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.

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.