The budget is where so many advertisers fail.
People new to Adwords quickly see their budget eaten up and dismiss the whole Adwords system. When in truth if they understood the system better and made a few small changes they would see their campaigns improve and their budget costs drop.
A successful campaign starts with the interface between you and your potential client the Ad. I’ll be discussing Ad copywriting in the next post.
For now here’s how to set and manage your budget properly.
This could save you a fortune -
Do you advertise on the Adwords ‘content’ network?
Do you even know what this is?
You can find it in ‘Edit Campaign Settings’.
You could be haemorrhaging cash here without even knowing it.
The content network will see your ad appear right across the Internet on sites related to your chosen keywords via Google’s Adsense program.
The problem is that in most cases there’s a huge difference between your ad on the search results page and your ad on someone else’s site. This difference is in the state of mind of the person that will see your ad.
A person seeing your ad in Google’s search results is proactively looking for what you’re offering, at least if you’ve got your keywords right, and so they are much more likely to buy or complete the desired action on your site.
Somebody coming across your ad whilst ‘browsing’ the Net, and that’s the key difference, is much less likely to complete the desired action. Since they are not proactively seeking out what you offer but instead casually come across your ad as they surf the Net, consequently their response will be much poorer.
I suggest you immediately turn of the option to appear on the content network. It’s very easy to do simply uncheck the checkbox found in your campaign settings at the top right.
Your daily budget
Start with a high budget to test and have your ad show the maximum number of times. This will build your CTR (Click Through Rate) for which Google will reward you by effectively letting you lower your bid without affecting your ad position.

Google’s aim is to return the most accurate result for any search. If your ad gets lots of clicks, a good CTR, logically it must be relevant and effective. The Adwords system will then raise your ad position or at a minimum allow you to reduce your bid without penalizing you by dropping the ad position.

To begin with you may want to spend less but a better attitude is to spend smarter.

Successful advertisers typically turn the daily budget up to the ‘max’ in their campaign settings area, based on Google’s suggested daily maximum. Cost control is achieved through pausing poor-performing ads and groups, or lowering bids – not by cutting your daily budget.

If you’re not appearing on the front page for a search you can’t measure ROI accurately for your keywords. You MUST pay through the nose to begin with.
But be careful not to appear at No.1 as it can attract the casual clicker.

After initial testing if you’ve written a good ad and are getting good CTR then you should see your ad hold it’s own when you lower your budget.
The idea is to get maximum exposure of your ad to better track keyword performance.
Don’t underbid your Ad group because you’re thinking of your “maximum bid” as your actual bid.

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I’ll make this as quick and easy as I can.
Each campaign should be broken down in to Ad groups. An Ad group sits within a campaign and you can have up to 100 Ad groups in any one campaign.
Arrange your keyword lists into clusters e.g.
Grp1
Product Names – Model numbers – plurals – reverse wording etc
This is your root group with your core keywords.
Grp2
More about this below
Grp3
Domain names and variations www and without etc – company names, company domain names, domain names and variations e.g. mydomain.com www.mydomain etc,
Grp4 – superlatives & related
Best, cheap, cheapest, best buy
Grp5

No space, typo’s, hyphenated
Etc. etc. refer back to the keyword list chapter for more grouping ideas.
Essentially you should logically group certain keywords together. The above groups are only suggestions. You could take it further and have one set of keywords per Ad group: -
Grp1 Main keywords Grp2 Model numbers Grp3 Plurals Etc. etc.
But then management becomes time consuming. Try to keep the Ad group number down by grouping keywords in a logical manner.
Now Grp2. I’m jumping ahead a bit here since we haven’t discussed ad writing or campaign set up yet.
Run your ads for a while I suggest at least a couple of weeks at the maximum budget. More on budgets too in a future post. After a couple of weeks you will have a number of keywords that are performing well for you. Or at least you can see they are the potential best performers with the most searches even if you don’t get any clicks.
Take these keywords and place them in Grp2. Only select regular keywords, by that I mean no typos, hyphenated or ’space less’ keywords / phrases, domain names, company names etc. leave those where they are.
Grp2 is where you will use a technique to thrash your competition, explode your CTR and get those visitors to customer conversions really flying.

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Your keyword list is the backbone of all your Pay Per Click campaigns. You need to properly source and research relevant keywords for your market. Develop a good long list. Go deep and go wide, by that I mean explore every avenue and every avenue off every avenue etc. etc.
Here’s a brief example of how to expand your lists by exploring related
avenues. For this example I’ll use mortgage as the root keyword.

Mortgage is a very competitive keyword because the commissions are very good.
So how do you get in on the action without paying through the nose?
Create your first list open Notepad and get pasting keywords. Think of different ways your prospect can interpret mortgage e.g. best loan, buy house, bad credit mortgage, no status loan, home finance, house purchase finance etc. This really is only marginally removed from the main keywords you should dig deeper still.
Open another Notepad document and next try expanding into types of mortgage – interest only, flexible etc. Now take these open a third Notepad and mix them up with your first list as you do this you’ll find avenues of keyword clusters present themselves from single keywords e.g. flexible home finance, interest only house loan, best flexible mortgage etc.
Here’s another avenue to explore. You could set up an Ad group focused entirely on mortgage company names take that further still and add a .com to the name or a co.uk or your own countries extension e.g. www.somemortgagecompany.com . Open up another Notepad document for this.

It doesn’t matter if this domain doesn’t exist, people type these in to Google so it’s possible you can pick up very low cost traffic with these keywords.
Broadly speaking stay clear of the general keywords and dig a little deeper expand on related terms or, here’s a good one, rephrase those terms. To briefly go back to our example above ‘best flexible mortgage’ could also be entered as ‘best mortgage flexible’ or ‘flexible best mortgage’ or even ‘mortgage flexible best’ you get the idea. Better open another Notepad for these.
Put yourself in your prospects shoes. What would they search for? How would they type it into Google?
Now for even more ideas, check out these keyword goldmines –

Be sure to separate out all these keywords in to different lists in a number of Notepad documents. You will be setting up different ad groups for each. It’s important to not simply drop them all into one campaign together. I will be explaining more about this in another post.

Try combinations of words both forward and backwards e.g. buy widget, widget buy.
Check your site Log files, they’re a great source of information on your site visitors and they’ll tell you what keywords people used to find you.
Try regional targeting; think of different words phrases for describing a region e.g. New York, east coast. Try long lists of more regional (town, city, state, province) words e.g. buy car New York, Canadian life insurance etc then go back to the top and try spelling errors, no spaces, plurals etc on these. Read magazines or sites relating to your market or the market you are promoting, look for industry jargon or buzz words you could utilize.
Try searches for your main keywords on the search engines and see what related terms pop up. Check the Meta tags on your competitor’s site. Check the copy on your competitor’s site.

Ok back to those keyword lists. I mention advertising on brand names above, Google is getting stricter on advertising on company brand names e.g. you can’t use ebay in your keyword list and you haven’t been able to do for sometime now. But as things stand it’s not quiet closed off entirely but it’s not far off. Just be aware of this.

A fantastic way to explore those keyword avenues mentioned earlier is to utilize a thesaurus. Here is a link to a great thesaurus resource -  http://dictionary.reference.com.

Going back to my mortgage example. A quick thesaurus search on mortgage gives me -
balance, bond, capital outlay, continuance, debenture, extension, instalment plan, lien, loan, mortgage, on account, on tick, plastic, respite, securities, stock, surplus cash, tab, trust, wealth.
Not all entirely useful but I could expand on instalment and build a collection of words around that e.g. low mortgage instalments, mortgage instalment table, mortgage instalment payments.
Do you see where this is going?
I trust that gives you an idea of the power of going deep and wide on your keyword list building.
OK so you’ve got your lists. Now what?
You now need to further qualify your customers by adding negative keywords to your campaigns e.g. if you are selling a product you don’t want people clicking on your ad looking for something free, or keywords that may qualify your ads for a product you’re not selling e.g. digital camera case.
Case is no good if you’re only selling cameras. You can easily add negative qualifiers right across your campaigns now. This is pretty straightforward and I won’t go into detail here.
Most of all when creating your keyword lists BE CREATIVE there are over 200 million searches on Google everyday and people have their own idiosyncrasies. They WILL NOT always search for the most obvious terms related to your business. In fact I came across statistics from Google recently that stated a surprisingly high number of search terms entered in to the search engine are unique and have never been entered before!! Even with over 200 million searches a day.
OK that’s it for now. This is a fairly long post but it has to be, keyword sourcing is the backbone of any good PPC campaign. Without a good keyword list you’ll get nowhere.
In the next post I’ll go into more depth on how to organize the lists of keywords you create into ad groups and then we’ll get right into the Adwords system and I’ll explain the fundamentals of setting up a campaign, before I move onto some stunning tips for Ad writing.

Be ready to stomp on your competition.

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