Written by james | 03 February 2010
Posted in S.E.O

Are you paying too much for your Google AdWords? Is the pay-per-click advertising burning a hole through your profits? Find out here how you can set the record straight and get more traffic response with less cost. We all know pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can cost a lot, and how do you make a good profit when you’re paying through the roof for advertising? It's not simple; it requires technical skill, creativity and trading skills.

You need creativity so you can write good adverts and headlines for those ads. If you can do this well, then it will increase your click-through rate. The technical skill is required to perfectly organise all the keywords that you bid on and to make different groups for the keywords with separate copies of the adverts for relevancy to those keywords, also with relevant landing pages. Finally trading skills are a necessity, as you need to manage your bids to keep costs low and managing what different bids on different keywords you have and need.

The fact that for AdWords, there is usually just one person operating and managing it and they usually only focus on building skill for just one of the attributes listed above, but you need to focus on all three as a whole, that’s how you do best with cost and customer rates. You need to work with an open mind towards all the areas of PPC advertising. We will now cover a few ways to help you train all of these skills and tools/metrics that will help you in the future.

AdWords comes with two essential measurements you can use to gauge your progress and growth. These are; Quality Score (QS) and Click Through Rate (CTR). CTR shows how attractive and relevant your ad is to searchers by giving you the percentage of people that see your ad and then click on it. QS shows you the overall quality of the ad based on your CTR, the relevance of the landing page to your advert and the relevance of the body of your ad to the search terms you are bidding on.

The body and title of your ad should always contain your main keyword, no exceptions. When you include the main keyword, it makes your ad more relevant which will increase your CTR and QS substantially. It does also help if the keyword is included in the URL of the landing page, you will see this in many, if not all, of the most successful PPC adverts. Also, make sure you include a call to action (e.g. the word ‘buy’), something that indicates they are going to get a good quality product/service, something to imply they will find what they want and something that gives the impression of a fast, reliable service/delivery. Just try to get as much of that as possible into the body of your ad. It’s easier than it sounds once you know what you are doing and have had a little practise.

As for trading skills, you need to master the different match types of Google AdWords. This will allow you to keep the costs of your ads down and help you get better value advertising. There are three match types, shown with different punctuation that AdWords uses to tell the difference:

• Broad match- this is shown without punctuation and will include your ad on searches that contain your keywords anywhere in the text, relevant keyword alterations, and ‘expanded match’, which includes plurals and suffixed/prefixed versions of the keywords. This can include searches with one small plural part of your keyword(s) that may not be relevant, so you may need to include negative keywords
• Phrase match- this is shown with double inverted commas, e.g. “key words”.  This makes your ad show up when the search term includes your keywords in the exact order you put them, for instance the search terms ‘discount key words’, ‘key words specialist’ or ‘key words wholesale’ would display your ad on the results page. But ‘key lime words’, ‘word keys’ or ‘key and words supplies’ would not include your ad in the results.
• Exact match- this is shown in square brackets, e.g. [key words]. This will only show your ad if somebody searches for your exact keyword/string of keywords contained in your bid, e.g. ‘key words’ will be the only search term that will show your ad on the result page.

That covers the different types of matches, but for maximum relevancy and better adverts, you need to do different ads for the different types of products/services you offer. For instance if you offer different varieties of a product e.g. wine, there should be a different ad for; ‘white wine’, ‘red wine’, ‘rose wine’ and ‘sparkling wine and champagne’, or any other popular varieties. This will give you a more relevant ad for the different varieties people are searching for which makes it more likely that your ad will be clicked on.

Some keywords that contain commonly used words like colours or words like ‘luxury’, ‘quality’, etc. should not be used for broad match, as it will make the ad show on result pages of irrelevant search terms. Instead do those on phrase match and include a more general, but more relevant term on broad match for a more general extra ad, this will allow you to get the amount of people from broad search but with the relevancy of phrase match, which is much better than either alone. Exact search tends to be much too restrictive and does not really offer much traffic compared to other match types.

When you use negative keywords, remember the expanded broad search function does not work, so you need to make sure you include the plural negative keywords as well as the singular. Now you also need to be able to arrange your different bids into ad groups, keeping each group relevant to the varieties, i.e. an ad group per variety, keeping the ad for that variety relevant. Try to keep them efficiently organised for the best value.

Overall, you need to be able to keep the ad groups organised and relevant, you need to write good, appealing adverts, keep the landing page and whole advert relevant and manage your keyword match types. This will give your adverts the edge, and this will increase your traffic, sales and customer rates while lowering your cost, thus increasing profit significantly. Good luck and have fun making/editing your Google AdWords adverts.