Increase Adwords Profits - Adwords Consultant advises how you can Force Your Pay Per Click Campaign into Profitable Submission

One of the most common things I see when reviewing other people’s internet businesses is inefficiently setup Pay Per Click campaigns (eg. Google Adwords) that are costing the website owner a fortune or even worse - resulting in them having negative cashflow. Follow these steps below in your campaign to increase adwords profits.

Lets assume you already have a Google Adwords Campaign setup to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. Here are the top 7 things based on my experience that you should check or get a professional to check for you to force your pay per click campaign into profitable submission (make it more profitable).

1. Wasting Cash and Clicks with Content Network - Edit your campaign settings and turn off this ‘Content Network’ check box. All you are doing here is saying to Google ‘just show my ads on your search engine network when people are actively searching for what I am offering’. My experience is very low click throughs as a general rule with the Content Network, and it can have an adverse effect on the profitability of your campaign.

2. Not enough use of the Keyword in the Ad. - Ensure you are using your keyword in the title, in the body of the ad and also in the URL if possible. This will make the keyword highlight in bold and draw the users eyes to the keyword that they were searching for. The more you can use the keyword in the Ad without looking like you are doing ‘keyword stuffing’ the better.

3. Lazy, lazy, lazy….. Did I mention the word Lazy enough? What I mean by this is not being granular enough with their ad groups. The Lazy approach is to group heaps of keywords together in one adgroup. This will affect how relevant your ads are and will also give them a lower click through rate. A simple example is ‘Air Mattress’ is not the same adgroup as ‘Air Bed’. If you are creating an ad group for ‘Air Bed’ it could contain ‘Air Bed’, ‘Air Beds’, ‘camping air bed’, but not ‘Air Mattress’ as that would need to be a separate Ad Group.

4. Generic Boring Non Specific Landing Page - If you are running an ad about a specific product or service then make sure the page that the ad is landing on is only about that product or service. The great thing here is that you will get more conversions because you are giving Mr/Mrs Customer exactly what He or She is looking for without making them go looking for it on your site. This means don’t send your Google Ad customers to your home page that has 100 different links on it. Following on from our example above if they were searching for the keyword ‘camping air bed’ then send them directly to your camping air beds page.

5. Not Using Negative Keywords - Negative keywords are simply keywords that you do not want your ad to show up for. You achieve this by placing a ‘-’ sign in front of the keyword in your keyword list. Nearly all clients existing adwords campaigns that I review do not use this feature, which is a shame because it means that they are paying for clicks on non relevant search terms. I did a consulting job last year for a company that sells horse rider fashion such as Jodhpur riding pants. When I was doing the keyword research I was shocked by the number of dodgy characters who are searching for this type of keyword and sex related terms. The fact remains that if I hadn’t used negative keywords for this campaign we would have struggled to make it profitable because of all the people searching for non related sites.

6. Neglecting to Split Test Ads - I love the “create new ad” link because it means you can create a second, third or fourth ad and make small changes (tweaks) to your copy and split test which gets higher click through’s and conversions. An example would be testing the use of capitalisation in the copy body or URL’s to increase conversions. eg. internetmarketingdoneforyou.com used as the display URL in an ad is likely to get approximately 1% or 2% less click throughs than InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com. If you are not currently split testing your ads then stop reading now and go implement this as it is huge.

7. Keeping Unprofitable Generic Keywords - Some Keywords are more profitable than others - Focus on ‘buying keywords’ rather than ‘generic keywords’ to keep the cost of your clicks down and only pay for clicks from potential customers who have a higher probability of buying. Say you are an affiliate marketer and you are selling specific brands of nokia phones. Don’t bid on the keyword ‘Mobile Phone’, instead focus on your buying keywords such as ‘nokia 8800′ or ‘nokia bluetooth headset’.

That about wraps up the main Pay Per Click profitability killers I see in my travels. Obviously there are a lot more, but if you start by tuning your campaign to remove these big hitters above you will out perform over 90% of your competition.