a landing page that makes perfect sense. People click on search engine ads to learn more about whatever was featured in the ad. It seems logical that they’d look around from your home page for whatever interested them in the ad, but that's wrong. Searchers are impatient. So if your search engine ad mentions a software demo, do not send them to your company's home page. Send them to the exact page from which they can access the demo.

When you manage your Google Adwords campaigns according to these guidelines, you’ll be paying less to get a much more satisfying response.