As you probably know, Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing system, which is a great way to get traffic to your site. But if you don’t know the ins and outs, it can end up costing you a lot of money and not making you any.

So, what’s the key to success with AdWords? Well, I wish I could tell you there were one or two simple tricks, but the fact is, the best way to ensure success with AdWords is to be familiar with every aspect of the system. This will likely take weeks or months of research, plus a few bucks spent testing out a real AdWords account. However, you can greatly increase your chances by following this bit of advice: don’t skimp on the keyword research!

Maybe you had it in your head that you could go through your site, grab 20 or 30 words or phrases, load them into an ad group, and you’d be watching the traffic and sales pour in. This is simply not the case. Keyword research should be the most time-consuming part of setting up any campaign; not only that, but you should be doing it all the time. That’s right – never stop building your keyword list. Okay, now let me explain a few things:

First, you need to understand how Google uses your keywords to show your ads. You place a bid that determines your maximum cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. This can be different for every single keyword, if you wish. This bid does not represent the amount you’ll pay for each click (like on Overture); this is just the maximum you’ll ever pay for any single click. For example, if you have a max CPC of $0.50 set for a keyword, you’ll only have to pay the full amount if someone else bids $0.49. If that person decides to lower his bid to $0.30, you’ll only pay $0.31. This is because Google’s bid discounter only charges you one cent more than the next highest bidder, no matter what your max CPC is. Theoretically, then, you could bid $10 or even $100 and still only pay $0.31 for a click.

But that’s not all! As you start getting impressions (i.e., your ad shows up in the search results) and clicks, you’ll have a click-through rate (CTR). This represents the number of clicks you receive per 100 impressions. Here’s the really beautiful thing about AdWords: the higher your CTR, the lower your click cost. Because Google values relevance, you’ll receive a bonus for having a relevant ad, and CTR is the primary indicator of how relevant your ad is. So, let’s say you’re competing with someone for ad position No. 3 on the search results page for a particular keyword. Your max bid is $0.50 and his is $1. He should be way above you, right? Not necessarily. Suppose you have a CTR of 5%, and his is only 1%. Google factors in CTR when calculating ad positions, so you end up with this: max CPC × CTR = (what we’ll call) ranking factor. In this case, your ranking factor is 0.025, while your competitor’s is only 0.01. Which means your ad shows above his for $0.50, even though he’s willing to pay up to $1!

Okay, so now you know the basics of how keywords work in AdWords and how Google charges you for clicks. What’s next? Keyword research. The best way to go about this is to use WordTracker. I won’t get really specific about how WordTracker works, because they’ve got a ton of information right there on the site – just go do some reading there when you finish this article. Basically, though, WordTracker will help you find the best keywords to use in your AdWords campaign. You type in any word, and you’ll get up to 300 related terms, which you can then click on to find a few hundred variations of that term. The terms you’ll get are all terms from WordTracker’s search query database, which uses metacrawlers to compile information (again, they explain it on their site if you’re really interested). So you know that all the words you find there are real terms that people are actually searching for. Even better, you get a prediction of how many searches to expect per day for any keyword, how many times it shows up in their database, and a KEI value to determine your best words (KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, which you can also read about on the site). You can get a free trial, or you can sign up for a single day to test it out with all the features included (a day’s membership is just a few bucks).

There are some free keyword research tools you can use, but I recommend these only for absolute newcomers who have no budget to start out with. Overture’s Keyword Inventory is a good, free resource, but there’s a catch: it shows results only for searches done through www.yahoo.com. If you’re marketing with Google AdWords, you should know that Google accounts for at least twice as many searches as Yahoo!, in some cases three or four times as many. (Though reports vary, Google usually receives credit for about 50-60% of all searches, while Yahoo! gets about 20-30% – but this is based on all searches, and results for individual searches may vary widely.) You may find other “free” tools or downloadable programs that claim to help you with keyword research, but I say don’t bother with them. You get what you pay for. Most of them just pull their results directly from other free online tools, and they don’t offer anything in the way of features unless you buy the “full version.” If you’re out to get one for free, just use Overture. (Google’s own traffic estimator is decent, but it doesn’t give you an exact count for searches within a given period; you just get status bars, which are hard to interpret. Google’s bid and position estimates are also usually way off.)

But third-party tools, even if they’re very good, won’t do your keyword research for you. You’ll have to pick through your web site (or your affiliate’s sales letter) for words and phrases that you can use. Then, using those words, see if you can think of similar words or concepts that people might be searching for. There’s no real trick to this; you’ve just got to do a lot of brainstorming. Once you’ve got a good core list, take that over to WordTracker to beef it up. (Hint: If you see any words that don’t directly relate to your product, service, or niche, add them as negative matches.)

Now you should have a lean but healthy keyword list. This is your first step to beating out your competition on Google AdWords.

Author Bio
Ryan Cole runs The Internet Marketing Blog, a free resource for those who need help with Google AdWords, affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC, or any other online marketing topics. Visit for more info on keywords, WordTracker, and Google AdWords.

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Pay per click, as the term itself suggests, is a form of advertising that makes use of keywords for popularizing your business on the web. To make a success of your pay per click marketing you need to find the keywords that will best describe about your business. Pay per click marketing is used these days on a large scale, as this is the best way to reach out to online visitors. A study found out that more than seventy five percent of online visitors could be reached through pay per click marketing.


Yes, pay per click marketing is the best source to attract the attention of online visitors, but you must also realize that you need to know all you can before you actually start the process for your business. Nothing can be more frustrating then being caught in a situation where you are not aware of what you are doing and what is happening to your business. So make sure that you know in detail all the nitty gritty about pay per click marketing before using pay per click marketing for your business.

Finding out and identifying the proper keywords is the first task for undertaking pay per click marketing. What you need to do is find out what words will be used by online visitors for searching information or the products that are being sold through your business. There are various tools that can be used for finding out the correct and appropriate keywords for any particular business. Overture, word tracker and digital point are some of the tools that are capable of finding out appropriate keyword for any site in the web.

Sit and plan out carefully what amount of money you are willing to spend on your pay per click marketing campaign. For pay per click marketing, you will have to bid a certain sum of money on keywords that describe your business. Those particular keywords will be used for advertising your goods in major search engines. Whenever a visitor clicks on your site a pre determined amount will be reduced from your bid amount. It is inevitable that you will get many visitors who will click on your site just because your site happens to be listed at the top of sponsored finds in search engines. This cannot be avoided.

There is very little time to grab the attention of visitors. What you can do to grab visitor attention is to making very compelling landing pages. It is very possible that people will not buy goods from you for the first time they visit, but design the page in such a way that at least the visitor leaves behind his email address so that you can contact them in future and tell them about your products. Your landing page must appeal emotionally to the visitor. If you manage to gather the email address you can create a strong database and send out emails through auto responder.

Competition is something that is inevitable and you cannot avoid this in any field. So any marketing strategy including your pay per click marketing strategy must be made and implemented in such a way that you always stay miles ahead of them. Being successful in business is all about beating the competition and no matter how tough the competition, you will have to beat this at all cost.

Author Bio
Steve Waganer has specialization in Web Marketing .He is expert in Search engine optimization, Affiliated Marketing,Pay per click marketing and Organic search engine optimization.To get his expert advice for your website to get high rank and top position in major search engines visit www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com – Free Website Content

Before we get into it, learn more about Google Adsense here:
http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/

First and foremost is: Positioning

Where you position your Adsense link boxes and banner ads is extremely important. Trying to make money from the bottom of your pages within your website just won’t cut it. You need to add your Adsense links right in the heart of your template or right in the heart of your content. I would personally suggest both actually.

Adding Adsense in the heart of your template:

Link Units:

Since the introduction of Google Adsense “link units”, we can now add what looks like a “menu system” to compliment our menu system within our website. This is HUGE. Have you ever just clicked on a website and kept clicking on the menu links? I know we all have. By adding a “Google link units” to your menu, you will get more clicks than you thought possible. Try adding the link units near the top for better performance and try creating your link units to match the color of your menu system in place. Once in a while I find myself clicking on a menu link unit without even realizing it which in turn gives more money to the website owner.

Leaderboards & Skyscrapers:

These may very well be your “bread & butter”. I only say this because of the sheer size of these ads units. The best place to add these ad units is obvious; Straight across the very top of your website (leaderboards), and straight down the side of your template (skyscrapers). Anywhere else may not look proper within your template and may look unprofessional.

Square & Rectangle Ad Units:

These are great to compliment the mass amount of content within your website and also within your recommended resources. You want to compliment your content, you don’t want Adsense to BE your content because this will look poor on your part. Adsense is very popular with webmasters; who doesn’t want to make some extra money. However, don’t forget that many of your visitors are also used to seeing Adsense within a website, and need a good reason to click on them.

Square and rectangular units are great to use within articles posted on your website or within your link resources. Try adding your Adsense boxes above your resource links within a page to give your Adsense account that added extra exposure.

Just remember that Google allows up to 3 ad units per page. Using these 3 strategies will help to better optimize Adsense for positioning! Let’s now go onto targeting…

Optimizing Adsense: Taking out non-related ads!

Do you ever wonder how ads like “business card specials” ever get displayed on to your website when your company content is all about baby clothing? Since the introduction of “Adwords Site Targeting”, we now have to keep an eye on the ads being displayed on our website(s). Companies may now specifically target your website for more exposure. There is no restriction whether the website is content related or not, just more marketing exposure for the advertiser.

Filtering Adsense Advertisers:

Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the “Competition Filter” which allows us to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. This is going to be an on-going optimization task in the future. Without filtering the ads being displayed within your website, you might find yourself with ads unrelated to your industry and possibly some ads that have a negative effect within your site.

If you don’t remove all the unwanted ads being displayed on your website, you might end up hurting your Adsense performance online. The more targeted you can get your Google Adsense ads to display on each page, the better your chances at being able to make more money. Try to take a moment every week to study the ads being displayed on your website.

Open up a note pad, or word document and record all the websites you don’t want to be displayed anymore. Add these sites to your “filter list” within your Adsense account.

Remember to add the website (within your filter list) like so: smartads.info – without the www. Adding anything after or before the url will only prevent the company from displaying one of their many ads like so (www.site.com/ads/1.html). This way you stop anything from the entire website from showing up within your Adsense campaign online. The more you optimize your Adsense filter, the better your performance will pick up and the less non-related ads will be displayed on your website.

One constant that holds true with Adsense:

The more pages you have with your Adsense campaign being displayed, the more you WILL make. People who have online networks immediately can profit from Google Adwords because they have the power to add their Adsense boxes & banners onto multiple websites, possibly 1000′s of pages.

Should you add Adsense to your website?

If you own a small company that has a brochure type website that gets maybe 50-100 visitors a day, I recommend NOT adding Adsense to your site. It will never make enough money with that kind of traffic. Remember: Your Adsense campaign needs to make over $100 to get paid out.

If your company receives around 500-1000+ visitors a day, you can now start considering to make money through Google. Adsense is all about numbers. Play the numbers to make more money. In fact, try making goals for yourself to make X amount of dollars through your Adsense account by a certain time. Doing this will only increase your business and make your company more powerful online by increasing the amount of traffic it receives.

For multiple websites, channels are important:

Google allows you to track the performance of multiple websites all in one account which ultimately gives you the ability to track how many visitors you’re getting for each website. It also allows you to work harder on those sites that aren’t up to par.

I consistently look at each individual website channel to work harder at promoting the ones that aren’t performing well. By doing this, we increase the amount of promotion going into the websites that under perform, and in turn eventually increase the business for those websites as well. The more you promote your website, the more the exposure you will ultimately deliver for your Adsense campaign and your company.

Google Search with Adsense:

To top all that off, you can add Google search within your site to give visitors a search function for your content and to allow people to also click on your Adsense program. Please note that for Google search to work, your website and all of its content pages must already be indexed by Google. Adding the Google search bar to your site right away won’t help your visitors at all.

For more Google Adsense optimization tips, go here:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

Don’t forget to read the Google Adsense Policies & Procedures:
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies

I hope this article helps you to make more money!

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the president of Smartads. We help small-large companies to grow their business online and offline.

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