Thursday, January 29, 2009

AdWords Advertising

By Justin Harrison

Campaigns on AdWords are designed to be small effectively written ads. Even though they are small they can be very effective in driving users tho your web site.

Two methods for this advertising practice exist related to the positioning of advertisements. Once you've set up your AdWords campaign, you will be presented with the option of either placing your ads on the search or the content network (in this case, AdSense), or on both.

Search network advertisements are assigned many keywords that would match the text of the advertisement and that is an excellent method for getting searches to locate your product or service.

Within the content network, as opposed to the other, your ad will be surrounded by an article or other content which is related. So in this scenario, your ad is viewed by readers who are maybe not thinking about purchasing at the moment, so, they are only browsing and not searching.

Because of this, contextual advertisements normally do not have the same impact as search advertisements. If your desire is to target both markets you want to create two separate marketing campaigns as this will allow you to expand your target area and inevitably increase traffic to your site.

Advertisers spend a lot of time and money making their advertisements, and they tend to close in on a certain age group, and a certain peer group. And when people in that age group click on the ads, they know they have did what they have set out to do. And they make they money they want.

If you have an AdWords search advert created but yet want to try the content network you could consider starting up a different advertisement series pointed at the content market. Content networks have a more passive audience so simply just copying over your search network campaign will not suffice, you'll need to complete retool it to make it work.

In the final analysis a well run search network campaign is usually the most effective way to generate business but with a little ingenuity and well written copy there is no reason why this could not be supported by a parallel campaign on the content network.

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

PPC Management - Adwords Quality Score

By Brian Basch

Practically everyone who is a normal user of Google Adwords is aware of their quality score and its importance to your account. Google calculates and assigns a score to each keyword within your account in order to determine its relation to displayed ads and destination pages.

Perhaps nothing affects your adwords account more than your quality score. This score influences your minimum bid amount and your ad position for each keyword in your account. Because ad position and pricing are so crucial to the success or failure of your efforts, comprehending Google's quality score is a necessary evil.

In order to try to keep ads related closely to what the user is searching for, Google decided to introduce the quality score to adwords. Ideally, users will experience a better result if the advertisements displayed next to their queries are closely related to their area of interest. This is both logical and a bit idealistic: as any algorithm-driven ranking system is bound to have some problems with understanding every single keyword.

The publicly-known elements of the quality score system are:

1. How closely a keyword is related to the ads in its ad group. This element should cause advertisers to implement their ads and keywords in closely related units, rather than tossing all keywords together in one group. Doing the later will likely lead to high minimum click prices and lower ad spots.

2. A keyword's past performance on the Google.com website. Google wants to provide a benefit to continuously improving advertisers and this aspect encourages just that. If you are not making constant refinements to your copy for a given keyword, it will end up costing you in the form of a lower quality score and high bid prices. This makes having useful and creative ad copy a necessity.

3. Past performance of you whole adwords account. Not surprisingly, Google looks at your entire account's history as a component of your quality scoring and bid pricing. Because of this, it highly recommended that you work to optimize and enhance your account's campaigns in order to reap the benefits that can bring to your advertising expense.

4. The quality of your landing page. The destination URL that a visitor is sent to after clicking on your ad should display a page that is closely related, in Google's eyes, to the ad's topic. Landing page relevancy is a bit more abstract than the other factors, but it can weigh heaviliy on your overall pay per click performance. Sending users to relevant pages on your website will only help them find what they are looking more efficiently. Hence, Google rewards you for helping their search customers.

The bottom line is that growing your knowledge and understanding of Google's quality score measure will act to directly improve your advertising return on investment. By lowering your minimum bid prices and raising your ad positions, quality score improvements are your very close friend, treat them like it!

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

How To Manage An Adwords Campaign, After The Launch

By Brian Basch

Well you are finally at the top of the mountain. You have done all the leg work; positioning your ads, selecting keywords, studying bidding options and doing your marketing research. added to this is the fact that you have been smart enough to utilize Google's great keyword research tools. You seem to have set up your advertising campaign for the next 6 months! Now what else is left to do?

The bad news is that you are not yet done because the real work is yet to come. Tracking is critical to your campaign. You will need to do this for all your ads, to make sure they are performing to maximum capacity.

You can do this in a variety of ways. Adwords will help you with this as it has a tool to show you the exact amount of traffic an advertisement is drawing. You can also do this with tools on your website. From these results you can calculate how many leads and sales were produced by a single advertisement.

It is critical to your Adword campaign that you pay attention to every detail and monitor it well. A failing ad can drain your budget, fast. It will distract you from your productive ads and have you chasing ineffective leads. Let's face it you will still be paying for clicks to a bad ad.

When you have an ad that is no good, you need to think what can be done to improve it. True you may have a good position in the first 5-10 pages but you still need to make improvements with the keywords. In order to get more views to your ads it is sometimes a temptation to choose popular keywords. This is because you might think that a popular keyword will draw traffic due to supply and demand.

The problem with popular keywords is that they are not targeted. Searchers will start with these words but go onto more targeted ones. This attracts shoppers not browsers to your website. The best keywords are those that attract traffic but also draw your niche market.

You will want to have a good blend of keywords. general ones to bring in traffic and new leads and specialized ones to make sales.

The bottom line is that if you want a successful Adwords campaign you need to watch your campaign like a hawk. Remember the success of your business will depend on the efficiency of your advertising campaign.

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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Discovering An Alternative To Google Adwords

By Brian Basch

Pay per click advertising is offering an exciting new trend in Internet marketing. The search engines have at last found a way to make money with online marketing. What do we mean by this?

Traditional methods of advertising were somewhat different. An ad would be paid for according to its duration not exposure. You would simply pay for your ad to be run for a certain length of time, regardless of how much exposure it got.

This could be in several medias; radio, TV, newspaper or online on a web page. The price would be for running the ad for a limited time, and would make it available for all to see. Finally somebody saw the light and figured out that there should be a better way to market online. Of course not all marketing methods gave the same amount of exposure to an ad. For example a busy website would give a lot of exposure to an ad, so why not have a system in place where both advertiser and host could make money?

If you raised prices for the advertiser you would risk losing customers. In fact it could also be detrimental to the credibility of your business. Customers and sales would be lost and your competitors will start to get the edge on you.

Business might not pick up and your site's reputation would suffer. Enter the idea of pay per click advertising. The advertiser writes a small ad based on a good performing keyword. Then they submit it to the search engines, the ad will come up when its keyword is searched for. Every time a searcher clicks through on the ad the advertiser will pay a small fee to the search engine. This means both advertisers and host make money.

When the search engines saw the potential of this idea they decided to develop it. To get better placements, advertisers were invited to bid higher. The advertiser with the highest bid won the best placement, this gave their ads better exposure. Both search engines and advertisers increased their profits.

Apart from Google and Google Adwords there are other pay per click engines. Many people tend to ignore this fact. Some better alternatives are; Microsoft Adcenter, Yahoo Search and Search Feed. If you want to make a profit with pay per click advertising you will need to explore these other options.

It is wise to use as many different tactics for gaining traffic as you can. Using different pay per click engines will help you to expand your business and increase your profits.

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Managing A Successful AdWords Campaign

By Brian Basch

It is deceivingly easy to embark on an Adwords campaign, but not so easy to run a successful one. In fact you will easily detect the difference between a successful campaign and one that is barely making it. In fact an Adwords campaign that is not working will cost you a lot of money, and prevent you from progressing in your business.

How can you stop your hard earned money from being eaten up? The answer is transparent; you will need to pay attention to every detail of your Adwords campaign. Firstly you will need to take care when you choose your keywords, secondly be careful when you bid. But above all you will need to micro-manage your campaigns.

It is quite hard to select the right keywords. You will need to be sure that you have the right mix of broad based keywords and specialized ones. On the one hand they must generate traffic on the other hand they must produce sales. This will prevent you from incurring huge losses.

You will find many resources and tools at the Googgle Adwords site, to assist you with your keywords for your Adwords campaign. Marketers will be able to discover in demand keywords, and a wide variety of different related keywords to help with their advertising campaigns.

Many marketers do not know that pay per click marketing is really just like a large auction, with the person placing the highest bid winning the prize. The advertiser, will offer the best price for a keyword and be the highest bidder. In this case the prize is the best position, which will gain the most exposure.

It is common knowledge that searchers have short attention spans. Because of this you will need to create and ad that is simple to read, gets your message across and is in a premier position. If your ad is just one of many in the search results then you will see little or no results. However even if an ad draws a lot of traffic, it can still only bring in useless leads, which makes it equally ineffective. The main idea is to try to maintain a precise balance.

Monitoring your campaign is the key to the success of your Adwords campaign. Thisis made easier by the fact that Google provides tracking tools to do this. You can track the traffic and even sales that are generated by each keyword in your campaign. this makes adjustments to your campaign easy to do.

If you are determined to succeed with your Adwords campaign you will need to monitor it. Google provides good tracking tools from the very beginning of your campaign. They will help you assess each one of your keywords. This enables you to make changes to a failing campaign.

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Friday, January 2, 2009

Three Keys To A Successful AdWords Campaign

By Brian Basch

Throughout the Internet world the "buzz" is all about Adwords. Rumors are flying about how vast amounts of money can be made with 3-4 hours of work a day. This concept appeals to the new entrepreneurs who think they can get rich quickly with a minimum amount of work. This sounds like a castle in the air, but in fact it is not an impossible thing to do. In reality you do not even have to spend a dime of your hard earned money on the latest literature on Google Adwords. You can just go the Adwords site and learn all you want from the excellent tools and tutorials there.

There are 3 tactics that will help your Adwords campaign to succeed:

1. The first thing to do is to choose a winning keyword. In fact your keyword selection is critical to the success of your Adwords campaign. If your keyword is not good enough to draw sales then your whole campaign will fail. You will need to choose a keyword that can attract new leads to your business from a general market, but at the same time must also bring in leads from your special market.

Search engines are impersonal; they will not worry about the fact that you will have to pay for clicks in if they are not pulling sales. With this in mind be careful how you choose your keywords. Of course popular keywords will bring lots of traffic but not necessarily any sales. Now a large number of marketers will just jump into the search engine database and fish out some popular keywords, what they fail to understand is that these keywords will not be directed at their particular market.

Keywords are not easy to find and select, but Adwords has the answer to your problems. They have many tutorials and resources to assist you in your search for the perfect keywords. You can find some of the finest resources around when you go to www.adwords.google.com

2. Bidding can be tricky. You will need to bid a certain amount to attain a good position. The average searcher will not generally look beyond 5-10 pages pf the search results before trying a brand new keyword.

This makes it a necessity for you to achieve a good placement and for your ad to be shown within the 5-10 pages range. Search engines will place ads according to the amount an advertiser has paid. The highest bid will be given the best place. When bidding always keep your budget in mind and do not let your campaign run out of money. You do not wan to spend large amounts of money to get top placements and then not be able to maintain them. To prevent heavy losses search engines give you the option to set a cap on your bids and only spend a certain amount per day or month. When you reach the cap you ad will be suspended.

3. Last but by no means least is the fact that you will need to manage your campaign. Ads can be unpredictable and you will not fully realize their performance level until your campaign is active. Pay proper attention to every part of your campaign to ensure success. Know how to adjust quickly if necessary.

Now you know! Without having to pay $54.99 to the "experts" you have all the points you need for a successful AdWords campaign. Now the responsibility of using this knowledge is in your hands.

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