This is a very challenging post. I’ll try to explain my step-by-step Pay per Click (PPC) system in one single article (and I want to keep it short). This is the same system we’ve used to get millions of qualified visitors for pennies. I’m really excited about writing this article and I think you’ll love it.

Keyword Research

• Use the Google Tool to get keyword suggestions for your site.
  
• Run the same tool on your competitors’ websites!
• Use the same tool for “Descriptive words or phrases” as opposed to the “Website content” feature.
  
• Use WordTracker to get more keyword ideas.
• Use SpyFu to find out what keywords your competitors are using and get ideas from their campaigns. Looks for the 800-lb. gorilla in your market and run SpyFu on their domain. They’re very likely to have a huge budget and a very optimized campaign. Let them do all the research, spend the money and learn from them.
• Get synonyms from Synonyms.com, Thesaurus.com and Quintura.com.
• Get misspellings using this tool. Almost nobody bids on misspellings so you can get clicks for very cheap.
• Bid on competitors’ URLs. They’re dirt cheap and extremely relevant. A lot of people do a Google search for YouTube.com instead of typing www.youtube.com in the address bar.
• Another way to get cheap clicks is by having geo-targeted keywords, such as “Seattle chiropractor”. Make sure that you only bid on the keywords for the areas you serve and that your landing pages contain those keywords. Otherwise, Google might think you’re not relevant and that will hurt your Quality Score.
• Bid on action keywords, like “FIND local chiropractor” and “BUY PlayStation 3″.
• Consider the buying cycle. “Costa Rica beach condos” will get you a lot less traffic than “Costa Rica” but it’ll be a lot more qualified if you rent beach condos. Because you’re paying for each click, you only want qualified traffic.
• Consider “side searches”. Side searches are needs that you can fulfill but so can other products or services. For example, if you have beach condos in Costa Rica, you might want to bid for “honeymoon destinations”.
• A lot of people recommend starting with thousands of keywords. I don’t think this is a good idea because when a campaign is too big, it’s really hard to manage it. Start small. Ten percent of your keywords will drive 90% of your traffic anyway.

Keyword Research for the Content Network
You’ll need a different approach for the Content Network. Some ideas:

• Bid on thought strings. If you sell weight loss pills, try strings like “[brand] didn’t work for me”, “has anyone tried [brand]?”, etc. Look for things people would say in forums, blogs and discussion boards.
• Bid on popular article titles. If there’s a very popular article out there called “The 4-Minute Formula to Lose Weight Eating Chocolate”, bid for it. Your ad will be displayed every time the article gets syndicated on a site running AdSense.
• Do the same thing with book titles.

Campaign Structure and Settings

• Have separate campaigns for search and content networks.
• Have separate campaigns for broad and long-tail keywords. You’ll want to pay less for broad keywords.
• Use the Google AdWords Tracking code to track your campaign performance.
• Choose to show your ads more evenly so it’s easier to split-test them:
  
• Choose the right geo-location for your campaign. This might sound obvious but you’ll be surprised by how many people ship products to the US only but advertise all over the world. If you are a chiropractor who serves the Seattle area, have two campaigns; one targeted to Seattle with keywords like “chiropractor” and “pain treatment” and another one targeted to the whole world with keywords like “Seattle chiropractor” and “pain treatment in Seattle”.
• Choose “Accelerated ad delivery”. The Standard option spreads out your ads throughout the day. That’s not good because when prospects search for your ads, they might not be there. By choosing Accelerated Ad Delivery, your ads will show every time until you hit your daily budget. That way you know when you need to increase your budget.
  
• If you know that most people will buy your product between 10am and 5pm on week days, use ad scheduling.
  
• I set my budgets as high as possible. If a campaign is making me more than $1 for every $1 I invest, I want to invest as much money as Google is willing to take from me. If my campaign is not making me money, then I just kill it. There’s no reason to limit a campaign that is printing you money. Only limit your budget at the beginning, when you’re testing the campaign.
• The best way to figure out how much you should start bidding is by using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. Enter different amounts and see how much traffic you can get for each amount. Run your numbers and figure out what is the perfect bid. If you pay more than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be paying too much and you won’t make a profit. If you pay less than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be leaving a lot of profitable traffic on the table. There’s a sweet spot in between and Google’s tool will help you find it.
• Bids should end in 2 and 7 ($0.12, $0.17, $0.22), etc.
• There are two factors that determine how much you’ll pay for each click: your maximum bid and the Quality Score. The QS is a grade that Google gives to each of your keywords based on how relevant your ads and landing pages are to that keyword. The higher your QS, the lower your cost per click. You need to have your keywords in your ads and the best way to do this is by grouping your keywords into ad groups and writing one ad for each ad group.
• Ideally, you should have one keyword per ad group. But, this is very time consuming. If you have a lot of time, go ahead and do it. If you don’t, this software can do it for you. All the pros use tools like SpeedPPC, but if you’re on a budget you can do it manually the first time. If you don’t have time nor money, you don’t absolutely need one ad for each keyword, but try to group your keywords in groups as small as possible; don’t just throw all your keywords into one ad group.
• Put the three match variations of each keyword into each ad group. For example, in the ad group “Costa Rica Vacations” you want to have the keywords “costa rica vacations” (use quotes for phrase match), [costa rica vacations] (use brackets for exact match) and costa rica vacations (don’t use any special characters for broad match). More on keyword matches here.

Creating Killer PPC Ads

• Include your keywords in your ads (on every line if possible) for higher QS and lower cost per click.
• Use your headline to grab attention, the first line to mention the top benefits of your products and the third line for a clear call to action. You can use the URL line for including keywords and calls to action as well.
  
• Use Digg.com to come out with killer headlines. Look for the headlines with the most diggs.
  
• Tie your ad copy to current events.
  
• Always split-test ads. Have two ads that look almost the same except for one element. Find a winner and then write a new ad to beat it. Keep doing this again and again to constantly improve your click-though rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Start by testing the big stuff (offers, guarantees, marketing message) and move down to the small details. Changing one single word can double or triple your CTR, so test everything. This is a nice tool that allows you to calculate if you have enough data to make a good decision.
• Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This is a feature that includes your keywords in your ads. I used to love it but then I realized that it made some of my ads look really bad if the keywords people searched for weren’t relevant to the ads. Stick to one keyword and one ad per ad group and you’ll do great.
• Use numbers and special characters in your ad ($, #, ®, ©, ¼, &, etc.) They’re a great way to get people’s attention.
• Call your readers. For example, “hey you, skinny man” or “hey you, bankruptcy victim”.
• Use negative ads. For example, “Is Bob’s New Book a Scam? Don’t Buy Bob’s Book Before You Read This”
• Try news-style ads. For example, “62 Year-Old Woman Happy with Husband’s Performance”
• Try tease ads. For example, “The One Secret to Reduce Taxes by 87%. Get It Here for FREE”
• Ask questions: “Are You Sick of Spider Veins?”
• When you write ads for the Content Network, you don’t need to include your keywords. Your goal here is to grab people’s attention, so get controversial, use weird characters and get their attention in any way you can.

The Perfect Landing Page

• Use landing pages; don’t just send people to your home page. The goal of a landing page is to capture leads. After that, you’ll need to do a good job to monetize those leads.
• Avoid big headers and navigation menus. If you need a navigation menu, you can have it in the footer.
• Have an attention-grabbing headline.
• Use bullet points to get your point across.
• Have 1 clear call to action. Make it clear what you want people to do.
• This post will give you copywriting tips.
• This post will help you understand how the subconscious mind works.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

• The best way to ensure you pay as little as possible for your clicks is by using negative keywords effectively. Read this post on PPC negative keywords.
• Eliminate keywords with no impressions after 7 days.
• Eliminate keywords with no clicks after 14 days.
• Eliminate keywords with low conversion rates after 30 days.
• Eliminate keywords with low CTR or write better ads to increase the CTR.
• Eliminate keywords that don’t appear on the first page or increase their bids so they make the first page.
• Use the Opportunities feature to get ideas on how to improve your campaign.
  
• Put keywords with a lot of traffic in their own ad groups and write special ads for each of them.
• Use Google Website Optimizer to test elements on your landing pages (headlines, calls to action, graphics, bullets, guarantees, etc.) This is the best way to increase your conversion rate.
• Pick your winning ads and write new ads to beat the winners.
• After 45 days, once your campaign has built a good record of high CTR and QS, lower your bids by $0.03 every couple of days and keep an eye on your traffic to make sure it doesn’t drop. Most of the time, once a campaign has a good record, you can lower your bids without losing any traffic.
• Look for the “Campaign Limited by Budget” message. If your budget is limiting your campaign, set it extremely high. If you absolutely need to have a budget, lower your bids so you get more traffic for the same amount. Keep lowering your bids until the”Campaign Limited by Budget” message disappears.
• Look for new traffic segments. For example, if you’re a chiropractor and a lot of people see you for their back pain, create a landing page addressing that issue and create a new ad group with back pain-related keywords and ads.
• Compete with yourself. If your campaign is doing great, create a new website (in a new domain) and get almost twice as many leads/sales.
• Buy several domains. Some domain names get 2-4 times as many clicks as others. Keyword-rich domains always win. Domains are only $9/year, so buy a bunch of them and see which one has the highest CTR.
• Don’t limit your campaign to Google. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com also have PPC programs. They’ll send you a lot less traffic, but the conversion rates are usually higher.

How To Ensure an Excellent Quality Score
QS is extremely important. If you have a high QS, your ads could get twice as many clicks as your competitor’s while you pay only half of what he’s paying. In fact, having a poor QS is the reason why most people lose money with PPC, so pay attention and follow these guidelines:

• Have links to a contact us page and a privacy policy page on your landing page.
• Include your keywords in your ads as much as you can. This is where having one ad per keyword makes a lot of sense.
• Include your keywords in your landing pages, but don’t overdo it.
• SEO factors on your landing page are very important. Have a relevant page title, H1 tag, meta description and meta keywords.
• There must be a connection between your ad and your landing page. If your ad promises a downloadable report and your landing page tries to sell a widget, you’ll be in trouble. You can offer whatever you want, just be upfront about it in your ad.
• Avoid “trouble” words like “offer”, “guarantee”, “buy now”, etc. Put these words in images and call the images 1.jpg, 2.gif, etc. Don’t put the trouble words in the images alt tags either.
• For all those images that don’t contain any of the “forbidden” words, use descriptive alt tags.
• If you’re going after very different markets (such as “beach vacations in Costa Rica” and “ski holidays in Colorado”), have individual landing pages for each of your markets so you can keep your QS high.

I hope you guys enjoy this post. It took me a long time to put it together but it was a lot of fun.

I’m really excited about this post because this is something that we’ve been doing for our clients for a long time, but we always considered it to be part of our “secret sauce” and didn’t want to tell anybody.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing “secret” or “super ninja-voodoo” about this trick. In fact, it’s something that Google itself recommends. The thing is, nobody does it!

This trick alone has helped us cut PPC costs by 42% for those clients that were managing their own campaigns or had their campaigns managed by some rookie.

OK, here it goes.

The “trick” involves using negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that, when typed, will stop your ads from displaying. The most common one is “free”. If you sell Metallica DVDs, by using “free” as a negative keyword you can stop your ad from showing when people search for “free Metallica DVDs”.

The question is: how can you come up with the perfect list of negative keywords? There are basically two things you should do:

1. Use Google Keyword Tool
Search for your keywords using Google Tool and spot possible negative keywords. Let’s say you offer luxury rentals in Panama. This is an example of words I would put in my negative keyword bucket:

Your properties are in Panama, Central America, not Panama Florida, so put “Florida” as a negative keyword.

You don’t rent boats or cars, so add “car”, “cars”, “automobile”, “automobiles”, “truck”, “boat” and everything else that can be rented to your negative keywords list.

If you only offer short-term rentals, add “long” to the list too.

Just so you get and idea, this is the first screen of keyword suggestions. You can get thousands of other negative keywords if you keep scrolling down and search for variations of your main keyword.

You must be thinking “if someone wants to rent a boat and they get an ad for property rentals, why would they click on it anyway?” The answer is “most people click first and read second”. And, that’s costing you money.

2. Use Google AdWords Reports
From your AdWords account go to Reporting > Create Report. Choose the Query Performance Report:

Select the date range and choose to see the keywords for all your campaign.

This report will show you the actual terms people search for to find you.

Most advertisers use broad match, which means they’re trusting Google to decide if a search query is relevant to one of their keywords. “Panama plane rentals” and “Panama rentals” are definitely close terms, and if people search for the former and you have the latter on your list of keywords, your ad might show.

By taking a look at the report you created from Google AdWords, you can see the ACTUAL search terms that trigger your ads and put the budget-killing words on the negative keywords list.

Feel free to use WordTracker Free Keyword Tool to find more negative keywords.

If it’s the first time you do this, it might take you a couple of hours instead of 25 minutes, but I can promise you that they’ll be about your 2 most profitable hours ever.

There’s more great stuff coming! Follow Me on Twitter: @ZekeCamusio.

Google Keyword Tool is great to figure out how many people are searching for a keyword. The only problem is, if you offering catering services in the LA area, you can only serve your local market, and it doesn’t matter how many people are searching for “catering services” in New York or Miami.

So, how can you calculate how many people in your local area are searching for your services?

1. Go to Google Traffic Estimator Tool

2. Enter Your Keywords
You can use Google Keyword Tool to get ideas.

3. Enter a Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) of $50
Don’t worry, you won’t be paying anything; you’re just doing research.

4. Enter a Daily Budget of $50,000
Again, you won’t be paying a dime, so don’t worry about it.

5. Select Your Target Market
You can select cities, states, a bundle of cities or, for example, “Los Angeles and 60 miles around it”.

6. Multiply the Number of Total Clicks by 10
OK, this is not very scientific, but it’s pretty accurate. Google will show you how many clicks you’ll get if you get the #1 spot as a Google AdWords advertiser. Most ads at the top (if they are well written) get a click-through rate of 5%-10%. That means that for every 10-20 times the ad is shown, it gets 1 click. So, if Google tells you you’ll get 100 clicks per day, it’s safe to say that your ad will be shown 1,000-2,000 times. That’s the approximate number of searches the keyword has.

Note: as with any search volume tool, you won’t get an exact number, but if you follow this step-by-step system, you’ll get a pretty accurate estimation.

Pay Per Click campaigns can quickly become an expensive endeavor. As more and more advertisers leave TV, Radio, Billboard advertising and move to the web, the competition for each click continues to go up as do the costs. Sometimes each click can cost upwards of $5.00. That’s very expensive traffic unless you’re selling cancer treatments or legal services.

Here are a couple of money saving tips to help drive traffic to your site at bargain basement prices.

Bid on Competitors URLs
You’d be amazed how many people type YouTube.com into a search engine instead of into the address bar. Each time someone types a competitor’s website address into Google, there’s an opportunity for you to show a very inexpensive ad to that consumer. You can make that ad even more compelling by advertising as an alternative to that competitor with their name in the ad copy. Sometimes these very targeted clicks will only cost you $0.05/per click.

Bid on Competitor’s Names
It’s the same idea as the URL, but you’re using the competitor’s name instead. Traffic from clicks like this can be very inexpensive and very targeted if you pick the right competitors.

Bid on Misspelled Words
This is different than Typosquatting. You’re just showing inexpensive ads to people who accidently fat-fingered their keyboard or mistyped the name. An ad like this could cost a fraction of the correctly spelled word. Use this tool http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi to help find typo’s of important keywords.

Test Your Site with Cheap PPC
Inexpensive tactics like this to drive traffic to your site is a great way to fine tune your product price points, try out new guarantees, experiment with special offers, etc before you even have a product to sell. The goal is to drive a bunch of traffic and see what offers are the most useful. With traffic like this at less than $0.10 per click, you can learn a lot about what works on your site and what needs to be changed. PPC can be expensive in the long run, but you can use tricks like these to experiment for a few dollars.

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Landing Pages and Calls to Action
The most important part of any online campaign is the call to action. A call to action is a simple request for your audience to take the next step. The easiest thing to do is use a “Buy Now” button, but you’re probably losing out on a lot of conversions if all you’re doing is asking people to buy. Other calls to action are:

•    Subscribe to Newsletter

•    Download our Free E-Book

•    Download our Free Videos

•    Order a Catalogue

•    Request a Proposal

Build it (Easy) and they Will Come
The easier it is for your audience to take the next step, the more likely they are to act. We’re often taught as marketers to collect as much information as we can, but do you really need more than an email address and a name to continue the conversation? Your audience is much less likely to act if you’re looking for a phone number, address, or other personal information. And ask yourself; am I really going to do anything with all that extra info?

The Fewer the Words, the More They Matter
If you’re anything like me, you probably skipped ½ the words in this article. You probably read the bullet points and the bold-texted headline and subheads. That’s because we’re all accustomed to skimming content online. Because we treat your landing page content like a magazine or a newspaper, here are a couple simple things you can do to make sure people take the next action:

•    Write Short Sentences – The shorter the better.

•    Write Short Paragraphs – Don’t forget that many of your readers may be non-native English speakers, keep it short.

•    Use Bullet Points – Perfect for scanning.

•    Highlight Important Points in Bold – Don’t make them think.

•    Use as many Subheads as Possible – Break topics into small paragraphs and tell your audience exactly what to expect.

•    Use as Few Words as Possible – Practice writing and re-writing sentences for brevity.

•    Use Graphics – A picture is worth 1000 words.

•    Don’t Make Your Prospects Scroll Down – If I have to scroll on a landing page, you’ve lost me.

Tell Your Story with Great Design
Look at your design without any words and ask yourself: “Would I still buy this?” Great design can tell the story all alone. Here are a few design tips:

•    Get Rid of Distraction

•    Use Fewer Links

•    Keep the Navigation Ultra Simple

•    Avoid Multiple Calls to Action

Yes Your Way to More Sales
Once you’ve gotten your audience to take the first action, they’re much more likely to commit to a follow up action. If they’ve downloaded (and watched) your free videos, they’re much more likely to sign up for a free trial. If they’ve read your e-book, they’re much more likely to want to purchase your full-length e-book. We all have a psychological tendency to say “yes” again and again after the first “yes.” Get them saying “yes” and you’re on your way to a sale.

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To be really successful at Pay per Click (PPC) marketing, you need to optimize your campaigns all the time. Every week would be ideal. If you can’t, try to do it at least every two weeks.

When we optimize our clients’ Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns, there are three main things that we do for them.

Ad Position Optimization
People don’t go to the fourth page of PPC ads to find what they’re looking for. If your ads don’t show within the first positions of the first page, very few people will click on them. However, ads in the first position always get a lot of unqualified clicks because people tend to click before they read. For that reason, advertisers in the first positions end up paying for a lot of junk traffic.

Try to get your ad between positions 2 and 6. On Google AdWords there are two ways you can increase your ad position: by raising the bid amounts and by making the ad more relevant –or a combination of both. On Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, ad relevancy is not an influential factor; they only care about bid amounts.

There is one case where it really makes sense to be number 1. Google can sometimes put your ad above the organic results instead of on the right side of the screen. If your ad is very relevant and your bid is high enough, you’ll get there eventually. Ads at the top get much more traffic than ads on the right side.

Ad Copy
You should always be running split-tests. They are free, setting up the test will take you less than a minute and most of the time a tiny change can boost your Click-Through Rate (CTR). Last week we replaced the word “amazing” with the word “great” for one of our clients and CTR went up 46%. That’s a huge improvement and all it took was a tiny change. Unless you constantly test, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Use PPC as a market research tool for the real world. You can run two ads; one featuring your low prices and another one featuring your high quality. Then you can figure out if online buyers in your industry are more price-driven or quality-driven.

Conversion Rate
The conversion rate optimization is the most important component of a PPC campaign optimization. You need to figure out what keywords convert very well and which ones convert poorly or don’t convert at all. Then there are a few things that you should do about non-converting keywords: get rid of them, add negative keywords to your campaign (if people are searching for “free widgets” and you sell widgets, add “free” to the list of negative keywords) and/or lower the bids for these keywords. If you have keywords that convert very well, this is what you need to do: perform more keyword research and add similar keywords to your campaign, create an ad group for these specific keywords so you can keep a closer eye on them, increase the bid value and use these keywords to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC using other search engines. Yahoo!, Ask and MSN won’t send you as much traffic as Google, but they can send you a fair amount of traffic that might convert better than Google AdWords’.

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Although Google and Yahoo claim that managing Pay per Click campaign is easy, we strongly disagree. Sure, opening an account, choosing some keywords, and setting up a budget is a piece of cake. But making more money than the campaign is costing you is a real challenge.

This article will provide you with a great insight on some advanced techniques that we use for our own clients. Three out of five people that start a Pay per Click campaign lose money and every single one of our clients makes money; so we must be doing something right. Pay attention and get ready for the most useful article you will ever read on PPC campaign management.

Concentrate on the Segments of the Market that You Can Serve
Make sure that you are very specific about how you can solve a need. For example, one of our clients is an English school in Denver. They offer accent reduction courses for foreign executives that want to sound more American. When they were managing their own campaign they were losing a lot of money going after the keyword “accent reduction”. The reason was that people wanted to get rid of their accents in a lot of different ways (cassettes, CDs, computer software, teleseminars, and one-on-one phone consultations) but our client offers classes on the subject. We did three things about it: we started using keywords like “accent reduction class” instead of just “accent reduction”, we changed the ad to something like “Accent Reduction Class in Denver, CO”, and we used negative keywords (software, phone, book, CD, cassette, etc.) to filter out unqualified prospects.

Create a Landing Page for Each of Your Top Keywords
Figure out what keywords get you most of the traffic. If you have 1,000 keywords in your campaign, chances are that 10 of them are getting 90% of the traffic. Create a landing page for each one of them. Driving all your PPC traffic to your home page is probably the most common mistakes that people make.

Optimize Your Campaign for CR (Conversion Rate), not CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR is the number of times your ad is clicked for every 100 times it is displayed. The CR is the number of visitors that complete a goal on your website (place an order, download your whitepaper, sign up for your newsletter, or whatever you expect them to do.) CTR is a very important metric for two reasons: Google will display your ad in a higher position if your CTR is high and a high CTR also means that you are getting more traffic. The problem with taking CTR as your main metric is that people might visit your website and not convert, which means that you are wasting a lot of money attracting them. Google Analytics allows you to set up goals and see the conversion rate and ROI for each of your keywords. If a keyword is converting really well, try increasing its bid; if it’s converting poorly, get rid of it.

Use Long-Tail Keywords
A long-tail keyword is the opposite of a general keyword. For example, “cars” is a broad keyword and “2002 Honda Accord” is a long-tail keyword. A specific term doesn’t have as many searches as broad terms but it will cost you a lot less and will bring you much more qualified prospects. Someone searching for “cars” is not very likely to become a paying customer any time soon. But someone searching for “buy 2002 Honda Accord in Chicago” is.

Use Locations, Brands, and Models
Let’s go back to the cars example. Bidding for the term “cars” will cost you a lot and bring you a great percentage of unqualified visitors. So why not break down the market based on the areas you serve, brands, and models you offer? For example: Honda Accord Chicago, Honda Accord New York, Honda Civic Chicago, Ford Mustang Austin, and so on.

Use Negative Keywords
Some negative keywords are obvious. If you offer high-end design services services you probably need these negative keywords: free, cheap, affordable, and low cost. But sometimes you might be missing some less common negative keywords. Set up your Analytics with advanced filters to find out the real search terms that people are using. This way you will find out that your ad is showing for search terms like “web design book”, “professional web design in Miami” (and you are located in Utah), or “how to learn web design”.

Use DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion)
This is by far the best way to boost CTRs. DKI is a technique that allows you to insert the keyword that the person searched for in the headline of the ad. Ads with the keyword in the headline are highlighted by Google and get a lot more clicks than ads without it. This is how you do it in Google AdWords: {KeyWord:Default Keyword}, where “Default Keyword” is the headline that should be shown in case that the search string is over 25 characters long.

Put the Benefits in the First Line and the Features in the Second
Tell people how they can benefit from what you offer. Instead of:

Online Marketing Agency
Social Media , Search Engine Optimization,
Pay per Click, and Conversion Boosting.
www.Website.com

try this:

Online Marketing Agency
Get 500 Qualified Visits per Day.
Customized Plan. Results Guaranteed.
www.Website.com

The first ad is focused on what the company does while the second ad focuses on what they can do FOR YOU.

Split-Test Ads
Always have two ads competing with each other. After both have gotten 30+ clicks, pick up the winner and write a new ad to try to beat it. Don’t settle for a good ad, it can always be better. Many times changing one single word can boost the CTR by more than 50%. Make sure you only test one thing at a time. If you test two things at once, you won’t be able to tell which one caused the difference in the CTR. Set up your account so your ads show evenly and never let Google pick your winner ad.

Explore Other Options
Google AdWords is great but it is not the only option. Try Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, and Ask ASL.

Use Coupon Codes
When you open a new account, all the PPC services offer you free money to get started. It can be anywhere from $25 to $100 in free clicks. I won’t post any coupon code here because it will expire as soon as everybody starts using it, but do your homework; search for something like “AdWords coupon code” and you will find tons of links.

Avoid the #1 Spot
The #1 spot is the one with the most clicks but also with the lowest conversion rate. People often click without reading the ad first and that will cost you money. Place your ad between positions 2 and 5 to optimize your conversion rate.

Include Buying Words
Words like “buy iPod Touch”, “purchase iPod Touch”, “order iPod Touch”, “iPod Touch store”, and “buy iPod Touch online” have less searches than “iPod Touch” but people searching for them are a lot more likely to buy the item.

Geo-Target Your Ads
Pay per Click providers let you choose where you want your ad to be displayed. So if you only serve the Los Angeles area, make sure that your ad is not showing for the rest of the world.

Bid on Your Competitors Names and Products
Bidding on your competitors’ names and products can be a very effective way to get qualified clicks. Leverage all their branding efforts and write a creative ad that shows why you are a better option.

Write Great Ads
Some ads are up to 10 times more effective than others. These are some of the techniques that work best: use powerful words (guaranteed, killer, proven, quick, fast, easy), ask questions that the readers can identify with (“Do You Want to Speak English Like an American?”, “Are You Tired of Repeating Yourself?”), and keep your copy simple and straight to the point.

Avoid Salesy Ads
Don’t use all caps or exclamation marks and make your copy believable. Ads like “LEARN HOW I LOST 100 POUNDS IN 4 DAYS. CLICK HERE NOW!!!!” are a huge “no, no”.

Use Your Ads to Pre-Qualify Prospects
Because you are paying for each click you get, you want to make sure that you only get qualified traffic. If your services are more expensive than the average, include the price in the ad. If you only serve your city, include that in the ad too. “Web Design in Austin, TX – Make Your Company Stand Out. – Custom Designs Starting at $4,000.” is a good example.

Go After Common Misspellings
Misspellings are great because almost nobody bids on them and therefore they are very inexpensive. You will be surprised at how many people misspell words.

Don’t Start a Campaign Bidding Too Low
If your bids are too low, your ad will show at the bottom of the page (if it shows at all) and you will create a very poor CTR history, which will cost you more in the long term because a high CTR lets you get high positions with a lower bid. It is always better to start bidding high and then decrease the bids if necessary and not the other way around.

Structure Your Campaigns Right
Don’t just throw all your keywords in one ad group. Divide them into different campaigns and ad groups so it’s easier to optimize the campaign later. If a keyword is getting a lot of traffic, give it its own ad group. Remember that 90% of your traffic will most likely come from a handful of keywords so watch that elite group very closely.

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