Adwords and Clickbank for the Gambler Within

There are many options for profit when it comes to Clickbank and one of the best kept secrets in the business is using Adwords along with Clickbank in order to create new and fairly quick profits. Before you dive off the deep end and put next month's house note into your Google account expecting quick riches there are many things you need to know about Adwords.

Keep these things in mind when weighing the potential benefits of an Adwords Clickbank campaign and whether or not this is the course of action that is best for your current situation. It is also important to remember that the fact something isn't right for you now doesn't mean that the timing will never be right. It is never an all or nothing proposition unless you choose for it to be.

Costly but Effective

There are plenty of cheap and even free methods you can use to promote Clickbank products. Adwords isn't one of them. This means you need to be very selective about which products you are willing to promote through this method and how much money you are willing to dedicate to that promotion. You definitely do not want to promote products that have a relatively high rate of return or an unseemly amount of competition as those drive costs up and profits down.

Risk

Are you a gambler by nature? Gamblers know that you risk big to win big. Adwords may seem like a small risk at $1 or $2 a pop but those dollars add up quicker than you might imagine. If you aren't making more than you are spending on your campaign from the beginning it is time to seriously rethink your strategy. This is a bigger risk but the profits are more immediate for many and can be quite sizable. You can increase your profits by increasing your expenditures. The more you are willing and able to risk the greater your potential for profit...AND loss. 

Results

If you like to see the results tally up quickly this is going to be a great way for you to market. Some people cannot stand the waiting to see if bum marketing methods are going to pay off. They lack the patience required to wait out the storm and see where things fall when all is said and done. This is rarely necessary when it comes to using Adwords in conjunction with Clickbank. 

Adwords and Clickbank are an excellent combination for affiliate marketers that are not risk averse. If you are willing to risk big in order to win big then you should consider this as a viable opportunity to bring home even bigger profits. Do you have a gambler's spirit?

Common Mistakes in Developing an Adwords Campaign

Many businesses have benefited significantly from utilizing an Adwords campaign. If you have yet to incorporate Adwords into your overall marketing plan for your business enterprise, you definitely will want to consider adding Adwords to your program. With that said, you will obviously want to get the most out of your Adwords campaign and efforts. Therefore, you will not want to make any mistakes in the process.

Through this informational article you are presented with an overview of some of the more common mistakes that people make when it comes to planning, developing and maintaining an Adwords campaign in this day and age. Armed with this information you will be in the best possible position to ensure that you end up with an Adwords that really proves itself effective for your business enterprise ... not only today but into the future as well.

A common mistake that some people make when planning an Adwords campaign is to fail to spend an appropriate amount of time really researching keywords and keyword relevance. The fact is that when you are building an Adwords campaign you cannot rush the process. You must be deliberate and thoughtful when it comes to selecting the keywords that really will be most useful to you and your business when it comes to crafting what you hope will be an effective Adwords effort.

Another mistake that oftentimes is made when it comes to implementing an Adwords campaign is a failure to budget appropriately. As is the case with selecting keywords to be used in your Adwords effort, you must also be very thoughtful when it comes to developing a budget for your Adwords campaign.

Additionally, you need to understand that another common mistake that occurs in an Adwords effort in many instances is the failure to really monitor the Adwords campaign once it is up and running. The fact is that the Internet and World Wide Web is a very fluid place. Therefore, you need to constantly monitor your Adwords efforts to make sure that they remain effective even in light of developing trends and changes that take place on the Internet all of the time.

By understanding and then avoiding these common mistakes you will really be able to develop and then maintain into the future the best and the most effective Adwords campaign possible. You will be able to position an Adwords campaign that will be very beneficial to your business enterprise.

Understanding Why Adwords is Cost Effective Marketing

If you are like most business owners in this day and age you really are finding yourself facing an ever more restrictive budget. As a result, you are always on the lookout for ways in which you can make your budget stretch as far as possible. Unfortunately, one area in which you may be thinking of making cutbacks is in the realm of advertising. On some level, making this type of decision really is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Before you make such a decision, you need to consider Adwords. In the end, you likely are to find that Adwords provides to you an amazingly cost effective way to market and promote your business even during these difficult economic times.

Generally speaking, there are two specific ways in which Google Adwords are very cost effective. When you really take a moment to appreciate these factors, you really will be more likely to conclude that using Adwords really is a course you will want to take when it comes to making your marketing budget go further. 

First of all, Adwords are cost effective because by definition they really do reach only those potential customers or clients that have already expressed a specific interest in the goods or services offered by your business enterprise. Indeed, they have already done a specific search engine search in this regard. Therefore, you are not spending money on advertisements that end up in the hands of people that have no interest in what you are selling. 

Secondly, Adwords are very cost effective in that your business venture will only pay when the ad you have designed and placed actually is clicked on by an interested consumer. Your business is charged only when a consumer does click onto your displayed advertisement and ends up being linked through to your Internet website.

In the final analysis you really would be hard pressed to find any other type of advertising, marketing or promotional program that would prove itself more cost effective than Adwords. Therefore, in making sure that you can get the most out of your budget, you definitely will want to consider including Adwords within your comprehensive marketing program today and into the future as well. Moreover, through the use of Adwords you will find that in a very short period of time the traffic to your website will increase ... as will the revenues and profits that you generate from your business venture.

Getting Certified in Google Adwords to Increase Marketability

In this day and age an ever growing number of people are earning what can only be described as excellent money through their involvement in online marketing. The fact is that these people are increasing their own marketability by becoming certified in Google Adwords. If you are like these individuals and interested in adding to your own abilities and inherent value in the realm of Internet marketing, you will want to take a look at becoming certified through the Google Adwords Qualified Individual Program. This article contains an overview of the Google Adwords Qualified Program.

In order to give you a bit better idea of this certification program, a brief overview is provided for your consideration. With this information in hand you will be in the best possible position to determine whether the Adwords certification programs will best meet your needs not only today but into the future as well when it comes to your own marketing efforts on the Net.

In order to be certified through the Google Adwords Qualified Individual program you will be required to undertake an examination conducted by Google Adwords itself. Through this certification process developed by Google Adwords, you initially will learn how to utilize the various tools that are associated with Google Adwords, including the specialized tools that end up gaining this certification.

While there is a nominal charge to take the Google Adwords Qualified Individual training program and examination most people who do take this course and undertake the examination find it to be a great investment in their future. They find that their own marketability is greatly enhanced. These individuals find that more and more individuals and businesses come to them for Adwords assistance.

When all is said and done, an ever increasing number of potential clients or customers actually are aware of the Google Adwords Qualified Individual program. Therefore, the reality is that this type of certification really is proving to be a selling point for people who are interested in gaining a clientele interested in Google Adwords development and related services.

With all of this in mind, you need to take a serious look at the different ways in which you might be able to benefit from the Google Adwords Qualified Individual program. In the end, this may be the perfect option for you and may provide you with the best possible path to really make money through your own online efforts.

Adwords, Starting a Small Business and the Importance of a Market Study

Starting a small business is a challenging task -- even in the best of circumstances. Because starting a small business is … such serious business … it is important that you enter the process of establishing a small business with your eyes wide open. In other words, you need to undertake a meaningful marketing study, including how Adwords can fit neatly within your overall marketing efforts.

In regard to starting the process of beginning a small business without blinders on, you need to take the time (and expend the funds necessary) to undertake a market study or a market research study. When all is said and done, a market study or market research study may be the most important step that you take when developing a new small business idea. Through your market research efforts you will be able to devise the most effective Adwords campaign for your new business venture.

A market study or a market research study is an endeavor through which the viability of a product or service is tested on consumers. A market study or market research study can take many forms.

There are market studies or market research studies through which a person will be provided a product to use. After using or trying out the product, the person will participate in a focus group to discuss the product or will be interviewed one on one in regard to the product or will answer a questionnaire in regard to the product.

Through a market study or a market research study, a small business can learn the strengths and weaknesses of a product or service that it hopes to put out on the market. By learning the strengths and weaknesses of a product or service, a small business can make necessary changes that will make the product or service even more appealing to consumers.

As mentioned previously in this article, in addition to being able to assist you in plotting a general, overall marketing and advertising effort for your small business, a market research effort will also assist you in identifying the best course for you to take when it comes to developing an effective Adwords effort. You need to keep in mind that a significant number of new business ventures are relying heavily on Adwords to promote their efforts today. In the end, you can join these businesses in launching a profitable business using Adwords campaigns by understanding the ins and outs of the market in the first instance.

Does Adwords have a Keyword Suggestion Tool?

Yes, but you need to be an Adwords advertiser to access the tool. 

Once you are logged in, click on the 'Campaign Management" tab, then on on the 'Tools' link, then on 'Keyword Suggestion Tool'. Enter one keyword or phrase per line and suggestions are tailored to the language and country you selected. The results show popular queries that include your keyword and there are separate lists for related queries and any relevant suggestions.

Is there an Adwords Traffic Estimator?

Yes, but you need to be an Adwords advertiser to access the tool. 

If you are setting up a new campaign or Ad group, or modifying keywords in an existing Ad group, you have the opportunity to get estimations of traffic. After you enter new keywords you will see the 'Estimate Traffic' button. Clicking on it will bring up data on 'Clicks/Day', 'Average Cost-Per-Click', 'Cost /Day', and Average Position. Unlike Overture, Google keep their traffic data under wraps. 

Third party tools like Ad Words Analyzer (which uncover targeted keywords with high search volume and very little competition) are often used by successful advertisers in preference to the standard tool.

What are the most expensive Pay Per Click (PPC) Keywords?

The most expensive keywords are found in competitive markets that have high profit margins and commissions. Markets like Search Engine Optimisation, Data Recovery, Web Hosting, Mortgages, Medical Malpractice, Lawyers, Attorneys, Leads, Telecommunications, Gambling, and Pharmaceuticals. Any of the common keywords in these markets attract top bids in PPC advertising. You can buy a keyword list with over 39,000 keywords ranked in order of price, and save yourself weeks or months of research.

Adwords Ad serving and Keyword and site targeting

Hold on for a short fire and brimstone sermon about the Ad Serving setting: Please do not Optimize your ads. I don’t care where you are. Run, don’t walk to a Web browser, log in to your account, choose a campaign, click the Edit Campaign Settings link, and move the radio button from Optimize to Rotate. Then click the Save Changes button. 

   

Done? Okay, now I can get rational and calm again. Let me explain why you made this change, and why it’s so important. When you run two ads in the same ad group, Google shows them to different people and gives you statistics on how each ad performed. If Google optimizes your ad serving, the ads with lower CTR get shown less and the ads with higher CTR get shown more. Eventually, the poor performer stops showing, and Google declares a winner by default. You set the test up once, and it runs without you from then on. 

What could be bad?

First, your tests take much longer when you don’t give each ad an equal chance to be “voted on” by searchers. You need a threshold number of impressions and clicks for each ad to determine a statistical winner. If one ad gets fewer and fewer impressions and clicks, it takes longer to declare that winner. When you can’t declare winners as they happen, you learn slower. Think of how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics because they go through so many generations in a short time frame. The more iterations per time frame, the more your ads can evolve and improve. AdWords is a playground where both evolution and intelligent design rule. You also lose money, because your campaigns are improving more slowly than they might. 

Ad groups that could achieve profitability in a few days, based on traffic, will take weeks or even months to start making money. In the second-to-worst-case scenario, you don’t learn anything about your market because you don’t even pay attention to the differences between the winning and losing ads. You don’t learn which headlines work best, so you can’t improve your Web site, your e-mails, your expensive offline advertisements, and so on. If you allow Google to optimize your ads, the absolute worst-case scenario involves Google killing off the more effective ads by mistake. Google decides ad effectiveness on the basis of CTR, not on whether the visitors who click an ad end up buying. Often the highest CTR ads lose money because they attract too many non-buyers. 

Networks

As we saw, you can show your text ad in any of three places: Google pages, search partner pages, and the content network. The default setting for each campaign includes all three networks. The trouble with this setting is that the three sources of traffic generally behave very differently, respond to different language and different offers, and don’t command the same bid prices. You can set different bids for the content network, but a cleaner way to separate the networks is to put each one in its own campaign. See the later section, “Separating your account into three types of campaigns” for details.

Locations

Google allows you as much geographical precision as you could possibly need. The default setting is by country: Google gives you a list of countries and you choose the ones whose inhabitants will see your ads. Straightforward and uncomplicated, this setting is common for online businesses who can serve customers pretty much anywhere. If you sell downloadable software, or telephone consulting, for example, you don’t have any reason to exclude customers from Belgium or Israel or New Zealand, assuming language compatibility. In my experience, certain African and Asian countries tend to be hotbeds of credit-card fraud, however and if you don’t think a particular country will add a great deal to your bottom line, you may want to leave it off your list. 

Countries and territories

In its list of available countries and territories, accessible by clicking the Edit button next to Countries and Territories, Google lists the most commonly selected 24 countries at the top, beginning with the United States and continuing alphabetically from Australia to United Kingdom. The following is a list of dozens of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Choose countries by selecting them and clicking the Add button. You can select multiple countries by holding down the Ctrl (Windows) or Ô (Mac) keys as you click the country names. When your list is complete, click the Continue button to return to the Edit Settings page.

Regions and cities

If you want to target prospects more precisely, select the Regions and Cities Option after clicking Edit on the main setting page and Change Option on the Location Targeting Page. When you continue, you’ll be able to choose regions from within a single country If the country is the United States, you can select the States/Regions/Metropolitan Areas radio button, and then select the areas you want from a list box. Or you can select the Cities radio button and enter your own list of cities in the format of city name state abbreviation: Durham NC or Roanoke VA. You can toggle back and forth between these two radio buttons to complete your list.

Customized

If you run a local business, the regional and city targeting may not be precise enough for you. After all, no matter how good a dry cleaner you may be, few customers will drive 45 minutes across town to drop off their dress shirts. Enter Customized targeting to the rescue. You get to that page by editing the location targeting options, clicking the Change Option link, and clicking the Customized radio button on the Location Targeting Options page. You’re given two options: a circular area, or a wild and wacky polygon of your creation. 

- Circular: After entering a physical address or centering the map at your desired location (zoom way in by clicking the + button at the top left of the map), you can enter a radius around that spot in miles or kilometers.  

- Multi-Point Option: Occasionally, a circle will not be precise enough. What if, I don’t want to show my ads in the Gordonsville area and points northeast? Google sends a multi-point option to the rescue. Below the map, click the Multi-Point Option link. Your map reverts to global scale, and you can either enter coordinates like you’re a World War I ace, or zoom in to your map location and draw a polygon that defines your target area.

Keyword and site targeting

If you show your ads on the Content network, how does Google decide which AdSense publishers show your ads? You tell Google whether you want to bid on pages that are optimized for your keywords, or whether you want to choose specific sites for your ads. In the old days (before June 2007), if you select Keyword Targeting, you couldn’t tell which sites were showing your ads. Imagine sending a check to a national TV network so your commercial would be shown on their affiliate stations, but they refuse to tell you where and when (and even whether) your ads will run. That’s what Google’s Content Network was like. Just as this book was entering the “make another change and we’ll break your fingers” stage, Google unveiled a new report that shows you which AdSense Web sites are showing your ads and how well the ads are converting on each AdSense page. To generate the Placement Performance report, you must first set up Conversion Tracking. See www.askhowie.com/sitereports for instructions as well as examples of the power of this long-awaited feature.

Your first campaign uses Keyword Targeting by default, and you can’t change it. Once your first campaign is configured, you can create a Site-Targeted Content Network campaign by clicking the Site-Targeted link next to + Create a New Campaign on the Campaign Summary page. Name your new campaign and your first ad group, choose the language or languages your customers speak, and select your geographic target. Basically, you’re selecting a group of people in some geographic area, from a small town to the entire world, who visit certain Web sites. You can choose Rap/Hip-Hop fans in the Midwest, Progressives in South Carolina, Evangelicals in Chicago, and so on. Interest groups merged with geography can provide very tight, responsive markets for your ads. 

On the next page, you’re prompted to create an ad. You can create a second ad to test, or just click Continue to choose the Web sites where you want your ad to appear. Google doesn’t assume you know any specific sites. The wizard prompts you to select from categories such as games or health, enter topic words, name specific Web sites, or describe your audience and let Google suggest Web sites matching that demographic. 

If you type the topic Gout, Google returns a list of 55 Web sites, along with information like impressions per day and supported ad formats (text, image, video). You can filter the results by clicking Choose Ad Format, so if you have a square 250 x 250 pixel image ad, you can choose only those Web sites that have elected to serve ads of that size and shape. If your desired audience is in the United States and you choose to target the entire country, you can choose Web sites based on demographics. 

Google will show Web sites visited by 25–44-year-old women making more than $60,000 a year who have children in their household. You can select any or all of them to show your ad. The first one, vamoose.com, is a directory of vacation rentals. Ask yourself: Can I create an ad that will interrupt someone trying to rent a vacation home and make them act on my offer? If so, will that person be a good prospect? If both questions can be answered Yes, you may have a successful Content site.

Changing the default Adwords campaign settings

If you want to set up one AdWords campaign, put it on autopilot, and never look at it again, feel free to skip this section. The changes I suggest will usually mean more, not less, work for you more decisions, more overseeing, more risk, even, if you drop the ball. Google gives you a vehicle with an automatic transmission that does your thinking for you. On highways it works fine, although it will never be as efficient as a well-handled manual transmission.  

 

When you take it out for a race, though, you’re going to need precision control based on experience - something no computer can do for you. Ready to strap on your Adwords seatbelt and hit the track? 

Changing the default campaign settings

From within your AdWords account, choose a campaign and click Edit Campaign Settings. You’ll see a page where you can change various settings for that particular campaign. Some of these options are shown to you when the campaign is born, while others hide on this page, waiting for you to find them. Let’s explore the options that you haven’t yet seen.

Delivery method

If you exceed your daily budget on a regular basis, you have two choices: tell Google to pace your ads evenly through the day (standard), or show the ads as often as possible until you run out of money (accelerated). Both methods can make sense, depending on the viewing patterns of your market. If your market is global, you probably want to show your ads evenly so you can get your message to your prospect in Singapore as well as the one in Saskatoon. If you run a local campaign for office workers, you may want to accelerate the ad showing if more people buy in the morning than the afternoon. 

However, the choice begs an important question: why are you limiting your advertising spend? The concept of a budget for advertising doesn’t make sense if each ad is making money. If I offered you a dollar bill in exchange for your half-dollar, how many times would you want to complete that transaction? Does infinity sound about right to you? It wouldn’t make sense for you to say, “Let’s only trade my 50 cents for your dollar 24 times, because my daily budget is 12 dollars.” 

Limit your daily budget for testing purposes, when you’re not yet profitable and you’re adjusting your keywords, ads, and Web-site sales process to become profitable. Another case where limiting your budget makes sense is if demand exceeds supply and you can only service so many paying customers. Or if you work for a big company used to advertising that’s not directly tied to results, and you’re given an ad budget. Or if you haven’t read this book and don’t yet know what you’re doing. (In fact, as you’re assessing the competition, if you find that their ads disappear and reappear on the Google search results page as you refresh the page, you can be fairly confident that a) they aren’t profitable yet; or b) they don’t understand results-accountable marketing and won’t be much of a threat to you.) 

Keyword bidding

Keep the default here (Default bidding – maximum CPC) if you’re going to pay attention to your keywords and monitor your account on a regular basis. Don’t let Google optimize your budget.

Ad scheduling

Click the Turn On Ad Scheduling link and gasp to discover that Google gives you the option to schedule your ads by 15-minute increments, any day of the week. You can run your ads from midnight to 2:45 a.m. Monday, 3:00–3:15 a.m. Tuesday, and so on. By clicking the Switch to Advanced Mode link near the top of the page, you can even adjust your maximum bids by time period. You may want to be in a higher position on weekends, or just after The Daily Show, or during Monday Night Football, and so on.

Position preference

If you select the Enable Position Preferences check box and save your changes, you are taken to a position preference introduction page. When position preference is activated, you can designate a position range for each keyword, accomplishing two goals: your ad will not show for a given keyword unless it falls within that position range, and Google will try to keep your ad within that range, given your budget limitations. Essentially, position preference is like setting your maximum CPC, except you focus on the outcome (position) instead of the input (how much you’re willing to pay for that position). I prefer to control the money rather than the position since the only metrics that matter at the end of the day are money in and money out. 

To play with position preference, drill down into the Keyword tab of an ad group, and make sure the settings are showing for each keyword. (If the cell at the top of the column reads Show Settings, click it.) Then click the Edit link in that column for the keyword whose position you want to set.

Generate keyword phrases using the phrase combiner

I’ve developed a keyword-manipulation tool, the AdTool, which makes it easy to generate thousands of “sneaky” keyword variations from a single keyword. You can add U.S. cities and states before and after all your keywords, you can substitute synonyms with the click of a button, you can add hundreds of misspellings, convert singular to plural and vice versa, add .com to the end of your keyword, and add quotes and brackets automatically (if you’re as bad a typist as I am, this one feature will save you hours). Let’s say you’ve brainstormed 1000 keywords that all contain the word mortgage. Now you discover that 5% of searchers spell mortgage without a “t” as morgage. The AdTool will let you replace mortgage with morgage in all 1000 keywords and add those new 1000 keywords to your campaigns. 

   

You can also use it to generate hundreds of keyword phrases using the phrase combiner. For example, someone who sells collegiate team clothing might sell 20 different items (hats, jerseys, sweatshirts, and so on) related to 12 different sports (baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and so on) for 150 colleges and universities (Duke, UNC, Princeton, and so on) 20 × 12 × 150 = 36,000 keywords. I’ve included four colleges, five sports, and five items. The AdTool instantly generated 209 variations, including two-word phrases like Duke hat and Princeton sweatshirt.

The big reason to separate similar keywords into ad groups to show an ad that scratches the itch is supported by other reasons: 

- Google bolds keywords in the search results: Type any word or phrase into Google and look at the results page. Every keyword you typed (except for a, an, the, for, and suchlike) appears in bold in every listing, whether sponsored or organic. Bold text catches the searcher’s eye. 

- Talk to your prospects in their language: If your prospect is searching for foods that prevent gout and you put that exact phrase in the headline, you’ve scored an empathy point. The way they search is the way they talk to themselves. Tap into their lingo and you demonstrate understanding. 

- Improve your ads by split testing: If you don’t segment your market, you’re missing key split test data. Maybe you have two ads running neck and neck, with a CTR of 1.4. In actuality, Ad #1 has a CTR of 3.6 with people who typed tiger woods putter and only 0.03 with people who typed golf shoes. 

- Show visitors the right landing page: The golfer searching for lefthanded titanium drivers doesn’t want to land on your home page and have to play hide-and-seek with your site navigation. Google has made us impatient and lazy your visitors will go back to Google before trying to make their way through a confusing site. With a tight ad group, you can send all the traffic to a perfectly matched landing page either for a selection of left-handed titanium drivers, or the best-selling men’s and women’s drivers, or an article on how to choose a left-handed titanium driver. The easier you make it for your visitors, the more likely they are to follow your lead. 

- Easy campaign management: Managing different ad groups is easier than handling one larger group. If your AdWords campaign consists of 1000 keywords, all in one ad group, you’ll have a miserable time trying to manage that campaign. You’ll have trouble comparing keyword performance because you’ll have too much data to look at. You may end up spending time inputting keywords you already have but can’t find.

keywords I can add to my AdWords campaigns

Remember the frantic high-school-essay writer’s best friend, Roget’s Thesaurus? It got us through some pretty rough papers by giving us 12 ways to say accomplish and 19 ways to say want. (Although my history teacher thought hanker too colloquial and prefer too wishy-washy.) Well, the old thesaurus is now online, in two free incarnations, and can lead you to keywords you would otherwise miss.

Online Thesaurus 

 

  

Go to http://thesaurus.reference.com to access the online version of Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus. Type your keyword (one word, generally) into the text box near the top of the page and click the Search Button.

LexFN.com

The Lexical FreeNet connected thesaurus, located at www.lexfn.com, can perform several cool tricks. Type a keyword into the Word 1 box, select the Show related radio button, and click the Submit Query button. You will find synonyms, words that are triggered by your word, more specific and more general categories related to your word, and words that are part of your keyword and words that your keyword is a part of. If you sell stage makeup for theatrical performers, several of the results of this LexFN search will point you in promising directions (greasepaint, for example), while others will help you brainstorm negative keywords (see the later section, “Deploying Negative Keywords”).

KeyCompete.com

If you’re serious about using AdWords, KeyCompete.com is one of several paid tools I recommend highly. Go to www.keycompete.com and type a keyword in the search box; then click the Search button. Click any of the Web site links to see a long list of their other keywords. In other words, if your competitor has done a good job of researching keywords, you can use this sneaky tool to take advantage of all their hours of hard work. You can buy individual keyword results for $5, or purchase a single day’s access for $19. An annual subscription is $299. If you need to compete against established competitors in an Adwords market, this tool is a no-brainer.

Using your server log to get smarter

Quietly, uncomplainingly, your Web site has been storing a gold mine of visitor data, patiently waiting for you to realize its value. If your Web site has been welcoming visitors for any length of time and you haven’t perused your server log yet, you’re in for a treat. Among lots of other useful data, your server log will tell you exactly what search terms visitors typed to land on your site. All the tools I’ve talked about in this section are useful as idea generators but only your server log tells you exactly what keywords are already getting people to your site.

Because Web servers differ significantly, unfortunately I can’t tell you exactly how to find and read your own server logs. If you are technically savvy about your Web site, you already know where to find the server log. If you’re not sure how to view your server logs, contact your hosting provider. What you want to look for in your server logs are the key phrases and keywords that people typed into a search engine just before visiting your site. You want to select a reporting period that makes sense (last month, last year, and so on). Some of the keywords with very few clicks are potential long-tail keywords I can add to my AdWords campaigns. Long-tail keywords refer to phrases that are rarely typed, and will therefore bring you very few visitors, but collectively can generate many sales. 

The concept of the long tail (the phrase itself refers to the shape of the graph of the statistical distribution of events) was popularized in the book The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, who argued that in a digital world with no production or shipping costs, the combined profits generated by long-tail products can be greater than the profits from the blockbuster bestsellers. Amazon.com, for example, can be more profitable than brick and mortar bookstores because such a large proportion of Amazon’s sales come from obscure books that physical stores wouldn’t be able to stock due to shelf space limits.

Similarly, long-tail keywords, as long as you don’t spend too much time generating or managing them, can give you the slight edge that leads to market domination over time. Here’s how: The long-tail keywords are very cheap, with almost no competition. This traffic stream lowers your average bid price, giving you more visitors for the same amount of money. Assuming you convert these visitors to sales at a rate equal to or higher than that of your other visitors (a pretty good assumption, since they’re coming in on very targeted and specific keywords), you make more money per visitor. You can afford to advertise more and to pay more for advertising compounding your slight edge into a real lead. Finally, the increased traffic means you can split-test and improve all the elements of your sales process more rapidly than your competition, leapfrogging you ever farther ahead over time.

Adwords keyword Strategies and Tools

In the perfect Adwords campaign, every click leads to a sale, and you don’t miss any clicks that could have led to a sale. In real life, of course, such a perfect campaign is impossible. But it’s the goal of everything you’re doing. Your keyword selection represents a balancing act between hyper-aggressive and hyper-conservative:  

   

- Hyper-aggressive: If you choose every keyword in the universe, you won’t miss anybody, but your CTR will be microscopic and your bid prices will be astronomical. 

- Hyper-conservative: If you bid only on the very obvious keywords, you’ll miss a lot of sales from prospects who approach the search process differently from you. 

The ideal balance point is the one that maximizes your business goals, whatever they are. If you are advertising a for-profit business, your goal may simply be the highest possible profits. You may sacrifice some profits for quality of life, and go for the highest ROI. If you’re building a company to sell, you may prefer to build a huge subscriber base to earning profits up front.

 Whatever the goal, the same three-part strategy applies: 

1. Start with the obvious keywords. Make a list of the keywords you would search if you were

 your customer. 

2. From there, go laterally into synonyms and related searches. Conduct the research, use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, and one or more of the tools described a little later in this article. 

3. Tweak or fire underperforming keywords and keep looking for new ones. 

Part III shows you how to manage your AdWords campaigns to continually improve your results. Eventually, you’ll have a stable of reliably profitable keywords pointing to the appropriate ads, taking visitors to effective Web sites. 

The Free Keyword Tool

You can use the Free Keyword Tool at www.askhowie.com/freewords to generate related search terms. Simply type the main keyword in the box and click Submit to receive a list of 100 related terms. You can research each of the top 100 terms by clicking it the tool will return the keywords (and their search volumes) for all keywords that include the one you typed. You can explore the keyword landscape, and download keywords to your computer in a file that you can open in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

Google’s keyword tools

You can use that tool to find thousands of keywords related to your main ones. Google searches Web sites similar to yours and references its huge search database to help you discover the words other people have used to get what you can give them. 

KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker sites 

These two Web-based services, available at www.keyworddiscovery.com and www.wordtracker.com, respectively, are comprehensive and competing keyword research tools. Every serious AdWords user I know relies on one of these not-so-cheap tools. They both give you hundreds or thousands of keywords related to broad search terms. They tell you how many times the keywords have been searched in the recent past. They allow you to download keywords and counts into spreadsheets or text files. They let you create projects to store your words. Neither is cheap, although WordTracker thoughtfully offers a week-long subscription for around $30.

Learn about customers from v and Google blog search

By July of 2006, Technorati was tracking over 50 million blogs, and estimated that 175,000 new blogs are created each day. Granted, many (most?) of these blogs are completely irrelevant to everyone but their creator and two or three friends, but that still leaves hundreds of blogs written by professionals in any given industry for other professionals in that industry.  

 

Other blogs touch on issues related to your product and service every now and then. Blogs are great places to learn about your customers because, for some reason, people write blogs like online diaries little held back, little left to the imagination. When they rant about a vendor or a product they don’t like, they go all out. Also, bloggers love to link to and comment on one another’s blogs in a particular market space, so true conversations develop. Arguments, discussions, reviews, comparisons read influential bloggers’ posts and you’ll quickly feel the pulse of a market segment’s desires. How do you find the blogs and blog posts relevant to your business? Two sites are particularly helpful: Technorati and Google’s Blog Search. 

Technorati

Technorati is a search engine for blogs. Go to www.technorati.com and enter your keyword at the top. Technorati gives you three ways to search for blog posts:

- Search for posts with your keyword in the text: Choose In Blog Posts from the drop-down list to the left of the Search button. 

- Search for posts tagged with your keyword: Choose In Tags. 

- Search for your keyword in the description of the entire blog: Choose In Blog Directory. 

I find the Blog Directory search to be most helpful it returns a list of ofteninfluential blogs that deal with your market. If you’re selling home gym equipment, go visit them (by clicking their URL) and find out what they’re ranting about and what’s tickling their fancy. Pay attention to visitor comments, if any (few comments probably means few readers and not much influence), and follow the blogroll the list of blogs that this blog thinks is important.

The top listing for Home Gym Equipment is a post called Track Your Walks. Technorati shows us that 257 other blogs link to this one, making it highly authoritative. When you click the post title, you’re taken straight to that post. In this case, it’s the Walking expert for About.com at http://walking. about.com. Since a lot of people read and rely on About.com for advice, you’d want to read this blogger’s reviews of home exercise equipment before entering that market. 

You can sort the blogs by relevance (based on how closely the blog’s description matches your keyword) or by authority (a measure of how many other blogs link to that blog). Because the Blogosphere represents a network, you can usually find your way to the center of that network just by observing who’s quoting whom. Blogging expert Dave Taylor likens the Blogosphere to a giant party. The person in the middle of the room surrounded by gaping hangers-on is probably the most influential person. Sidle over to that group and you’ll learn a lot about your market. On the other hand, you can also find blogs that don’t link to other blogs, that just try to sell you stuff, that rant and rave but have no influence whatsoever. That’s like a person loudly talking at a party, but no one is listening. Technorati isn’t very smart about returning relevant search results in blog posts it will look at individual words rather than the meaning of the whole phrase. If your keyword is more than one word, put quotes around your search term to ensure that all the words appear together in the post.

Google blog search

http://blogsearch.google.com returns results not only from blogs, but also online forums. It works just like a regular Google search, without the Web pages, and sorted by relevance or date. Say you invented a device that improves automobile and truck gas mileage by adding supplemental hydrogen to the engine’s air intake valve. Enter your big keyword, hydrogen boost, into Google’s Blog Search. 

Clicking the first post leads us not to a blog, but to a forum dedicated to really big Toyota trucks and SUVs: www.ih8mud.com. The posts on the forum indicated that many doubted whether the hydrogen-boost kit would actually work as advertised, that the kit required too much power from the alternator, and that price tag of $900 seemed too steep. By reading over the posts, you can get a sense of the objections you’ll have to overcome in your sales process. Second, you see the specifications that you need to improve: Instead of 20–30 amps, can you design a unit that draws only 8–10? Third, you see that $900 is more than this segment of the market is willing to pay for a product like yours.

Loitering on Web sites

Your competitors’ Web sites are great places to learn what to do and what not to do. When I talked about bid persistence earlier in this article, I advised you to print out a list of the top AdWords advertisers in your market three times over six weeks. Grab those printouts now, and circle the Web sites that appear on all three pages both the sponsored and organic listings. It’s time to hang out with successful businesses and see what they’re up to. First, look at your competitor’s Web site as if you’re a potential customer. Can you find what you’re looking for? Does the site confuse or bore you? Is it easy to contact the site owner and ask questions? Do you trust the site? Can you order easily? 

Remember that the home page may not be the landing page you get to by clicking its ad. Check out its landing page, and see how it draws you in or not. Pay attention to how that landing page connects to the rest of the site. Does it try to make a sale, or capture your contact information? What are the featured products? What are their shipping and return policies?

Groups related to your keywords and your market

The two big providers of free groups are Yahoo! and Google. Spend some time on each site, searching for groups related to your keywords and your market.

Join the most active groups, read the message archives, and follow the daily threads. Verify that the people in the groups are your prospects. Resist the urge to do any selling in these groups. You’re at their watering hole, remember? If you start pitching your product or services, or contribute comments that are off-base or self-serving or unhelpful, you’ve just identified yourself not as a zebra, giraffe, springbok, or wildebeest, but as a crocodile! If you want to come back and sell to these groups later, after you’ve mastered their jargon and understood their concerns, they’ll freeze you out if you pushed too hard at the beginning. 

Yahoo! Groups

Begin at http://groups.yahoo.com. To join Yahoo! Groups, you need a free Yahoo! account. If you don’t yet have one, you’ll be prompted to create one. You can start searching for groups without an account, but you’ll need to create an account before you can join a group. If you have a Yahoo! account, log in and start searching. You can apply to join groups right away. After you’ve done some searching, you’ll discover why Google, not Yahoo!, is the preferred search engine. Yahoo! focuses exclusively on keywords, and ignores meaning and context. When I typed Juggling into the Groups search box, the first two groups listed were a support group for work-at-home moms and another for Christian homeschoolers with more than two children. 

They were in the top positions not for relevance, but because they were the two largest groups that had the word juggling in their description. Both groups, of course, used the term juggling metaphorically. So neither is a particularly useful watering hole to learn about your prospects’ views on replaceable wicks for juggling torches or the proper weight of a silicon stage ball. The next three groups, however, are closer to the mark: a group dedicated to Contact Juggling, a group of Christian clowns, and the main Yahoo! juggling group. The Contact Juggling group’s archives are public, while the other four groups require membership. In addition to the keyword search, Yahoo! also gives you a directory of categories that may be more useful. You can see the categories Hobbies & Crafts > Hobbies > Juggling. 

Click Juggling to view 192 different juggling-related groups. The first two groups look familiar. When you click juggling2, you’re taken to the group’s home page, where you can read a description of the group, see how active the members are (by viewing the message-history chart), and decide if it’s worth your time to join this group. To join, click the Join This Group! on the right. On the next page, select the e-mail address you want linked to this group, choose how you want to receive messages (individual e-mail, daily digest, or Web only), select the e-mail format, copy some text to prove you’re a human and not a software program, and click Join. I recommend choosing the daily digest over individual e-mails if it’s an active group, you could easily spend your entire day dealing with off-topic threads about whether other threads are off-topic, and nonsense like that. You can always change your preferences after you’ve joined, and you can also quit any group easily. Once you join, you can read through the archives and view profiles of group members. If you wanted to launch a competing product to the Dube Airflight Clubs, you could gain valuable insight into what people like and don’t like about them. If you wanted to (say) sell against Airflight, you could create thinner clubs less likely to bang into each other, or softer clubs that wouldn’t hurt so much if they hit people in the head. And you would save this post in an idea file for when you started writing AdWords ads.

Google Groups

To search Google Groups, go to http://groups.google.com. Google Groups hasn’t been around as long as Yahoo! Groups, so you won’t find Google communities as established as the Yahoo! ones. But Google Groups get direct feeds from many of the independent “usenet” groups that have existed since the late 1980s, and so provide much more comprehensive coverage of the market. When you search Google Groups for juggling, you don’t get the irrelevant listings that Yahoo! served up. The first groups Google shows you are a unicycling group, a non-Google group called rec.juggling (which I talk about in a minute), and a discussion list for the Vancouver Juggling Club.

To join a Google Group, click Apply for Group Membership on the right. If you’re logged in to your Google account, you get taken to a signup page where you choose your e-mail delivery schedule, provide a nickname, and apply. Once you’ve been approved for membership, you can read and reply to messages, search the message archive by keyword, and post new questions. Google formats its group messages on the Gmail template meaning that replies are kept next to the original message in chronological order.

Adwords Keyword Tool and Your Market Advanced Methods

If Oprah ever reads my hilarious yet touching and wise essay, Manifesto of an Average Ultimate Frisbee Player, surely she will invite me to be a guest on her show. For several weeks after this, many people will search online for Oprah Frisbee guy and a few variations. But would it be wise to build a business based on that keyword family?  

 

 Probably not, since my fame (and it is coming, I tell you) is likely to be fleeting. If your business success depends on shortlived trends or fads, you’ll never turn your AdWords campaigns into business assets. They won’t be reliable. Similarly, if your market is trending downward (Ken McCarthy discovered that very few people in the 21st century are searching for buggy whips anymore, even though they had been all the rage 100 years earlier), you can’t rely on past data.

Luckily, Google publicly shares a tool that allows you to view trends in your market to help you decide whether it’s stable, growing, or declining. Visit Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) and search for the major keywords in your market. Is the traffic stable over the past few years? Trending upward? Good. If it’s trending downward, beware. You’ll see seasonal cycles in the Google Trends graphs. Don’t worry about dips that occur regularly each year. Be worried if the overall graph trends downward.

Aside from being fascinating and addictive (at least for people who subscribe to American Demographics magazine), Google Trends gives you a longer-term picture of your market. Why, for example, did searches on back pain spike in July of 2005? I don’t know, but I’ll but some chiropractic market analyst has an answer. The cities, regions, and language tabs provide more useful information. For instance, the regions tab reveals that 9 of the 10 countries ranked for most back pain searches were part of the British Empire at one point in their history.

 Coincidence? Maybe. 

Sometimes, Google superimposes news headlines on the graph. William Shatner’s hospitalization for back pain in October 2005 (point B on the graph) appears to have triggered little additional interest, but the December 2006 ABC news report on lower back pain and yoga (point C) either anticipated or sparked another explosion of interest going into the new year. I don’t know what any of this means, but if I were selling products to help your aching back, I would spend a lot of time looking at graphs like these. And whatever your market, I recommend you do the same.

Taking the Temperature of Your Market Advanced Methods

The search data described in the preceding section represents the demand side of your market. The following sections look at the supply side information about the businesses selling in that market, and how much they’re making. To continue paying homage to Ken McCarthy’s swimming-pool metaphor, it’s not enough for the Olympic diver to be able to tell that the pool contains 660,253.09 gallons of water. If the water is frozen solid, diving in is not a good idea. If the market consists of hundreds of thousands of monthly searches but no buyers, you’re diving in a frozen market and it won’t feel good when you land on your head (or your empty wallet). The average bid price, described earlier in this article, is one indicator of the responsiveness of a market. But this issue is so important that you should take some time and corroborate your first impression with several other data sources.

Number of advertisers on Google In the popular imagination, entrepreneurs get rich by creating products and services that nobody else has ever thought of. In real life, that rarely happens. Truly original products and services often languish for years until they catch on. Rather than celebrating when you discover that no one else is selling what you want to sell, you should become somber and a little nervous. Then take a deep breath, relax your shoulders, and continue with your day. (I didn’t want to leave you all nervous and tense you might get back pain, and I’m not selling anything in that market. Much better for me if you get gout.) Go to www.google.com, search for your keyword, and count the number of sponsored listings. You can do this by clicking More Sponsored Links just below the column of AdWords ads on the right. The first 10 listings appear on that page. Click the Next button at the bottom to bring up listings 11-20. Keep clicking Next on each subsequent page until you run out of Next links to click. Seven ads on Result Page 9 translates to 87 ads. For some reason, Google doesn’t always display the More Sponsored Links link the first time you search. You’ll see slightly different results depending on your geographic location a number of listings in my example were for local chiropractors but the general trend will be clear.

Glenn Livingston (of www.ultimateadwordsresearch.com) cautions AdWords beginners to avoid competing on keywords with more than 25 competitors. Once you’ve cut your teeth in less competitive markets, you can begin to assault the lofty domains of high profit. After all, if someone’s doing well there, why not you?

Bid persistence: Will you still love me tomorrow?

Beware of markets full of here-today-gone-tomorrow advertisers. After all, advertisers are trying new things all the time, thanks to Google’s no-commitment, low-cost model. Just because you can gather more market data on a Sunday afternoon than Procter & Gamble was able to amass during the entire Carter administration doesn’t mean the data is stable. Bids especially are vulnerable to sudden change, since each bid represents not an entire market segment but one merchant’s decision that day. A simple way to establish bid persistence is to print out the first two pages of the sponsored listings, and then print out the listings again at least three weeks later. To reduce your risk as much as possible, repeat this exercise again three weeks after that. If you see that the listings are stable over those six weeks, it means that these folks are either very careless or they’re making money. 

Going deeper with the Adwords Keyword Tool

Earlier in this article, I describe how to use the Traffic Estimator to assess Total Market Health. Now I show you how to use another AdWords tool to figure out if you can afford to use AdWords to test your initial sales process. Google is famous for being wildly inaccurate in predicting your actual bid prices, because your actual bid depends on the quality of your Web site (as well as on the invisible hand of capitalism). The Keyword Tool, like the Traffic Estimator, gives you a dollar amount based on the history your competitors have amassed, which makes it more, not less, valuable at this point in your research.  

To use the AdWords Keyword Tool, follow these steps: 

1. Log in to your Standard Edition Adwords account and navigate to an individual Ad Group by entering the Campaign Management area, clicking a campaign name, and then clicking an ad group within the campaign.

2. Select the Keywords tab and click the Keyword Tool link. 

3. Enter your main keyword, select Cost and Ad Position Estimates from the Choose Data to Display drop-down list, and click the Get More Keywords button.

The estimated CPC for back pain and hundreds of related keywords as well as the position you can expect for that CPC. If your default CPC for that ad group is too low, enter a higher Max CPC in the box and click the Recalculate button. You can also enter smaller CPCs and recalculate to find out how little you can expect to pay for various positions. The lower the CPC, the less profitable it has been in the past for other AdWords advertisers. You’re looking for a sweet spot, where the Max CPC is low enough that you can afford to pay for enough clicks to test and improve and high enough that you can be sure others are making money in this market.

Adwords keyword research and CPC and Daily Budget

By doing a little keyword research and entering your results into the MPG calculator that you can download from askhowie.com/mpg, you can assess the Total Market Health (TMH) man, am I a fabulous acronym builder (FAB) or what? of your market by combining the total number of bids with a weighted average of bid prices. This gives you a rough estimate of how much money is being spent in the market by PPC advertisers. The process will take you fewer than ten minutes per market (I’ve done it so often I can do it in under five minutes), and it looks more complicated than it is. If you’ve never used a spreadsheet program before, you may want to have an Excel jockey friend on hand to help you the first time.  

 

  

1. Go to askhowie.com/mpg and download the MPG Calculator. You’ll need Microsoft Excel or the free spreadsheet Calc available at www.openoffice.org to open the MPG.

2. Once you’ve downloaded and opened the MPG, enter the keyword you searched using the free keyword tool described in the “Determining market size by spying on searches” section, earlier in this article. 

3. Enter the total monthly search volume from the spreadsheet with the top 100 keywords into the MSV column of the MPG. 

4. Log in to your account at adwords.google.com.

5. Click the Tools link and choose Traffic Estimator from the Optimize Your Ads section. 

6. From the spreadsheet with the top 100 keywords, select and copy the entire column containing the keywords. Do not include the search volume numbers, just the keywords themselves. 

7. Paste those 100 keywords into the box at the top of the Traffic Estimator. 

8. Leave Max CPC and Daily Budget blank, select the language and location targeting based on the market you’ve going after, and click Continue. 

9. Above the table on the next page, look for the Average CPC for those keywords. 10. Divide the Average CPC in half and enter that number in the Maximum CPC field. Click Get New Estimates.  

11. Keep reducing your Maximum CPC until the Estimated Ad Positions are 4–6 for the majority of your highest volume keywords. 

12. Now take the Average CPC estimated by Google and paste it into the CPC column of the MPG. 

The MPG calculates the TMH for the market defined by that broad keyword. It will be a number between 0 and 5000 (some markets may top out above 5000, but that will be rare). Try this exercise with different markets, and especially with different variations of your main keywords. Which appears more profitable: car insurance or auto insurance? Back pain or back ache? Beekeeper or apiarist? 

What sort of TMH are you looking for? The longer you do this, the better your feel will become, but for right now you can follow Glenn’s rule of thumb: Adwords beginners should enter niche markets with TMHs between 100 and 200. At 200, the markets become more competitive, and below 100, there’s not enough money to go around. One exception to this rule is the “dollars for dimes” market. If you’re helping people make or save money, you can probably make a go of it with a TMH between 50 and 200.

How many times people searched for keywords related to your business

In the movie Field of Dreams (how many times people searched for keywords related to your business), the Ray Kinsella character builds a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield based on a voice that mysteriously repeats, “If you build it, he will come.” That philosophy made for a great movie, but I don’t recommend it as a customer-acquisition strategy. If you build it, you’re probably end up with a garage full of it unless you take the time to figure out whether anybody’s going to want it enough to pay for it. 

 

  

Ken McCarthy, creator of The System Seminar for Online Marketing (thesystemseminar.org), once asked during a lecture, “If you were an Olympic diver, what would be the most important skill you could possess?” The answers varied the ability to hold a triple gainer, strong core alignment, powerful legs, and so on but Ken kept shaking his head no to each try. Finally, when we were getting really frustrated, he shared his answer: “The ability to tell if there’s enough water in the pool before diving.”

In other words, find out if there’s a market before you commit large amounts of time and money to creating a business or a product (or to learning fancy marketing tricks to attract buyers). As Perry Marshall points out, amateur marketers create a product and then look for people to sell it to while professional marketers find customers and then look for something to sell them. Whether you are starting a new venture online, or you have an existing business that you’re looking to expand online through Adwords, don’t spend any time writing ads or creating Web sites or sourcing products or setting up factories or hiring employees or printing letterhead until you’ve looked into the pool and determined that you can dive without hitting the concrete floor at 60 miles per hour.

In the old days of business, that sort of market research was a drag. Laborintensive, expensive, imprecise, and slow. But if you want to sell online through paid search, you can save yourself months of agony and thousands of dollars in less time than it takes to fly from Bath, New York to Bath, England.

Determining market size by spying on searches

Would you like to know how many times people searched for keywords related to your business last month? How about which keywords were the most popular? And suppose you could do it in about 20 seconds are you willing to spend the time before setting up your AdWords campaigns? The number of searches is a critical number if you plan to make AdWords a significant part of your business acquisition strategy. Think Yellow Pages again if no one is looking for the listing Unicycles, then a unicycle shop that relies on the Yellow Pages is going to have trouble paying the rent. Of course, many items and services are sold that aren’t searched for just not with AdWords. For example, lots of people buy CDs with guided meditations. But very few people searched for them (about four a day), so you could reasonably expect one sale every one to two months from AdWords traffic if your ad and Web site were very good.

Estimating profitability by snooping on your competitors’ keyword bids

Most smart businesses will spend money on customer acquisition until they reach the break-even point. If you know that every time a Google user visits your Web page, you make 35 cents (on average, not for every single visitor), and you have the ability to sell additional products and services to that customer in the future, you probably would be willing to pay 35 cents to get the Google user to visit. That is, you’re willing to break even on the first sale to gain a valuable business asset: a customer with whom you can build a relationship. 

If you are selling a product that promises customers will save or make money by using it, you can usually charge more for it than if the product does not promise financial reward. It’s hard to translate money into happiness. It’s easy to compare the price of the product (say, a $750 Adwords telephone consultation with me) with the thousands of dollars you’ll save on your AdWords campaigns. That’s why marketing consultants make more than life coaches. Keep this distinction in mind as you explore your markets. If the average bid is under a dime, you can assume that very few people have figured out how to sell high-ticket or high-margin products or services. For example, about 75,000 people search for home remedies each month, yet the average bid hovers around 10 cents. Home remedy seekers are do-ityourselfers, looking for cheap and ingenious tips rather than expensive do-itfor- me solutions. Compare that to starting a business, which goes for over two dollars a click. This comparison points out an important distinction between markets: the “buying dollars for dimes” market versus everything else.

In some markets, bid prices bear little relation to the value of a visitor. Big companies (which I define as any organization where the person in charge of AdWords campaigns isn’t using a personal credit card to pay) tend to overbid. Some businesses are so good at earning money from visitors that they can afford to lose money to acquire a customer. But in general, the average bid price for a keyword gives you a good idea how much a click is worth, on average, to your competitors. 

Google doesn’t share its bid prices publicly, but you can estimate them using the Traffic Estimator tool in your AdWords control panel. The tool is erratic in its ability to predict your actual bid prices, but as long as you’re using it to compare markets in a very preliminary “Is this worth my time?” sort of way, you needn’t worry about pinpoint accuracy.

Adwords main campaign summary page lists your campaigns

The main campaign summary page lists your campaigns and gives summary data about each of them. When you create your second campaign, all the column headings (Campaign Name, Current Status, and so on) become clickable so you can sort your campaigns in various ways. For example, you probably want the campaigns that cost the most to be in your face more; click the Cost heading to sort from most to least costly. Click Cost again to reverse the order. 

Campaign Name 

 

By default, AdWords assigns your campaign exciting and informative names like Campaign #1 and Campaign #2. For your own sanity, please replace these generic names with descriptions that will still make sense when you’re running dozens of campaigns at once. You can change the name of a campaign by selecting the check box next to the name and then clicking the Edit Settings button above the list of campaigns. 

Current Status

Campaigns can be active, paused, or deleted by checking the box next to the campaign or campaigns you want to change, and clicking the Pause, Resume or Delete buttons above the list of campaign names. 

- Active: Active campaigns currently display your ads to searchers. They cost you money and bring visitors to your Web site. 

- Paused: Paused campaigns are on hold, but can be reactivated by a single click. Pausing a campaign automatically pauses all the ad groups in that campaign. No impressions, no clicks, no visitors. 

- Deleted: Deleted campaigns can also be reactivated by a single click. So what’s the difference between pausing and deleting a campaign? Beats me. If you delete a campaign, you can’t actually make it go away. You can hide it by choosing Show All But Deleted Campaigns from the drop-down list that currently reads Show All Campaigns. This can be helpful if you don’t want to clutter your screen with old campaigns, but still want to see active and paused campaigns. Also, it’s helpful to delete campaigns if you’re writing Adwords For Dummies and you don’t want the world to see every detail of your AdWords account in your screen shots. 

Current Budget

Google shows you the daily budget you set for each campaign. It’s grayed out and bracketed in paused and deleted campaigns. You can change your daily budget for any campaign by checking the box next to the campaign name and clicking the Edit Settings button above the list of campaigns. 

Clicks

A click represents one person clicking your ad and arriving on your landing page. Google doesn’t count multiple clicks from the same computer on the same day (or tries very hard not to) that’s so your competitors can’t sit behind their desks and develop carpal tunnel syndrome trying to bankrupt you by clicking your ad repeatedly. Two clicks equals two unique visitors to your site.

Impr.

Impr. is short for impressions, or the number of times your ad was included on a page that Google showed to a searcher. 

CTR

CTR (Click-Through Rate) is the ratio of clicks to impressions, expressed as a percentage. It’s one of your most important AdWords numbers, so if you’re confused, take a little time to get clear. You can calculate CTR by dividing clicks by impressions. For example, if 200 people see your ad, and 12 of them click it, here’s the math:  

12 ÷ 200 = .06 = 6.00% 

You’d then brag at the AdWords Saloon, “My CTR is six percent.” And everyone would understand that your ad was so compelling, 6 out of every 100 people who saw it ended up on your Web site. 

Avg. CPC

The Avg. CPC (Cost Per Click) column tells you how much, on average, you paid Google to get a visitor to your Web site. You may have different average CPCs by campaign, ad-group, keyword, and ad. A big part of AdWords management is deleting or improving elements of your advertising that cost you more than you make back, so your average click cost is an important metric.

Cost

Your cost is simply all the money you’ve spent on clicks. In this screen, it’s broken down by campaign. When you drill deeper, you can see how much each ad and each individual keyword costs you. (After you’ve set up conversion tracking. 

You can change the date range in the All Campaigns or any other view by selecting one of the presets in the drop-down list just below the date, or by selecting the lower radio button and inputting any two dates. For some reason, Google insists that your start date be before your end date (that’s a little un-quantum-physics, don’t you think?). Get into the habit of checking your date range first, whenever you work on campaign management. Otherwise you panic if you see only six clicks, when the cause isn’t a broken campaign, but a view set to Today instead of This Month. 

Individual Campaign view

Click your campaign name to see your account at the ad-group level. You can see all your ad groups’ statistics, including two new columns: Default Bid and Avg. Pos. 

- Default Bid: Your default bid is the maximum CPC you selected when you created the account. You can change this bid for specific campaigns, the ad groups, or even individual keywords. You can also bid more or less based on the source of the traffic: Google, search partners, or content partners. 

- Avg. Pos: The average position of your ad refers to where it appears in relation to all other ads showing for the same keyword. At the ad-group level, an average position of 5.7 means that on average, your ad shows most often in position 6, less often in position 5, and occasionally higher or lower. If your average position is greater than 8, your ads are not showing nearly as much as they might only very determined searchers ever go on to the second page of Google results. You can see some trends, even with extremely small numbers. For example, my new Cold Calls ad group has received 2 clicks out of 41 impressions, for a rather nice 4.87% CTR. This CTR translates into 49 visitors to my Web site for every thousand people who view the ad after searching for keywords in the Cold Calls ad group. Each click cost me just under $0.20 on average, so I can expect to pay $9.80 for those 49 visitors.

Setting Up Your Adwords Standard Edition Account

If you already have a Starter Edition account, you see Google’s pitch to try the full-featured Standard Edition front and center every time you log in. If that’s you, keep reading. If you’ve decided to jump right into the Standard Edition, good for you skip to the “Opening a new Standard Edition account” section, later in this article.

Graduating from the Starter Edition

You can graduate from the Starter Edition to the Standard Edition at any time, simply by clicking the link at the bottom of any page of your account. On the next page, review the benefits of the upgrade, and note the warning at the bottom: You can’t go home to the Starter Edition again. When you’re ready to take the leap (this really isn’t a big deal, I promise), click Continue. The next page reminds you yet again that the change to Standard Edition is permanent. Boldly click the Yes, Graduate link and hum “Pomp and Circumstance” as the next page loads. Congratulations, you’ve done it! Skip to the “Running Mission Control with the Campaign Management Tab” section, later in this article, to find out how to use your awesome new powers responsibly. (Can you tell I just watched Spider-Man 3?) 

Opening a new Standard Edition account

If you’ve decided to jump straight into the Standard Edition, follow these steps: 

1. Open your Web browser and go to http://adwords.google.com.  

 

  

2. (Optional) Choose a language other than English (US) from the dropdown list at the top right, and Google will translate the page into that language. 

3. Click the Start button at the top right. (Sometimes the button is labeled Click To Begin or Let’s Get Started. I’ve never seen it read Drink Me, but I’m hopeful . . . .) 

4. Select Standard Edition and click the Continue button. 

5. (Optional) Select one or more languages from the list box. If you’ll be advertising exclusively in English, do nothing. To choose multiple languages, hold down the Ctrl key while you click (for PC users) or the Ô key (for Mac users). 

6. Leave the Countries and Territories radio button selected, and click the Continue button. With the Standard Edition, you can target your ads with flashlight-like (not really laser-like) precision. 

7. Select the country or countries where you’d like your ads to be seen: 

a. Select the country in the Available Countries and Territories list box, and then click the Add button to copy your selection to the Selected Countries and/or Territories list box. Select multiple countries just as you would choose more than one language, by Ctrl+clicking.

b. To remove a country or territory from the Selected Countries and/or Territories list box, select it and click the Remove button. 

c. When you’re done, click the Continue button. 

8. Fill in the text boxes to create an ad; click the Continue button when you’re finished. 

Now Google wants you to create your first ad. What, you’re not ready to whip out a masterpiece of persuasive prose at the drop of a cursor? No worries. Type pretty much anything here you won’t show it to the world for a while yet. The following list provides guidance on what to enter in those text boxes: 

• In the Headline text box, type the problem or opportunity. 

• In the Description Line 1 text box, enter a short description of big benefit. 

• In the Description Line 2 text box, write a short description of your product/service. 

• In the Display URL text box, type your Web site’s name. 

• In the Destination URL text box, enter the URL of the exact Web page you want customers to visit first. 

The display URL is what your prospect sees in the ad itself. It must be “real” enough to go somewhere relevant if they were to type it in, but it doesn’t have to be the same as the actual destination URL. Think of the display URL as the name of your online store; would you rather buy a CN Netcom amplifying phone headset? You can use the destination URL to track your Web-site traffic and to show different pages to different markets. But please don’t sweat it at this point. Just write something that doesn’t violate Google’s editorial or content guidelines and move on.

9. Type your chosen keywords into the list box and click the Continue button when you’re finished. For now, just type a single keyword that someone searching for your business might type; for example: 

used cars 

glow in the dark poker chips 

functional fitness training 

Next to the box where you input keywords, Google asks if you want more. If your URLs point to a working Web site, Google quickly scans the site and suggests other keywords, based on your Web site copy and Google’s database of related searches. If it can’t find your Web site, you can enter your main keyword and Google will give you variation and related searches from its database.

Google is, at its core, a very large data processor. By tracking the behavior of searchers, it gets smarter all the time and can offer better suggestions to advertisers and better search results to shoppers. Google notices, for example, how long a person will stay away after clicking an ad or free listing. If you click my ad, look at my Web page for 3 seconds and then click back to Google for another search, that tells Google you didn’t think much of my site. Enough data like that, and my bid prices will increase to penalize me for not giving Google’s users what they want. The keyword-suggestion tool can be helpful, but don’t use it right now. Until you understand how to create tightly focused ad groups, the tool will create a messy and unfocused campaign. Use the tool later to refine your campaigns. Right now, just pick one or two closely related terms, if you like, and continue. 

10. Select your currency from the Pay for This Account Using drop-down list, and then type how much you’re willing to spend in the Enter Your Daily Budget and the Enter Your Maximum CPC text boxes. Ready to have some fun? It’s trial-and-error time, thanks to Google’s Traffic Estimator. Enter any numbers you like for daily budget and maximum CPC and click View Traffic Estimator. It will show you estimated CPC, the position of your ad (1 puts you at the top of the first page, 9–10 put you at or near the bottom of the first search-results page or top of the second page, and 11+ puts your ad squarely on page 2 or worse), the likely number of clicks per day, and your daily cost. 

Typically, an ad on page 2 gets one-tenth the impressions of the same ad on page 1, so (unless the clicks are ridiculously expensive on the first page), page 1 is where you want to be. To view the maximum traffic you could possibly expect from that keyword, enter a maximum CPC of $100 and a daily budget of $10,000.

Make sure you change these back before continuing! Google will show you the most you’ll pay for a click if your ad is in the top position, and the maximum number of clicks each keyword will generate in a day. Keep in mind, your ad may out- or under-perform this estimate, depending on how well it connects with your prospects. Settle on a CPC you can live with financially that puts your ad somewhere on the first page. You can make adjustments when you have actual results to base them on.  

11. Click the Continue button. 

12. Review your selections on the next page, decide whether you want e-mail from Google about Adwords strategies and tips, choose an appropriate answer from the How Did You First Hear about Google Adwords drop-down list, and finally, click the Continue to Signup button. 

If you don’t have a Google Account, you’re prompted to create one. If you already have a Google Account for Gmail or other Google services, you can use it for your Adwords account. If you are a Gmail junkie, for example, you’ll want to connect the accounts so you don’t sign yourself out of AdWords every time you check your mail. For more information about navigating the Google Account business. 

After you click the link in your activation e-mail, you’ll get to the login page. Enter the e-mail address and password you selected, and you’re ready to explore the Standard Edition AdWords control panel. Your ads won’t show up on-screen until you activate your account by giving Google five bucks and a working credit-card number. You can do that now by clicking the link in the warning box with the reddish-pink background and following the account activation wizard (Google is very user-friendly when it comes to taking your money), or take the tour first and pay later. Even if you activate now, you can pause your campaigns so you don’t get charged for a lot of traffic before you know what you’re doing.

Activating Your Adwords Account and campaigns

Are you ready to spend some coin and take your campaign live? Click Activate Account and complete the form that comes up.

To activate your account, follow these steps: 

1. Use the drop-down list to select your billing country. The most common choices are at the top, followed by long list of just about every country there is. 

2. Select your country from the Time Zone Country or Territory dropdown list, and then select your time zone from the Time Zone dropdown list. Google won’t let you change your time zone once you’ve set it, so be careful here. No second chances!  

 

  

3. Enter the promotional code at the back of this book to recoup the cost of this book in free clicks. 

4. Click the Continue button. 

5. Choose a payment method. 

Google charges your credit card on a pay-as-they-click system. Chances are, your only real choice here is a credit card: JCB, American Express, MasterCard, or Visa. I spent about 10 minutes searching for a country that allowed other options, and gave up after pretending to be from the USA, Canada, UK, Norway, Netherlands, China, Azerbaijan, and Brunei Darussalam. (If you happen to live in a country from which Google accepts PayPal or silver or yak cheese, please let me know for the second edition.)

6. Accept Google’s Terms and Conditions. Google’s long and complex Terms and Conditions constitute a legal contract, so read it carefully before agreeing. I’m not a lawyer, so you’ll get no guidance from me on this one. I just signed up and hoped for the best. 

7. Click OK. You’ll be taken to a screen where you can fill out billing information. If you’ve ever bought anything online, that process will be straightforward and simple. 

Google’s preferred phone-number format includes dashes, but no parentheses or periods: 

919-555-3167 

not 

(919) 555-3167 

Once you complete the form, your account is live and your ad should start showing on the right side of the Google search results page for the keywords you’ve selected. 

After you complete your account setup, wait 15 minutes, and then browse to www.google.com and do a search on your keyword. Look at the top and the right of the search results page. If you don’t see your ad, scroll down and click the More Sponsored Links link. Keep going through the pages until you see your ad or you get to the end of the listings. This exercise gives you an idea of the competitiveness of your market. If you see a lot of competitors, don’t get discouraged. It means a lot of people think they can make money here. The information in this book will put you way ahead of most of them. When you see no or few competitors for a keyword, that may indicate a market that’s too small or too unresponsive.

When nobody can see your ad

If your ad doesn’t appear in the right column within 30 minutes of account activation, you may have a problem. Usually, correcting it is simple once you’ve figured out what it is. If your ad isn’t receiving any impressions (indicated by a 0 in the last row of the Impressions column), you may be a victim of one of the following: 

- Editorial disapproval: Have you violated Google’s editorial guidelines? If you throw exclamation points around like crazy, promise “the best” or “the cheapest” stuff, capitalize like you’re screaming in a chat room, use copyrighted terms, offer cheap drugs from Canada or $25 Rolexes or nuclear-weapon-making instructions, or commit any of a dozen other infractions, your ad won’t show. 

Google lays out their rules here: 

• Editorial Guidelines: https://adwords.google.com/select/ guidelines.html 

• Content Guidelines: https://adwords.google.com/select/ contentpolicy.html 

- Low ad rank: Based on your monthly budget, which you set when you created the account, and your optional choice of a maximum bid price, which you can edit at any time, your ad may be relegated to page 19 of search results, the equivalent of scribbling it onto the back of a gas station receipt in yellow crayon and tossing it into a dumpster. In the Standard Edition, you can see exactly in what positions your ads show. At this point, you can try raising your minimum bid and monthly budget and see if that gets you onto the first page of search results. 

- Poor keyword performance: If your keyword is pink slippers big enough to fit an African elephant or some other phrase that few or no people would ever search for, you could wait a long time before seeing a single click.

When just you can’t see your ad

Sometimes your ad is receiving impressions, but try as you might, you can’t find it yourself. Before you start humming the Twilight Zone theme, consider the possibilities described in the following subsections. Google thinks you’re searching outside your geo-targeting Remember when you first set up your account and you had to choose a geographic location within which to advertise? Google may be interpreting the information it’s reading on your computer (specifically, its Internet Protocol [IP] address, to mean you yourself are outside of your targeted area). IP addresses are loosely connected to different parts of the world. To find out where the Internet thinks you are, go to ipligence.com and scroll down until you can see the map at the bottom right.

There are many reasons why Google could get confused about where in the world you are. First, IP addresses aren’t exact they’re not like Zip or postal codes. Second, if you are connecting to the Internet through a service that’s somewhere other than where you are, Google can be misled. Third, little green aliens from outer space sometimes take over my fingers when I’m typing stuff I really don’t know anything about so that the paragraphs look long enough to be authoritative.

Impressions clicks and cost of you Adwords campaign

These three crucial numbers, are at the heart of your campaign. Smart advertisers pay close attention to those numbers to save time, money, and heartache. 

Impressions 

  

Technically, an impression is a single instance of a search results page that contains your ad. It doesn’t mean the searcher has seen the ad, just a search results page with your ad on it. If the searcher has a small screen with high resolution and your ad appears below the scroll (meaning they’d have to scroll down in order to view it), it’s still counted as an impression. If they click the first listing they see, before they’ve looked at yours, it still counts.

Impressions can indicate the potential size of your Adwords market. If you are bidding on popular keywords, you can expect lots of impressions. But if your bidding strategy places your ad very low in the ad rankings, and it shows up on page 4 of the listings, you’ll see very few impressions even though the market itself may be huge. 

Clicks

A click is a single instance of a unique visitor clicking your ad and arriving at your landing URL. Clicks are good, right? The more clicks, the more visitors to your Web site. Well, not so fast. Clicks cost you money, remember? You make that investment back only when the visitor buys something from you. 

The goal of your ad is twofold: 

- To get all the people who will eventually buy from you to click your ad 

- To discourage all the people who will never buy from you from clicking your ad 

Obviously, you can’t know in advance who will buy and who won’t. But you can make some pretty good guesses until you graduate to the Standard Edition and implement conversion tracking. For example, if you’re advertising a pony tail holder worn by Paris Hilton, and you mention Paris Hilton in your ad and select Paris Hilton as a keyword, chances are you’ll find a lot of visitors who have no interest in your hair accessory but a lot of interest in, shall we say, a multimedia Paris Hilton experience.

As you gain Adwords experience, you’ll learn how to turn the prospect tap higher or lower to maximize profits. 

Cost

Your cost equals the total number of clicks multiplied by the average cost per click. If you are paying $2.05 per click and your campaign has racked up 17 clicks, your cost so far will be $2.05 × 17 = $34.85. You should track how long it takes you to use up your monthly budget. If it’s all gone in 3 days, you’re looking at 27 days with no activity. You should also track, as best you can, whether an increase in Adwords spending produces more sales and profits for you. After you graduate to the Standard Edition, you’ll benefit from much more powerful reporting tools that show you the profitability of each ad and each keyword. You can change the date range to see how your campaign has performed at different times.  

On the campaign management Control Panel, click the Change link next to the date range at the top left of the green header. You’ll be given a choice of presets: all time, today, yesterday, last 7 days, last week (Mon-Sun), last business week (Mon-Fri), this month, or last month. You can alternatively click the second radio button to select any range you want. This second option is useful if you’ve changed something on January 17 and you want to compare the 5 days before and after the change. The statistics don’t represent what your prospects are doing in real time. Google cops to a three-hour delay in click reporting. You can see impressions faster than that, usually. But don’t panic because your expected traffic surge hasn’t materialized two minutes after writing that irresistible ad. Patience, Grasshopper. 

Graphs and reports

If you’re a visual sort of person, check out the Graphs tab on the right of the green header bar. You will be shown clicks, cost, and impressions per day. If you want to view your campaign data in beautiful printed form for some late night reading in bed, or want to share some statistics with colleagues without having them log in to the account, you can download reports of impressions, clicks, and costs by keyword and ad. You get a choice of formats; chances are, if you have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer, you’ll choose .csv (for Excel).