How To Keep Google Adwords Costs In Check

You can get significant marketing results with Google Adwords but unless you are careful and manage your results well, it can become quite expensive. That said, it can be a powerful and quick way to drive traffic to your web site. Ideally, you want ads with high click through rates, lower costs, and better response overall. We will discuss several of the best ways to take charge of your pay per click expenditures in the paragraphs that follow.

Experiment with cost per click AND cost per thousand impressions.

Some websites (and yours may be one) have highly targeted traffic to a particular offer. If that’s you, you can buy in volume on a cost per thousand (CPM) instead of cost per click basis. Do use “CPC”; (cost per click) in addition as well, but try CPM as well, to lower overall costs.

Keywords Matter
In almost any competitive niche, you will dicsover that the most obvious keywords tend to be very expensive. Be careful, because you don’t want to bid on the keywords that are really expensive – you could go broke pretty quickly. It is often better to search out less expensive keywords, and to organize them into effective ad groups wtih matching ad copy. You want to get the highest possible position at the lowest possible cost per click.

Adwords in not a set and forget game. You must constanly monitor your results and treat it from the beggining as an ongoing experiment. Start with a good keyword tool to identify a wide range of possible keywords. The free Google Keywords tool is one of the best out there, but you can find others that may add additional insights.

Long Tails Can Bring Good Results

There is ofter less competition and thus less cost for phrases of two or more words. Longer phrases also tend to be more narrowly targeted to your niche do whiel fewer people will search for them, those that do are more likely to be interested in your offer. The real payoff is that they are usually much cheaper clicks. I like to focus my capaigns as much as possible on three word keywords, and you should be sure to add a goodly number to your campaigns. Then watch and see not only which get clicks, but which convert into sales.


Now It’s Time To Start Selling

The ad your searchers see need to grab their attention and get them to click. If it doesn’t work well enough, Google will start charging you more when it does.

Your ads should:

• Uses your keyword phrase as often as possible, especially in the title
• Offer a benefit in the first line (not a feature)

• A call to action is good if you can fit it in
• Remove Objections with a Promise
• Use the keyword in the URL

The better written your ad the more clicks you will get. This in turn imporves your quality score and Google rewards you with lower costs per click.

Writing good ads in such a limited amount of space is a challenging art form, but the importance of well written ads requires on on going effort to constantly improve the ads you use.

Start with long tail keywords. Focus on well ritten ads and constantly try to improve them. The net result will be more traffic at lower cost per click.

[tags]Adwords, Google Adwords, Pay per click, PPC, Lower cost per click costs, Online advertising, PPC Ads[/tags]

A Mistake to Avoid With Opt In’s

I encountered a nasty situation recently with an offline business who was spending a ton of money on Google Adwords to drive traffic to her site.

Despite getting record level of clicks on her Google ads, she was getting virtually no phone calls and her business was suffering as a result. She blamed the person who was doing her adwords for screwing things up, but it turned out that was not the problem.

Now what actually was happening was she in an effort to grow her business decided to hook up with a sweepstakes vendor and put a banner on her site offering people a chance to win free services for signing up.

This was very prominent and not surprisingly,  people did as the site directed and signed up for the free services.  Once they did, they were taken to a page where they were encouraged to send emails to there friends to get them to sign up for the drawing as well. If they did or didn’t they were taken to a page where they could sign up for 22 other contests or freebies.

The net result was that this contest diverted people away from the task at hand, which was to convince them to call to get a quote on her business services.

I have long been an advocate of getting people to set up list building opt ins, but in this case we see a tragic example of it actually being counter productive and doing real damage to the business in the short term.

Now there may have been ways to mitigate the damage, had they had an immediate follow-up sequence of emails to recapture the attention of the people who signed up for the contest, but they did not.

If you are paying money to drive people to a site, your focus should be on getting them to take action that pays. Not getting them to sign up on a list. This is particularly true when you are paying in excess of $10 a click on many of the keywords.

If on the other hand you are driving free traffic to a site, getting those names may well be the best way to capitalize in the long run, particularly if you have set up a site to offer free information that leads to a longer sales funnel.

[tags]internet marketing mistakes, When not to list build, list building errors[/tags]