Generate Traffic, Leads and Sales With Video
If you don’t choose the right keywords for your ads you’ll waste a lot of money on your AdWords campaigns. Many marketers make the mistake of placing a large number of unrelated keywords in one ad group. This means the keywords will be competing with each other for clicks. Keywords that closely match your ad copy will generate the most clicks.
How to Choose the Right Keywords
It’s very easy to spend large amounts of money on your Google AdWords campaign if you don’t plan a budget. If you only have a few hundred dollars to invest each month begin with a small budget ie $1/day. You always have the option to increase it if you want to spend more.
Example
If you only want to spend a $1/day ($30/month) on a campaign, look for inexpensive keywords. For example if your cost per click (CPC) is 10 cents you can receive up to 10 clicks per day or 300 per month. This is enough clicks to determine if the campaign will be profitable.
If your CPC is $1.00 you only need 1 click (or 30 clicks per month at $30.00) to reach your daily budget. You won’t have enough clicks to judge whether the campaign will be profitable so you’ll have to run it over 3 months to receive 100 clicks. This may be too long to wait therefore select keywords with a low CPC.
Strategies for creating profitable campaigns on a low budget
1. Research keywords your competitors aren’t using
Select a product then do extensive keyword research on it to find the keywords your competitors haven’t discovered. These may include misspelled words, negative keywords and combinations of keywords.
If you can’t find alternative keywords, use the same ones as your competitors but select a different product. You’ll avoid competing with them for the same item.
2. Create multiple low budget campaigns
Not every Google AdWords campaign is profitable. In fact only a few will generate enough profits. By observing data from running several low budget campaigns simultaneously, you’ll quickly see which ones have the potential to be profitable.
3. Track each campaign
Tracking your keywords allows you to see which ones generated the sales. I use the ad tracking software AdTrackz to track my keywords.
Conclusion
Creating multiple campaigns with a low daily budget prevents you from quickly spending all your money in a few days. It helps you to tweak the data you’ve collected over a long period so your campaigns will become profitable.
***********
Need help attracting visitors to your web site with Google AdWords?
Please visit my Search Engine Optimization Services
So you’ve found an affiliate product to promote and need to set up your first Google AdWords campaign.
Here are the 12 steps to get started:
1) Keyword research
Use the Google Keyword tool to create a list of keywords related to your product. Ideally choose keywords that receive at least 1000 searches per month. Select your top 20 keywords to use for your campaign. Copy and paste your keywords into notepad so you can easily transfer them to your AdWords account.
2) Create a campaign
As summing you already created an AdWords account, create a new online campaign and name it something you can easily identify.
3) Create an ad group
An ad group contains your ads. You can set up as many ad groups as you want within your campaign. I suggest starting with one ad group then name it something related to the product of service you are marketing.
4) Create 2 ads within each ad group
Create 2 ads so you can split test them. Vary the second ad by only changing one line. Look at other ads on Google to get some idea how to write a good ad. Write a catchy headline that includes your keyword. Your ad should also include the description taken from the words at the top of your product page. For example if your keyword is “red shoes” and the headline of your product page reads “How to buy red shoes,” you should include this sentence and keyword in your ad.
5) Include the display and destination URL
The display URL should be the same as your product URL. If the product URL is redshoes.com your display URL should be the same. The destination URL is your affiliate link.
6) Add your keywords
Copy and paste the keywords you added to notepad into your campaign. Decide if you wish to use broad match (without brackets), “phrase match” or [exact match]. I generally use [exact match] because the words they are the exact keywords I want to us plus the clicks are more targeted.
7) Set up your budget
Set a low daily budget low (ie $5/day) so you don’t spend a lot of money immediately. Ideally you want to collect your data over a week’s period as you never know which day(s) will be the most profitable. Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to calculate the average cost per click you’ll pay for your keywords. It’s not exact so don’t place too much emphasis on it. For example it may say your keyword costs $10/click but after setting up your campaign you observe it only costs 50 cents per click.
8) Target your ads
The more targeted your ad is the better it will perform. You can target specific countries, time of day, languages, networks and devices (ie laptop, iphone, etc). I usually select English speaking countries, all times of the day, Google search and it’s partners and computer and laptop devices.
After letting your new campaign run for a while you’ll have sufficient data to begin making adjustments.
9) Rotate your ads
Under the scheduling and serving heading you’ll notice 2 options:
a) scheduling – this enables you to show your ad any time of the day
b) serving – you have 2 options
Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often (Recommended)
Rotate: Show ads more evenly
Check the rotate option because you are split testing 2 ads and want to see which one performs the best. One ad always serves as the control while you test the other one against it. Doing this exercise improves your conversion rates.
10) Track your campaign
Use a tracking tool such as Adtrackz to track all your keywords. You’ll then know which keywords generated the most sales.
11) Monitor your campaign
Observe the number of impressions, clicks, click through rate (CTR), cost per click to find which ad and what keyword performs the best then adjust them accordingly.
12) Tweak your campaign to maximize conversions
Your ultimate goal is to get conversions (make sales) otherwise you will only lose money. You need to continually optimize your campaign by testing different ads, adding new keywords, trying different match types (ie phrase, exact, broad), targeting different geographical areas and times. By continuously tweaking your campaign you’ll find a winning combination.
Tip
Don’ be discouraged if you lose money on your initial campaigns. Most people do. Only after running a number of campaigns will you find a profitable one.
Don’t give up!
