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Archive for December, 2009

What is the Google Slap and How Do You Know If You’ve Been Slapped?

20 Dec

googleslapYou’ve probably heard the term Google Slap being thrown about when it comes to Adwords. It refers to the ‘slap’ against advertisers using the Adwords system that have a poor landing page.

You will know that you’ve been Google slapped if:

  • Your ad ranking will drop, and sometimes not even show at all.
  • Your CPC will go up significantly. It’s not usually to be asked to pay $10, $20 or even $50 for a click if you’ve been penalised.

And not only that, just recently thousands of advertisers got a warning from Google about having poor quality landing pages or worse, told that they had been permanently banned from the Google Adwords program.

No prior notice. Just a letter/email to say that they can no longer use the program. Ever.

If you have been lucky enough to just get a warning or haven’t had any problems then the most important thing you can do with your campaigns is to improve your landing page quality score. But how do you do that?

Obviously Google wants good quality, relevant pages. So you need to be able to give them what they want.

You can improve your landing page score by:

  • Sending them to a page that contains the same information that the keywords and ad promises.
  • It should contain unique content that is informative and relevant.
  • If it is a page where the customer needs to purchase something, then it must not contain too many other unrelated products, and the main product should be the no. 1 focus.
  • include links to an about me/company and a privacy policy page (essential if you are collecting personal information).
  • it needs to be uncluttered, load fast and not contain errors.
 
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Understanding Broad, Phrase & Exact Match Keywords when Creating Your Google Adwords Ad

16 Dec

If you have begun to use Google Adwords, you will notice that you have match options such as Broad, Phrase, Exact and even Negative matches to use with your keywords. But what exactly are these terms and how to they impact your ad?

keywordtype

Broad match
The default option that you will get when you start entering your keywords is the broad match. Basically it means that as long as the searcher has your keywords somewhere in their search query then your ad will be shown.

If your keyword was for ‘celebrity perfume’ then your ad will be shown for any search that included those two words such as ‘perfume that celebrity’s wear’ or ‘latest celebrity perfume’.

Phrase match
The Phrase match means that they keywords that you are bidding on must be in the exact same order. In the above example you would not get ‘perfume that celebrity’s wear’ because the words are not in the correct order. However you would get a match for ‘latest celebrity perfume’ because the keywords are in the correct order.

Exact match
This match will show your ad if the user searches for the exact keywords that you bid on. This way your ad will not get shown for any of the above search terms because even though the second search term contains the right keywords it also contains the word ‘latest’. Only those searches that exactly match your keywords will be shown.

Negative match
You can also improve your ad matching by including keywords that you don’t want your ad shown for. For example you might add -free so that your ad will not be shown if anyone is searching for free items or products. Using negative matches can help improve your CTR due to not wasting your ad on searchers not interested in your ad.

 
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Posted in Adwords Tutorials

 

How To Choose The Right Keywords for your Adwords Ad

15 Dec

Choosing the right keywords for your Google Adwords ad is the most important part of creating a successful ad that will get clicked on. So you need to understand a little bit about what the customer is looking for and what types of words they are likely to be searching on.

A huge mistake that most new ad writers make is to target very broad keywords. This might mean that your ad is shown unnecessarily to searchers not interested in your product or service.

For an example, let’s say you are advertising for the weight loss/diet industry. This market is extremely huge with many different niches. If you were to add a keyword for word ‘diet’ then not only will you be facing tough competition and high bid prices, it is highly likely that the searcher wasn’t even looking for your product or service.

Maybe they were looking for diet cola, or even pet diet’s. If you product was for a diet pill then your ad has just been wasted since the person would not be interested and never click on your ad.

If however you had chosen the keyword ‘diet pills’ or even ‘[brand name] diet pills’ you will have a much higher click through ratio and you will also be targeting customers that are specifically looking for your product. So try and think about using highly targeted keywords as you will get a much better response and possibly more conversions.

The next step is choosing your budget or Max CPC. If you have chosen your keywords wisely then you will probably be able to get a lower cost per click than if you have highly competitive keywords.

keywordchoose

It’s always a good idea after you have entered your keywords to take advantage of Google’s Traffic Estimator to give you an idea of how many searches, clicks and the approximate position of your ad based on the budget that you set will be. Just click the ‘Estimate Search Traffic’ to see how many clicks/traffic you are likely to get. This way you can play around with different budget and maximum cost per clicks before submitting your ad.

As you can see, choosing keywords for your Google Adwords ad is all about trying to understand what your customer would be searching for so that you can create a successful ad that gets clicks and hopefully sales.

 
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Posted in Adwords Tutorials

 

Writing your First Google Adwords Ad

10 Dec

Writing your first Google Adwords ad can be daunting if you have never done it before, so this article will walk you through the process so that you can be up and running in no time.

Once you have set up your account with Adwords, one of the first things they will ask you to do is to write your first advertisment. You are given an example ad at the top of the page and five lines to fill out.

 

firstad_screen

Headline
The first line you have to write is the headline. When someone does a search for your keyword, this is the line in your ad that will be the most prominent and also be underlined. You only have 25 characters to work with in the headline so much sure it grabs attention. It is often beneficial to to use your main keyword in the headline if you can.

Description
The next two lines is where you get to write the bulk of your ad. You have 35 characters for each line. The most successful ads usually put a benefit in the first line and a feature in the second line. So you might have your benefit as “Make money with [product]” and your feature might be “Get your Free Report on [Product] here”.

URL
The last two lines are where you put your URL for the page you want your visitors to go to.

The first line (Display URL) will be the one that is displayed to your audience;
and the second (Destination URL) will be the actual url that they are sent to if they click on your ad.

Often if you are using your affiliate link, you would put the display url as the merchant page, and the destination url as your affiliate link. That way the audience will only see the display url.

So now your ad is done! It’s now just a matter of clicking on SAVE AD and next choosing your keywords and budget and saving the ad. Google usually starts displaying your ad within 10 minutes of submitting it, so you could start seeing traffic almost immediately.

 
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Is Adwords the Secret for Creating Instant Website Traffic?

10 Dec

Most website owners are always wishing that they could have more traffic. After all the more traffic that your website or blog gets, then they more money you could potentially make right?

The number one secret for creating more money online is the amount of traffic that your website or blog receives. After all the more people that visit your site, the more chances that you have of making a sale. So it’s pretty safe to assume that more traffic equals more sales (and therefore more money for you).

That’s why using Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is so popular. The largest and most used PPC Network is without a doubt: Google Adwords.

You can have a campaign up and running in Adwords in less than 10 minutes and start to see a dramatic increase in the number of visitors to your site.

Now there is nothing wrong with relying on search engines and articles to bring traffic to your site as well, but if you really want to increase your visitors in a short space of time, then you should consider paid traffic. Getting listed in search engines can take time, and then unless you are a SEO expert, the chances of getting on the front page of Google is minimal. Writing articles will bring in some traffic, however you need to be constantly producing new articles regularly to see a difference, and writing lots articles can be time-consuming.

Ok, you are saying, that’s all well and good, but isn’t it expensive to advertise using PPC?

Well I guess that really depends on your skill level. It’s true that a bad ad (or bad website) will not generate the traffic or sales you are after, but it certainly doesn’t have to be expensive as you are able to monitor and adjust your ad settings very easily. If you only want to pay 0.10 cents per click, or limit your spending to $5.00 a day, that is all possible using Adwords.

The best thing about using paid advertising is that you remain in control of the process and by implementing an ad campaign will start to see a large increase in the number of visitors to your site. And more visitors mean more money for you.

If you are struggling to get visitors to your site then give Adwords a try.

 
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Posted in Why use Adwords

 

Research Your Market for Best Adwords Results

10 Dec

There is a lot of people making big dollars with Pay Per Click Advertising and in particular with Google Adwords. However there is also a lot of people who are throwing money away and making Google very rich and themselves poor in the process.

The good news is that it IS possible to create a profitable Adwords campaign but it does take a little research upfront. The more research that you do the better the foundation that you set and hopefully your ads will start driving quality traffic to your site.

The reason that research is so important is that these days PPC Advertising is extremely competitive, especially if you are marketing a high value product. That means that simply to stay on the front page of Google you need to pay a lot of money for each click that you get, and that is still no guarantee that your ad will get clicked on at all.

The biggest mistake that unwary advertisers make is not researching their market and keywords first.

You need to know which keywords are getting the traffic and what prices that these keywords are going for.

Google has it’s own keyword research tool, or you can use one of the free keyword selectors online. It is important to know which phrases and words are getting the most searches. Once you have done that you can enter your search term into any search engine and see who your competition would be for that term. You might find that you have found a keyword that people are searching for but that doesn’t have a lot of competition from other advertisers. This alone would keep your bid prices down and still keep you on the front page of Google.

While you shouldn’t ignore a keyword simply because it has a lot of competition (sometimes this indicates that it is a highly profitable niche), if you find a phrase that doesn’t have as many advertisers, it could be a good term to dominate.

Researching your market before you launch your Adwords campaign can help save you lost dollars and start driving targetted traffic to your website.

 
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The Top 5 Reasons you should be using Google Adwords

10 Dec

If you have a product or business and are not getting the traffic that you want through natural listings in the search engines, then maybe it’s time to try paid advertising. Paid Advertising, or Pay-per-click Advertising is becoming more and more popular with business as a way to drive targetted traffic to their website.

Here is the top 5 reasons why you should consider using Google Adwords too.

  1. If you already have an account with Google Adwords, it will only take about 10 minutes to set up a campaign and not long after that to start seeing traffic arriving at your site. Even if you haven’t set an account up yet, that should only take no longer than 15 minutes as well. Imagine having an online ad campaign up in running in such a short space of time!
  2. You are in control of the advertising process. You get to say what areas/countries that you ad will run in so you are only targetting potential customers in certain areas which is especially important if you sell physical products. Or you can choose to show your ad worldwide if you have a digital product that can be accessed by anyone.
  3. With PPC (Pay per click) Advertising, you only have to pay for visitors that click on your ad to visit your site. That way you are only driving targetted traffic to your site. If they clicked on your ad, they were obviously interested enough in your product or service to find out more. No clicks means that you don’t have to pay – much more effective that banner advertising that you pay whether you get clicks or not.
  4. People searching for products online are usually quite computer savvy and are used to buying online.
  5. You are in control of the costs. You’ll always know exactly how much you are spending as you set your budget upfront. You control how much you are willing to spend, and can allocate how much you are prepared to pay for each click. That way you can control your spending and monitor your costs easily.

As you can see, using Google Adwords is very easy and quick to set up, and you remain in control of the advertising process entirely. That way you can quickly see what is working and what isn’t so you can adjust your campaign accordingly. It’s the fastest way to drive targetted traffic to your website.

 
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Pay Per Click – What exactly is PPC Advertising?

09 Dec

Not long ago, the only acceptable method for advertising online was through banner advertising. Those rectangle bars at the top of the page (usually flashing at you to ‘click here’) where the bane of most web surfers. We’ve come a long way since then and while banner ad’s are still around, the biggest change is that most companies now use Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) instead.

PPC Advertising is basically how it sounds. The company has to pay anytime someone clicks on their ads. If no-one clicks (no matter how many times the ad is shown) they don’t have to pay.

The two major PPC ad engines are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Both display ads according to what people are searching for. So if someone is looking for dating tips, only ads that are relevant to the term ‘dating tips’ will show up. This way only relevant ads are shown to potential customers.

The reason that is most popular with businesses is that you only have to pay for customers that come to your website (that have clicked on your ad). So essentially it is up to you to try and convert that visitor into a customer. It also means that the people that are visiting your site are TARGETED customers. They clicked on your ad because they were interested in what it said.

It’s also very easy to set up. In fact if you are already registered with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing it’s possible to have an ad campaign up and running in as little as 10 minutes and receiving traffic not much after that.

Of course the best thing about PPC Advertising is that you are in control of the advertising process. You can set which keywords that your ad will display for, and how much you want to spend per click on those keywords. You can even set a maximum budget per day. Then once your campaign is up and running you can see which ads that your visitors are clicking on, or which keywords work best with your ads.

 
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Posted in PPC