Part 9 - Research and Analytics

Viewing the Webpage of Your Competition

There is much to be learned from other affiliates landing pages. We suggest that review your competition before you set-up any full-fledge marketing campaign. Your competition has likely already tested and refined their pages, especially those that remain under the same keywords for an extended period of time (see Watching Affiliate Ads).

On competitor web pages you will want to focus on headlines, the overall quality of the page, the products being reviewed or recommended, and the sales copy. These characteristics can give you a lot of insight into what is working for your competition.

Under no circumstances should you copy a competitor s website, you are strictly using this for your own research so that you can gain insight into what may or may not work on your own pages. Never directly copy a website as there are great benefits to building a unique sales page of your own.

You can also get an idea of other profitable opportunities based on the navigation within your competitor s websites. Are they promoting other industries or products?

Do they have links to other web pages? Successful affiliates are typically involved with product promotions within more than one industry, and by looking at what they are promoting may give you ideas for other promotions.

Note : When researching other advertisers ads, do not click directly on their paid ads within Google, Yahoo, or MSN. This is click-fraud and is costing those advertisers money (would you like it if your competition clicked on your ads?). Instead, right-click the ad, go to the properties, and cut and paste the webpage URL part of the link into a separate browser window. This is an example of an advertisement for Google Adwords and the highlighted url is how you can visit a webpage without committing click fraud.

Their Ads Are Better Than Mine

The highest ranked ads within Google are more than likely achieving a high CTR, and have a highly relevant landing page. If your ad is underperforming, take a look at the top paid listings. Take some tips from their ads.

What components are intriguing visitors to click?

Is there a call-to-action that is enticing the visitor to click on the ad?

Are they using a unique ad writing style?

Are they using a question in their ad description?

One reason why your ads may be getting a low CTR (less than 1%) is the fact that your ad is not unique. Do not copy your competitor s ad copy as it will not result in optimum CTR. Writing unique ad copy that uses call to action phrases and the Common Keyword trick will give you the highest CTR possible. If you do notice a decline in your CTR for a particular keyword, check to see if another advertiser has copied you. If so, you will want to modify your ad to make it unique.

Testing & Analyzing Your Data

You have performed some lengthy research, set-up a campaign, and are now receiving clicks to the website you are promoting. The next step of this process is to implement some sort of testing and/or analytics that you will be able to use to evaluate your campaigns performance and refine your campaign for maximum profitability.

As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of components (keywords, web pages) that are underperforming and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertisers keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are underperforming. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.

There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are many things that you can refine to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low? Is your squeeze page working? Is your sales copy effective?

There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to get campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.

Web page Effectiveness by tracking Merchant Page CTR

In this test we are going to use my-linker in combination with your Google Adwords account to determine how effective your webpage is at getting visitors to click-through your affiliate links.

My-Linker is a program that is exclusive to WealthyAffiliate members and allows you to analyze your merchant page conversions. My Linker counts merchant page conversions when your website visitors click on your affiliate links. You can set up specific campaigns within my-linker which enable you to build specific linking codes for your site and track how effective your web page is at persuading your visitors to visit the merchant sales page. The higher the merchant page click-through, the better job your page is doing getting the visitors interest enough to send them to affiliate sites.

By adding my-linker links to your web pages you will be able to determine exactly which keywords are generating merchant page click-throughs. This is a very important aspect to a successful campaign, because if your keywords are underperforming, they either need to be deleted, or you need to make your web pages more relevant to these keywords.

Note: Make sure that you include your Google Conversion Tracking ID or else My-Linker will work with Google Adwords. My-Linker will report exactly which keywords are prompting your visitors to click through to merchant pages, and this is very useful data that you can use to determine if a keyword is wasting your money.

Sale Conversions using Google Sale Conversion Tracking data

Many programs online allow you to append your Google conversion tracking code to their URL so that you can track sales. The conversion code is dynamically passed to the order page, so that when someone purchases the product a conversion is tabulated within your Google account.

You can also email merchants and ask them to put your conversion code on their order confirmation page. Typically the merchant will only do this for their high volume affiliates, but it is definitely worth a shot regardless of how much web traffic you send to a merchant page.

Google Sales conversion tracking allows you to track your sales right down to the keyword level. If you have conversion tracking in place for sales conversions, you will find that 20% of your keywords bring in most of your sales. You can quickly weed out underperforming keywords or make the appropriate changes to your web page to make it more relevant and convert better.

Note : If you are using my-linker to track your merchant page click through rates, you will not be able to determine the difference between sales and leads on the campaign summary page. To determine exactly which keywords are generating sales, leads, or both, you need to build a report in the Reporting section of your Google Adwords account.

Under the Advanced Settings choose to add Sales Count and Leads Count. This will split up the conversion data and show you exactly which conversions were sales, and which were leads.

As you can see above, building a custom report will help you determine which "Conversions" came from leads through my-linker, and which were actual sales.

Tweaking Ad performance using A/B Split Tests

Split testing ads is very easy to do within your Google Adwords account. What you want to do is build 2 ads within an ad group that have different ad text, but has the same destination and display URL s. When split testing ad groups, you will want to make sure that your Campaign settings have Ad Optimization turned off.

This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time, because if this setting is on, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can determine which ad is performing better. Once you can determine that an ad is performing better (getting a better CTR) you ll want to scrap the loser and replace it with a new ad. At this point a new split test will occur. We suggest that you continually split test ads until you reach maximum CTR for the keywords within the adgroup.

Note : You should use different ad writing tricks for each ad.

Effectiveness of a Website using A/B Landing Page split test.

There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.

To test conversions you will need to set-up 2 different Clickbank accounts. You will build one landing page using the first clickbank account linking code, and one landing page using the other clickbank account linking code. You will then want to build and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL s. You will also want to have your ads served equally ( Rotate ) so that each page receives an equal amount of web traffic.

By having two Clickbank accounts, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate.. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.

Based on your results you can perform several different tests, and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.

Merchant Page Click-throughs

One of the most important actions that an affiliate needs a visitor to perform on their page is to click-through to the merchant pages after reading the information. If your visitors never visit the merchant pages, then you will never make a commission, thus why it is very important to keep an eye on this.

To track merchant page click-throughs, we have buildd a program called My-Linker (mentioned earlier), that will allow you to build specific campaigns where you can insert your Google Conversion Code, thus tracking merchant page conversions.

You will need to insert the code that is generated by my-linker in place of your affiliate links, and then you will be able to track which keywords are producing the highest merchant page conversions, and which ones are underperforming. This detailed information will give you insight into which keywords are performing and will give you an overview of how effective your landing page is at getting people to following your links to the merchant page.

Our Thoughts on Analyzing Data

In this section we ve spoke some great tricks that you should consider implementing when trying to refine your campaigns and optimize your campaigns for cost-effectiveness. By performing just a few of these tests, you will be able to determine which landing pages work and why, how well you pages are converting into merchant click-throughs, and through trial and error you will be able to build much more efficient campaigns.

We suggest that you adopt testing into your day-to-day activities. You will not only benefit from it in the short-term, you will be building maximum profitability and save yourself thousands of dollars in the long-term. We have wasted tens of thousands of dollars over the years on keywords and landing pages that simply do not produce, and if you can limit these through testing you can keep this money in your pocket.

This is Part 9 of 9, last part, Success for you with Google Adwords, Bookmark this with bookmark below, Add this !

Part 8 - Google Relevancy SLAP

Google Landing Page Optimization & The SLAP

The most recent change to the Google Adwords algorithm includes landing page relevancy when determining Quality Score. Google implemented this major shake-up of the paid search algorithm because they were noticing that the user experience was being negatively affected drastically by low quality, irrelevant paid search listings. In other words, the landing pages of ads were not relevant to the ad and keyword.

It s easy to determine if you have been affected by this algorithm SLAP because you will find that your minimum CPC jumps up to an absurd amount like $10.00/click. If you have noticed your minimum CPC increasing drastically, this is because your landing page does not meet the relevancy guidelines. You should never pay this much for a click, as it is almost impossible to make any keyword profitable at an inflated price like this.

Instead, you should learn how to follow Google's rules and build relevant landing pages. We have done a lot of research in this area, and have outlined how you can reach maximum results and get the lowest possible CPC.

While reading the following sections, keep in mind that the more relevant your Keywords, Ads, and Landing Pages are to each other, the lower your minimum bid prices will be.

Multiple Page Sites

Google is very strict on landing pages with only one page. Therefore it is a good idea to include links to pages within your site that talk highly relevant topics (optimally, the pages would include the keywords you are promoting).

We have tested a variety of single-page landing pages, and even though a page may be highly relevant and contain the keywords from the search, it may not lower your minimum CPC to an affordable level. If this is the case, we suggest that you build multiple pages with relative content within your site, and link them together. Google views multi-page sites as a better user experience, therefore grants a higher Quality Score for these sites.

Here is an example of a multi-page site layout:

www.yoursite.com

www.yoursite.com/reviews.html

www.yoursite.com/recommendations.html

www.yoursite.com/contact.html

www.yoursite.com/about-producta.html

www.yoursite.com/about-productb.html

If you can link all of these pages together, you are much more likely to adhere to the Google landing page relevancy guidelines.

Title and Headline

The title and headline of your page should always be highly relevant to the keywords that you are advertising. Make sure that you include relevant keywords within the title and headline of your page.

Google places a lot of weight on how relevant your title and headlines are when determining your landing page Quality Score. If you have something that is completely irrelevant within your title or within the headline of your page, then your will be awarded a lower Quality Score.

If you choose to use Dynamic Page Optimization to dynamically pass keywords into your page, you should make sure that you are using the PHP version that we have given you (see Dynamic Page Optimization). Google's bots can read your pages if they are.PHP, but if you pass the variables using JavaScript the dynamic keywords may not be recognized.

Relevant Domains

Having a relevant URL plays a role in your landing page Quality Score and you can increase your overall standing if you keep your domain names relevant. Obviously, this will not be practical for many people whom are reviewing multiple products across many different industries, but if you want to maximize your campaign potential, you will want to buy relevant domains.

For example, if you are promoting a product like Defeating Google Adwords, you could purchase the domains:

www.defeating-Google Adwords-review-site.com

or you could build something that is relevant to the industry, but not the product:

www.make-money-online-review-site.com

These will reach a higher Quality Score than a domain that is generic.

Note: This contradicts the ability to build multiple product reviews within the same site, but if you want to stretch the most potential out of a single campaign, a targeted domain may be a good option.

If you can t afford to have different domains for every product that you are promoting this is OK, the weighting on having a relevant domain name is very minimal, but we felt a need to mention it.

Keyword Density

Having a keyword density of 3-5% for your focus keyword will benefit your overall Quality Score. A focus keyword will generally be a highly relevant keyword or phrase that you want Google to think is the main topic of your page. For example, if you are advertising the keyword Defeating Google Adwords Review , on your website, you will want to have the exact phrase Defeating Google Adwords Review on your landing page with a density of 3-5%.

There are several free tools available that you can use to check your Keyword Density, but we recommend the following tool:

http://www.keyworddensity.com

Also, including relevant text is very important to achieving a high landing page quality score. If you are promoting the keyword Defeating Google Adwords Review and you send visitor to your webpage that consists text relating to Defeating Google Adwords, as well as Google Adwords, making money online, Internet marketing etc., Google will determine that your page is relevant.

NOTE : Do not try to trick Google by using your focus keyword within your text with a bunch of non-supporting content. The Google bots are a lot smarter than you think and they can tell whether or not your content is relevant.

Build a Fresh Campaign

If Google has raised your CPC to a high level the campaign is Flagged as being irrelevant. This means that no matter what changes you make to improve your landing page relevancy, you will not be able to reach lower CPC.

To lower the CPC, you will often have to re-build your campaign under a new name, and pause or delete the old one. Doing this will clear the negative quality score of the old campaign and allow you to start out with a fresh campaign. It is important to note that this does not always work, but it should be your first attempt before implementing other more drastic changes.

Tip: Google has bots as well as real employees reviewing your pages for landing page quality. You are going to have a much more difficult time trick ing an actual person than an automated program, so be forewarned before you try to trick the system. Instead, build quality landing pages that are highly relevant. This will not only give you a higher Quality Score, it will result in much higher sale conversions.

Building a Fresh Campaign & New Domain

If you have been affected by the latest Google SLAP and are seeing outrageous minimum bid prices, you may need to scrap your old domain and build a new one.

The more research we do, the more evident it is that Google flags domains as being irrelevant. Once you change your landing page to be highly relevant and use multipages you still may have trouble getting your bid prices down. In this case you will need to build a new campaign, and at the same time, move your website to another domain. If your domain is flagged as irrelevant there is little that you can do to lower your minimum CPC. In all of our campaigns where we have been affected by the recent Google Slap, we have been able to get our CPC down to normal levels by rebuilding campaigns, and moving our new, more highly relevant pages to new domains.

The Google SLAP is not a bad thing though. It has single handedly knocked out a HUGE amount of competitors and Google is becoming more and more profitable.

Now that you are strapped with the knowledge of how to SLAP back at Google, you have a big advantage over many of your competitors with keywords that are inactive!

Analyzing Your Competition

Competition is not always a bad thing. You can learn a lot from your competition, especially those that are making money. Analyzing your competition is an integral part of any successful affiliate marketer's research, and it is a component that we suggest you consider adding to your routine.

There are many factors that make up a successful campaign, many of which can be found by looking at your competition.

Watching Affiliate Ads

You can learn a lot of information by keeping an eye on the top page of paid listings within Google. If an affiliate remains under a keyword for an extended period of time, there is a good chance that they are generating a profit from this advertisement.

What you want to do is build a list of the keywords and the corresponding websites that are within the top ten listings for a particular search phrase. To do this you can either build an excel spreadsheet, or take screen shots of the search results. You will want to then check back once a week and see if the same advertisers are still promoting under these keywords.

If you see new advertisers and new websites coming and going every week, chances are that the people advertising the keywords previously were not able to turn a profit from the keywords. These are keywords that you typically want to avoid promoting.

On the flip side, if you see many of the same ads week after week, there are good chances that these advertisers are yielding a profit under the keywords. You will then want to set-up an ad to promote these keywords, as they will likely be profitable to you.

TIP : There is a program available to members at WealthyAffiliate that allows you to watch competitor ads. Many people are claiming that this tool is literally worth thousands of dollars to them. Gain instant access to this tool by joining WA Today.

This is Part 8 of 9, bookmark this with bookmark button below !

Part 7 - How to Make Web Page that Sell ?

Direct Linking vs. Landing Page

Direct linking is the strategy of sending Pay-Per-Click web traffic directly to a merchant site through your affiliate link. Although this can be an effective and quick method to get web traffic and potential sales, there are several downfalls to this strategy.

If you are not familiar with the difference between direct linking and having a landing page, you should familiarize yourself with this section. When Direct Linking, you send web traffic directly to your affiliate merchant through your sponsored ad in Google. For example, if you were promoting a program such as Defeating Google Adwords, your destination URL would look similar to the following.

http://yourid.defeatadword.hop.clickbank.net

Direct linking is the quickest way to set up a campaign in Google Adwords. You can essentially set up a campaign and have it running in a matter of minutes. This sounds great, but there are several drawbacks to direct linking and they should be taken into consideration prior to using this strategy.

Multiple URL's under the same search term

Last year Google added a new component to Google Adwords which does not allow multiple advertisers to promote the same URL under the same search term. This was brought into effect to increase the quality of their results, and to prevent one company from being advertised several times under the same keyword. If you have been promoting a product through direct linking and cannot seem to get any web traffic to your site this could be why. Another advertiser is promoting the same URL as you under the same search terms. The other advertiser either has set their CPC higher than yours or their Quality Score is higher, thus giving them most of the exposure.

Limitations

The average consumer nowadays is more knowledgeable than ever. They want to compare products prior to making the purchase and get the best value for their money. Direct linking does not give you the ability to take advantage of product comparisons.

Direct linking simply converts into less sales, thus producing a lower ROI. It does not give you the opportunity to promote several products at once. You are forced to rely on the merchant sales copy and Google Adwords does not allow multiple instances of the same URL under any given search term.

Using Direct Linking will not convert into sales as well as a landing page with quality content.

Relying on the merchants sales page

Direct linking does not allow for the opportunity of a pre-sale intermediate page. For this reason you are relying on the fact that the merchant has good sales copy. If they do not, the site will not convert well and you could be wasting your money.

Many products that are available are good quality products, however, the merchant website does not have effective sales text. This can negatively affect your Return On Investment. It is always better to build a landing page so that your paid web traffic can see your sales text prior to visiting the merchant page. It is a trick that has been proven time and time again to produce higher conversions.

No pre-sale opportunity for the visitor

Pre-selling is a good way to connect with a user and increase their buying potential. With direct linking this opportunity does not exist, therefore limiting your marketing potential.

Inability to collect adequate analytical data

Unless you have a Google conversion tracking code set up with a merchant, you will not have the ability to collect any form of analytical data with direct linking. When you have your own landing page or website you can collect this data through counters and other analytical tools.

When to use direct linking

In one word, TESTING. Direct linking allows you to quickly set up a campaign and get a feel for a specific product or industry without the overhead of building a landing page or website. However, you may not be able to get a sufficient amount of clicks as Google does not allow multiple advertisers to promote the SAME URL under the SAME keyword.

We use direct linking when we enter a new industry with products that we do not have any experience promoting, but with this being said, you cannot expect great conversions while using this technique. After you have made a few sales with a product by direct linking, you should always build your own landing page or website as you will sell more product and increase your Return on Investment.

Use the Direct Linking strategy when you are testing a new product or industry.

Building Relevant Web Pages

Many Internet Marketers put more emphasis on getting visitors to their site than focusing on building pages that are relevant to the search. A good landing page will have content that is highly relevant to the search and will have the ability to connect with the visitor on an emotional level.

The difference between a Landing Page and a Web page is that Landing pages are simply single pages with no other links to your domain. The only links on the page should be affiliate links that take your visitors directly to the merchant sales page.

Most paid search result landing pages are not nearly targeted enough, and honestly, most marketers are simply losing money because of this. If you have not been optimizing your pages for search relevance you are losing potential customers and limiting your profits!

Below are tricks that we have applied to several campaigns. These tricks will increase your overall ROI.

Targeted Content

Relevant ads can help generate a click to your site, but having relevant content on your webpage will convert the clicks into sales. Although many Internet Marketers can successfully get a good CTR, it does not mean that their site is an effective sales tool. When you are searching for something using Google, you are hoping to get the most relevant results from your search.

For example, if you advertise the keyword Internet Marketing e-book and your Landing page discusses how to become a successful internet marketer using a particular piece of software, you may not convert as well compared to if you were comparing Internet Marketing e-books. Many people advertise under keywords that are not 100% relevant to their webpage and these advertisers can be throwing away money because of it.

Personal Testimonials

Third party testimonials work well as a marketing tool, but personal testimonials work even better. By relating to the user, you are able to connect with them psychologically which helps them feel more comfortable making a purchase. We have seen increases of over 300% ROI on some of our sites by simply adding a few relative testimonials.

Page Heading

Capturing the visitor s interest in the first couple of lines on your page is paramount. If someone searches for the phrase make money , why not have a headline on your page that has make money in it. This relevance immediately grabs the user's attention, and gives them a reason to stay.

Related Images

Consumers are visual. Providing related images/graphics is a proven marketing tactic that will increase your sales. If you have a make money type site, you can reach better results by adding a picture of money and/or the products that you are promoting.

Compare the Products

Another trick that is highly effective is to build comparisons between products on your Landing page or Web Site. Consumers love to compare products before they buy as it gives them the feeling that they purchased the right product and got the best value for their money. Adding a comparison table to your site can drastically increase your ROI. When comparing products it is also helpful to rank the products as you see fit. The product on your page that is ranked #1 will receive 100% more web traffic than product #2. The main advantage for potential customers is that they do not have to compare products themselves because you will do it for them, and in many cases, this will help a browser become a purchaser.

The Power of a Review Page

A review page consists of a series of product or service comparisons that are compromised of individual reviews. These product reviews are based on several features such as effectiveness, guarantee, customer support, quality, price, description, and several other product-specific attributes.

Review pages are among the most effective selling tools for promoting affiliate-based products. When a visitor receives information on the top products relating to their search, they immediately gain a certain level of purchasing comfort. When customers want a specific type of product, a review page may give them the guidance they need to make the purchase.

A review page has to meet a certain criteria to be effective as there are several different components that can affect your conversion rates. They are as follows:

• Keep the Review Products Similar :All the products that are contained within a review should be tightly related. This allows the potential customer to view several products that they are interested in, and based on your reviews, make a smart purchasing decision.
• Keep the Reviews Brief : A review should be less than 150 words and should not take up the entire viewing space of a page. If you are going to include a description of the product, it should be an overview of the product as a whole. Do not copy the product s sales page and paste it onto your page as the visitor will end up reading the same text more than once.
• Allow for a Lot of Exits : Because a review page is essentially a pre-sale to the actual product s page, you should allow the visitor a lot of exits from your page to the merchant s page. You cannot make a sale directly on your page, so the sooner you get the potential consumer to the merchant site, the better chance you will have to make a commission.
• Write Quality Reviews : Become knowledgeable of the product you are promoting. If there are any inconsistencies in the information or the product descriptions, the visitor may see right through this and simply leave your page in search of quality content. Use a collaboration of your own experiences (if you have any), other website reviews, the merchant s website information, and industry information. DO NOT COPY DIRECTLY FROM OTHER AFFILIATE SITES. This is plagiarism.
• Proof Read Pages : Ever been on a website and noticed blatant spelling mistakes that diminish the sites quality? I am sure you have, and often times a spelling mistake or grammatical error will make your site look unprofessional. This lowers your ROI because visitors do not feel comfortable with the information you have provided. Use a word editor to proof read your spelling and grammar before publishing your pages.
• Provide a Reason to Buy : How will this product impact the customer? Better yet, what will they be missing out on if they do not make the purchase? If a visitor on your page has no reason to buy, they most likely will not. You cannot anticipate that every visitor to your site is prepared to make a purchase, therefore give them a reason.
• Adding a reason to buy will increase your sales. Visitors that are interested in the product(s) you are promoting may simply need a reason to buy before they whip out their credit card. It is as simple as stating the benefits of the product! Tell your visitors how the product can help them. For example: a product may save time, money, increase website web traffic, sales, conversions, etc..

How many is too many?

Having a page reviewing 10-20 products is very counter-productive and you will not see results. Doing this simply provides visitors with too many choices (yes, there is such a thing), and they will simply leave your page feeling confused. If you are promoting products with a review page right now, and you are making profits using 10-20, you are not monetizing your web traffic to its full potential.

Keep your review pages from 3-7 items, no more, no less. This will give visitors enough information to confidently make a purchase. Some products work better with 3, and some products work better with 7, just make sure that you keep within the range to reach the best results.

Limit the number of products your review or compare to 3-7 items only

Review Pages For The Advanced Marketer

In the previous section we talked about the importance of landing pages and how having a review page can drastically improve conversion rates. We ve also outlined some of the main aspects of a review page that you should consider.

• Keeping Products Similar and the reviews brief
• Allowing for affiliate link exits
• The importance of a quality review
• How correct spelling and grammar can make a difference
• How you need to provide a reason for your visitors to purchase
• The importance of having between 3 and 7 reviews per page, no more, and no less.

With these points in mind, we want to provide you with some more advanced examples and tricks that we use on a daily basis for many of our top converting landing pages.

Relevancy

We all know that Google Adwords prides its self on relevancy. The more relevant your webpage is to your ad, the higher quality score you will achieve. When you build an ad, Google visits that webpage and looks for keywords that are similar to the ones that you are promoting. For instance, if you are promoting a webpage that reviews Defeating Google Adwords, you may use keywords such as the following:

Defeating Google Adwords, Defeating Google Adwords Review, Compare Defeating Google Adwords, Defeating Google Adwords eBook, Affiliate Marketing eBook, Internet Marketing

If the landing page has these keywords within it, Google will agree that your webpage is highly relevant, and it will give you some Quality Score points.

When a visitor does a search for Defeating Google Adwords Review and they click on your ad, they will reach your webpage and be much more likely to make a purchase if you have the keyword that they searched for within your sales copy. The landing page above shows how you can add the keywords within your landing page. Have a header at the top section of the page that is the same, or similar to the keywords that you are advertising.

In the world of Internet Marketing, being highly relevant and using the proper tricks will enable you to outperform most other marketers out there. Below we are going to outline some advanced tricks that many people do not know about, or implement. We ve tested these tricks and implement them on a daily basis with many of our landing pages. The performance increase can be very significant.

Relevant Headings

If you grab the attention of your visitor using a relevant headings, it is much more likely they will stay on your page longer. If a visitor comes to your page, sees nothing but a sea of text, no images, no highlighted text, or no relevant headings, chances are they are going to leave your page. Keep your visitors interested with a highly relevant header that contains the keywords they used to get to your site. This will instantly draw interest, increase your chances of a click-through to the merchant page, and increase your chance of a sale. Having relevant headings is very important aspect of building great converting landing pages.

Pairing Ad Groups with Landing Pages

Having relative content on your landing page builds greater visitor engagement.

Visitors will stay on your site longer and read more of your information. This can lead to increased sales. If you are promoting a product such as Defeating Google Adwords you can advertise under many different highly relevant keywords like below:

Make money online, internet marketing, Google Adwords techniques, defeating Google Adwords, marketing tips.

All of the above keywords are different, and it is very difficult to have all of them contained on a single landing page. Remember, we want to engage our visitors by providing them with relevant content. Having a header that has the keywords within it will let the visitor know that the page is relevant to what they searched for.

This is where pairing ad groups and landing pages comes into play. If you build a separate landing page for each ad group, and use the common keywords from that ad group in the page headings and adcopy, you drastically increase your chances of making a sale. This trick however, takes some time because you need to modify your landing pages and have a different destination URL for each ad group.

We don t recommend tweaking a new campaign to this much detail, but if you have a campaign that is converting very well for you, it is important that you squeeze out every little bit of performance as possible.

Pairing ad groups with highly relevant landing pages will increase your sales and overall effectiveness of your landing page

Believe us, we've tested the techniques, and they work. Building separate landing pages for each ad group is hard work, but no one said that making money online was easy. If you put this kind of effort into optimizing your campaigns and landing pages you will out perform 99% of other marketers out there. Few people use tricks like this.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have your keywords show up in your landing pages dynamically, based on the search term? If there was a trick to dynamically add your keywords to your landing pages you wouldn t have to build more than one. You could save hours of work by implementing such a technique.

In the next section we are going to explain how this is possible, and provide you with step by step instructions on how to add Dynamic Page Optimization to your existing landing pages.

Dynamic Page Optimization

We ve talked about how important it is to have relevant headers on your landing pages, but to do this you need to build separate landing pages for all ad groups.

Dynamic Page Optimization (DPO) can be used to simplify this process and provide highly relevant landing pages by adding keywords dynamically.

DPO is a trick that is to be used by advanced marketers who have a good knowledge of HTML. Below are two pieces of code that you can use to implement DPO. One is made for landing pages that run on servers that support PHP, and one is written in JavaScript and can be added to any html page.

In order to take advantage of DPO you need to have some knowledge of HTML and web design. If you have a server that allows PHP pages to be displayed, you can use the PHP code below. If you do not have PHP installed, you can use the JavaScript version of the DPO code.To take advantage of DPO you need to use the version of code that applies to your application. If you are running PHP, use the PHP code, if not, use the JavaScript code. Wherever you place this code on your page, the keywords that are passed from your Google Adwords ad will be displayed. Below is an example of how to set up your Ad.

When you build your ad you need to append the code ?key=Your+Keywords to the end of your landing page url. Remember, for this to work, your landing page has to have the correct code installed on it. The example above is pointing to a PHP page. If you do not have PHP installed, your URL would look like this:

www.yourwebsite.com/page.html?key=Defeating+Adwords+Review

Your Keywords need to be separated by a + in order for Google to Accept your destination URL. This trick is relatively easy to implement, but some html knowledge is required.

Using this advanced trick will drastically improve your ad performance. Setting up your landing pages will be slightly more difficult, but the time you save on building separate landing pages for each ad group will far out weigh the initial setup process.

Sample Review Pages

In this section we ve talked about the importance of building relevant landing pages, and how it is possible to dynamically insert keywords of your choice into your landing page, but we haven t shown you exactly what a great converting landing page looks like. Below are two examples of landing pages that convert at a very high level. We have tested the lay outs of these pages and have been using them on many of our sites for a very long time. The fact of the matter is that visitors like the layout of these sites, which directly relates to how many sales you make.
You can download the files for these sites and use them as your own. We highly suggest that you use the templates if you are unsure of how to build your first review style landing page, or if want to implement a top converting site into your existing campaign.

This is Part 7 of 9, Don forget to bookmark this with bookmark button below, Add this !

Part 6 - How to Optimize Google Adwords ?

Inactive Keywords

Now that you are familiar with bidding prices and how to calculate your Break Even Point, we need to talk Inactive Keywords. Google Adwords has made some recent changes and has implemented yet another hurdle that many Internet Marketers are experiencing.

It is a fact that with Google Adwords you can bid as little as $0.01 per click, but for Internet Marketers this will result in the keyword being set to Inactive for Search. This means that your bid price is not high enough for Google to display it in the search results.

Here is the confusing part. All Google Adwords accounts are different, and the minimum bid for a keyword is different from account to account. The reason for this is that the minimum bids are determined by your overall Quality Score and history. If you have always had good CTR and your keywords and web pages are relevant to your product, then your quality score will be high. For this reason your minimum bid prices could be much less than someone with a poor performing account.

If you implement the tricks that are spoke in this articles, your quality score will go up, and your minimum bid prices will ultimately go down. This will save you money.

For many keywords we are able to bid the minimum $0.01 while many other Internet Marketers have to pay up to.20 or.30 cents to activate their accounts. It is easy to do the math and realize that paying less per click increases your overall ROI.

Quality Score determines your minimum bid prices on keywords. The higher your Quality Score, the lower your minimum bid price will be for your keywords.

Optimization your Daily Budget

All advertisers have different budgets, which is why Google Adwords is a fair playing field. You have now learned that Google Ads are placed according to Quality Score, not simply bid price. Advertisers with small budgets can compete with the big players by learning tricks to increase Quality Score. Ad placement is not just based on bid price. If a keyword does not reach high Quality Score then the ad may be overtaken by higher performing ads. With this being said, it is important that you set your budget to something that you can afford.

We have mentioned daily budget throughout this guide, however we need to talk it in more detail here because there are tricks that will allow you to reach more web traffic.

When many people learn how Google Adwords works, they are never taught about budgeting. Here we will teach you some tricks that may answer some of your major web traffic questions.

If you have a real budget of $5 per day, this is the amount that you are actually willing to spend to reach web traffic. If you set your campaign daily budget to $5, chances are that you will spend less than this amount. Many marketers do not realize that if you set your daily budget too low, Google will not serve your ads with every search query that is made with your keywords. Most times you will never even reach your daily budget if you set it too low. For this reason we set our Google Adwords Daily budgets quite a bit higher so that our ads will be displayed as much as possible in the search results.

Here's a formula that works well. Set your daily budget 5x or 10x higher than your actual budget. If you are willing to spend $5 a day then you can set your campaign budget at $25. This will allow for your ad to be displayed in more search results. If your budget is too low, your ads will barely be displayed at all and you will most likely see little to no web traffic. Google Adwords also has a daily budget calculator that will recommend the daily budget for the keywords that you have chosen. If you set this budget 5x to 10x greater, you will be guaranteed to have your ad served in all search results.

When using this technique, you need to be sure that you monitor your account. Although we have never been affected by having a budget 10x higher than what we are willing to spend, in theory you could accumulate these click charges. It is very unlikely and we have never seen it happen, but we suppose it could. For this reason, you need to keep an eye on your campaigns at the beginning.

Do not use this trick with the content network turned on.

Earlier we spoke estimating web traffic and ad positioning. Each time you build an Ad Group you need to use the web traffic estimator to see what keywords are going to get the most web traffic. It is very important to monitor these keywords to make sure that they do not get too much unwanted web traffic. No one should rely on the campaign daily budget. If you are going to be successful in the Internet Marketing business then you need to log into your account multiple times each day to monitor progress.

If you are spending too much money on one term without results you need to lower the bid price for the keywords or even consider deleting it. There is nothing worse than having one keyword that isn't converting into sales burn a hole in your pocket.

The daily budget is calculated on an average 30 day period. If you set your daily budget to $5 you could end up paying more, however, over a 30 day period, Google Adwords will control your spending so that you pay approx $5 on average per day.

Split Testing Ads

Split testing is not a new concept, but it is one of the most powerful methods of optimizing your ads. To split test, you need to set up multiple ads for the same ad group. The great thing about multiple ads is that Google gives you statistics for each ad (CTR, Clicks, and Impressions). This is very useful for comparing ad writing tricks and refining your Ad Groups to get maximum CTR performance.

In this example both of these ads have the same descriptions, but have different titles.

The data from these two ads will determine which is most effective in getting the attention of potential purchasers.

Split testing can save you time and money. We have implemented man split testing campaigns and immediately noticed great increases to ROI & CTR. As we have already mentioned, higher CTR greatly increases your Quality Score resulting in lower CPC and higher ad positioning. Below are some of the most effective split testing methods.

So where do you get the search keywords for your ad? There are four places that might help you find them:

• Logfiles : Examine your site's logfiles. How are people finding your site now? What words are they using? What search engines are they using? Are the words they're using too general to be used for Google Adwords? If you look at your logfiles, you can get an idea of how people who are interested in your content are finding your site. (If they aren't interested in your content, why would they visit?)
  In fact, if you use Google Analytics to measure your site web traffic, you'll find a category called Keyword Considerations that automatically tabulates the keywords that people have used to find your site via Google and other search engines.
• Examine your site : If you have an internal search engine, check its logs. What are people searching for once they get to your site? Are there any common misspellings you could use as an AdWord? Are there any common phrases you could use?
• Brainstorm : What do people think of when they look at your site? What keywords do you want them to think of? Brainstorm about the product that's most closely associated with your site. What words come up?
• Imagine someone goes to a store and asks about your products. How would they ask? What words would they use? Consider the different ways someone could look for or ask about your product or service, and if there's a set of words or a phrase that pops up over and over again.
• Glossaries : If you've brainstormed until wax dribbles out your ears but are no closer to coming up with words relevant to your site or product, visit some online glossaries to jog your brain. The Glossarist links to hundreds of glossaries on hundreds of different subjects. Check and see if it has a glossary relevant to your product or service, and see if you can pull some words from there.
• Keyword tools : Google's competitor Yahoo! has its own advertising network called Overture, and it offers a tool to test potential advertising keywords. Browse to the KeyCompete , Search Term Suggestion Tool , Keyword Research Tool , Free Keyword Tool , Keyword Academy , and take a few of your ideas for a spin.

Optimized Ad Copy Test

When setting up a campaign there is an option to allow Google to optimize the serving of your ads. With this option turned on, Google will display your better converting ad more frequently. This allows you to write more than one ad, and the best performer will be displayed more than the others.In the example above, the correct box is selected which will allow Google to optimize your ad serving. If you really want to split test ads to find out which is working better, you need to turn this option off.

Non-Optimized Ad Copy Test

This is the true test of CTR & CPC. Do you want to know which ad is performing better, and which ad CPC has been set lower from a higher quality score? Not allowing Google to Optimize your ads will allow you to truly test which ad is actually performing better because each ad will be displayed equally. Typically you want to allow for a total of 200 clicks before determining which ad is the better performer.

Both tricks can be used to determine different tests. If you want to determine which adcopy is performing better, you need to disable optimized ad serving.

Optimized ad serving will display your best performing ad to your potential customers and in many cases increases your ROI. Both tricks can be used for different purposes and it is important that you understand the differences. Many marketers simply leave optimization on because it is the default option when building a campaign, while many do not even know what its significance is.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Most of the time, users click on ads with titles and text that closely match what they're looking for. Lazy advertisers who want to take advantage of the ability to match the user's query in their ad title or ad text can use dynamic keyword insertion. The format is {KeyWord: Alternate text }yes, you need to include those squiggly brackets (called braces). So, if this is placed in your ad title and the user types Red Cactus, Red Cactus will be your ad title.

A typical use of this format is a large list of products that you don't want to create separate ads for; you want users to see something better than a generic title. Here's the problem with dynamic keyword insertion. Even factoring in the ad rank boost you get from the higher CTR that generally comes with matching the user's query, the return on investment of ads using such matching is ofteneven usuallylower than if you use a manual ad title that is slightly less Pavlovian in its appeal to searchers. You do pay a penalty in terms of ad rank when you write ad copy that filters out some prospects, but it's often worth it to pay that penalty.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a trick that many Google Adwords advertisers are not aware of. This trick allows the keyword to be dynamically inserted into the title or body of your ad.

If you have a large group of keywords that are relative, it is possible for you to include each keyword in the ad without writing multiple ads. Dynamic Keyword Insertion will allow you to do this.

marketing ebook, marketing guide, marketing resource, marketing techniques

Above are some keywords that you could use Dynamic Keyword Insertion with. When someone searches for a particular keyword and the search term is within your ad, all instances of the keyword are bolded. This has a significant impact on the overall CTR of your ads and will contribute to a higher Quality Score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is an effective solution to dynamically alter your ads to target a visitor s search. Here is how it works: When you use this format within your ad, each keyword from your Ad Group will be inserted into the ad dynamically.

{ KeyWord:Default Text}

The first part of the phrase is the word KeyWord , this inserts your keyword capitalizing the first letter of each word. This is followed by a : then by the Alternate Text. If a user searches a key phrase that is too long to fit within the ad, the default text will be displayed instead.

You may also use keyword which will keep your keywords lowercase, and Keyword which will only capitalize the first letter of the first keyword.

When using Dynamic Keyword Insertion, this is what your ad setup will look like.

When a search is done for any of the keywords on the previous page this ad will be displayed using the exact search term within the title of the ad. If the search is longer than 25 characters, Marketing eBook will be displayed as the default title.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a great method of getting a high CTR, however it does have some negative effects on an ad s overall Quality Score. Since it is the lazy person s method of hyper-targeting a campaign, Google gives advertisers who use Dynamic Keyword insertion a lower Quality Score.

We use Dynamic Keyword Insertion, and it works very well. With this being said, once you have collected some data about your best performing keywords you may decide to build ads specifically written for the keyword and remove the keyword from your Dynamic Keyword insertion Ad Group.

We know that you are probably thinking that the Dynamic Keyword Insertion function could save you a lot of time, but you are only partly correct. By using Dynamic Keyword Insertion you will be building ads that will reach a very high CTR, as the keywords will be bolded in each of your ads. However, when it comes to overall Quality Score, Google does not give points for ads that use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion technique, therefore lowering your ads overall score.

You can build the exact same ad with or without Dynamic Keyword Insertion, but the ad without will be positioned higher in the search results while achieving a lower Cost per click.

Run Better Tests

Go into the "edit campaign settings" area of your account, for any given campaign. The default method of rotating ads is set to Google's advantage. Google will start crowding out the ad that gets fewer clicks (a lower CTR) and start showing your high-CTR ad more often. That puts more money in its pocket, but it doesn't allow you to run the test evenly to measure through to your revenue stream to be sure which ad is truly the "better performer."

To ensure even ad rotation, uncheck the "show better-performing ads more often" box. Incidentally, the even ad rotation continues to be an underused feature of Google Adwords. You can use it to test more than ads. If you have two or three alternate landing pages, you can send your Google Adwords web traffic to them equally from a given group of keywords just by setting up more than one ad for an ad group, with identical ad copy, and changing only the destination URLs associated with the ad.

If you have tagged each ad URL with unique tracking code so your analytics package knows what's going on (or are using Google's Conversion Tracker), you should be able to compare the conversion rates on these landing pages without having to use any fancy content management tricks on your site. An example would be testing the home page against a tailored landing page, or a category page showing a selection of choices against a page describing a single product in depth. Don't guess, test.

Run Smarter Reports

You don't need to sign up for Google's Analytics service, or buy Webtrends Enterprise, Omniture SiteCatalyst, or other high-powered analytics services, to get useful tracking of your clicks right through to a sale. Google's entry-level Conversion Tracker gives you plenty of information if you set it up right. It's fairly similar to most analytics software in that you have to install the correct JavaScript code on your site and sometimes customize things to pass through revenue data, if desired.

But what if you want to determine the return on investment on ad copy you're testing, as opposed to which keywords or groups of keywords are performing better? Many users aren't aware of how powerful the advanced reporting is in Google Adwords. Go to the Reports tab and, once on the Create Report page, select Text Ad Report. You can then select a time frame and limit the report to the campaigns you're interested in.

Finally, you need to customize the stats shown in the report. Conversion-related data isn't included by default, so you need to bring up the whole range of available report elements (under Advanced Options: Columns, further down the Create Report page) and then click some additional boxes to add them.

Run the report and view it either online or in your preferred downloadable format. Quite simply, if you've made enough sales off the groups of keywords in question, you should see comparative data showing exact cost-per-conversion numbers for ads you've been running head to head (no fancy tracking codes required on your destination URLs). If you determine that one ad is significantly better than another in its ultimate revenue generation effect, you've made the most important discovery you can make about ad performance, and next, you'll want to delete the nonperforming ad and perhaps run new tests. You'll also want to attempt to learn lessons from the test, which is easier if you've been testing certain elements of your copy based on industry theories and your own hypothesis.

Sometimes, these tests are amazing. I ran a test on one product a new ad competing with the old for the month of April 2006. Both generated about 600 clicks. The old ad generated 11 unique new customers at a cost of $9.73 per customer. The new ad generated zero transactions, so we're still waiting on that cost-per-acquisition figure as it is currently at "infinity"! 110...on 600 clicks! That's statistically significant to say the least. Goodbye to the new ad.

This helped us confirm that our call to action in the old ad, relating to free shipping and available inventory, was working well. Unfortunately, Google Adwords doesn't give me suggestions for how to explain to a client that I wasted his cash testing a "great new ad" that turned out to suck. Maybe we can chalk it up to "branding."

Control Your Ad Positions

You can now tell Google Adwordskeyword by keywordto show your ads only in certain positions in the advertising area of the search engine results page. This is available in Advanced Options under Edit Campaign Settings.

Let's say you want your ad to show up only if you can be no higher on the page than ad position 3 and no lower than 6. Enabling the ad position control provides a drop-down box in "keyword settings" for every keyword. The default is "any position," but if you say to show your ad no higher than third position, and no lower than sixth, Google simply doesn't show your ad if your ad rank forces you outside these positions. Be careful with this one.

Essentially, what it's telling the system is to keep your ads turned off unless your positioning criteria are met, so you could see sharply reduced ad impressions if you use the feature. This feature won't adjust your bid for you, so this is not "classic" bid-to-position functionality that is available with some third-party bid management tools. It looks like Google is testing the waters on this feature, including the revenue impact, in order to decide whether to implement a more robust set of bid management options.

For now, Google still has no bid-to-position feature and no day-parting feature. Advertisers seeking such exotica need to investigate third-party options or custom programming on their own through the Google Adwords API. Keep in mind, though, that the existing bid system is easy to use because it has an automatic bid discounter, and it subjects your ad delivery to whatever budgetary parameters you specify. Frequent (several times daily) bid changes are overrated, especially given that your ad rank is not solely dependent on your bid.

Don't Be a Slave to Automation

Google has been brilliant about automating editorial functions. If you're new to some of the legal and policy issues, the process can be daunting. One example is the automated ad copy checker that kicks in when you enter a new ad. Sometimes, the system identifies a misspelling when in fact you're using a niche term that's relevant to your region or industry.

Other times, a potential trademark violation comes up, such as using the word "enterprise" in your ad copy (which is the name of a rental car company). If you're not in the rental car business, it's highly unlikely that your use of a common word constitutes any kind of violation. You should politely appeal to Google in the box provided. Usually, your ad is approved within 48 hours.

CTR and Keyword Match Types

Knowing the difference between keyword match types and how to effectively use them can greatly increase your overall Quality Score. The goal of Defeating Google Adwords is to teach you how to build effective advertising campaigns that will outsmart your competitors. You will pay less, experience better results, and increase your ROI.

Few marketers know how to effectively use match types. In this section examples will be used as much as possible to simplify the explanations of the techniques. The first thing that you need to know are the definitions of the match types that Google Adwords allows you to use for your Ad Groups. These definitions are directly from Google.

• Broad Match - This is the default option. If you include general keyword or keyword phrases-such as tennis shoes-in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads will also automatically show for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations. Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches.
• Phrase Match - If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in "tennis shoes", your ad will appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and possibly with other terms in the query. In this case, the search can also contain other terms as long as it includes the exact phrase you've specified. For instance, our ad will appear for the query red tennis shoes but not for shoes for tennis.
• Exact Match - If you surround your keywords in brackets-such as [tennis shoes]-your ads will appear when users search for the specific phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and without any other terms in the query. For example, your ad won t show for the query red tennis shoes.
• Negative Keyword - If your keyword is tennis shoes and you add the negative keyword -red, your ad will not appear when a user searches on red tennis shoes.

There is more that you need to know about keyword matching options so let s dive right into things. Using broad, phrase, and exact matching options for each keyword or phrase within your Ad Group will dramatically increase your CTR and Quality Score. In order to explain this in detail, an example will be used:

Keyword: Tennis Shoes

If you use the broad, exact and phrase match types for this keyword phrase you will reach higher CTR because the impressions that are calculated for the word will be divided among the 3 match options.

Tennis Shoes, Tennis Shoes , [Tennis Shoes]

If a user searches for Buy Tennis Shoes , then your phrase match term will most likely be triggered. At this point only your phrase match keyword will have an impression calculated for it (and hopefully a click too). If a user searches for Tennis Shoes , then your exact match [ ] term will be triggered and it will have an impression calculated for it.

If a user searches for Shoes basketball tennis soccer your broad match term may be triggered and an impression would be calculated.

According to the above examples, 3 impressions have been calculated, one for each match option. Now let s compare this to if you were only using broad match option for your keywords.

Using the same keyword above, you would now have 3 impressions for Tennis Shoes. So why does this matter? Using broad, phrase and exact match options for every keyword in your Ad Group will separate the impressions among the 3 keywords thus giving each keyword the chance for a higher CTR. Higher click-through ratios (clicks / impressions) for each keyword will improve their overall performance.

In this example we only have one unique keyword Tennis Shoes, but by using broad, phrase, and exact match Google calculates the statistics for each keyword separately, thus spreading out the impressions among the 3 match options.

Each keyword bid and position is calculated separately from other keywords and this trick will allow you to reach higher positioning at a lower cost. Having a high CTR also helps your overall Quality Score.

Use all three match types for every keyword that you include in your Ad Groups. Using this trick will dramatically increase your CTR. We recommend using a maximum of 25 unique keywords per Ad Group, however when using Broad, Phrase, and Match type options you will end up having 75 Keywords. This is fine as you still only have 25 unique keywords.

Using the Google Content Network

We warn our members at Wealthy Affiliate to turn off the Content Network when they are first starting out. This is the biggest mistake that can be made when starting out with Google Adwords, as 70-80% of your web traffic will come from this source, and you will lose money. However, if you have experience with Google Adwords and have campaign data, you can leverage the Content Network to increase your profits.

For those of you that are still wondering what the content network is, we will give you an overview of how it works, and why it is a bad idea to start out with the content network activated.

The content network consists of a large network of publishers (essentially web site owners), that display Google Ads on their web pages. Based on the pages content, Google will serve the most targeted set of ads.

Theoretically, this web traffic sounds highly targeted. Realistically, this web traffic is coming in the form of Arbitrage sites, and other bulk, low quality web traffic strategies. This web traffic simply does not convert the same way that search network does, and it is recommended that you have this turned off initially (especially in the product testing phase).

How to make Content Network web traffic convert

To be profitable using the Content Network you need to find a product that has high ROI. If you can get conversion data you will have the ability to determine which keywords are converting into sales. You can then use these keywords within your content network campaigns at a lower CPC. With this being said, it is not always possible to determine which keywords are converting into sales unless you own the product and can include your conversion codes on the sales page. If you do not know which keywords are converting for you, then we recommend keeping the Content Network turned off. You can waste thousands of dollars with the Content Network turned on, and in many cases beginner marketers do not know this. If you choose to use the content network, you can use same ad tricks that we have already spoken about.. The WOW factor has been proven highly effective to grab the attention of content network web traffic.

Search Network

The Content Search Network consists of sites that have added the Google Search functionality to their page or have their own independent search function. The Search Network is typically higher quality than the Content Network as people are getting your results in the same way as they would if they were searching a particular subject within Google. The main difference is that the search does not originate from the Google Search Engine.

Content Network

The Content Network is the lowest quality form of advertising within Google Adwords. The reason for this being that the Content Network is essentially a group of people with websites that get paid to put your ad on their webpage, also called Google Adsense.

Often times this web traffic is driven from low quality web traffic sources (bulk web traffic) in order for these Adsense Publishers to turn a profit. The Content Network can be a valuable asset to certain products/services campaigns, but the CPC must be set to a much lower price. We suggest that you set the bid anywhere from $0.01 - $0.05 if you are going to give the content network a try.

Setting Content Bids

Since Google's Content Network is not nearly as targeted as Google.com web traffic, it will not convert as well. If you set your bids the same for the content and search networks, you will find that your advertising cost will be very high, with a majority of that (70-80%) coming from your Content Network web traffic. Because of this, Google has recently added new functionality to their Content Network to allow you to bid on the content network separately. Unless you have significant conversion data telling you otherwise, you should not spend anymore than $0.05/click on the Content Network. If you are new to Internet Marketing, you should avoid using the Content Network until you feel comfortable with Google Adwords and Internet Marketing in general.

Control Your Content Bidding

Some advanced advertisers might want to use custom programming to separate clicks from Google's "content partners" from clicks on the same keywords emanating from the search network. I prefer to use established analytics packages that do this. At the very least, you need to understand that most "content targeting" clicks are worth significantly less to the average advertiser than most clicks originating from a web search.

In Edit Campaign settings, make sure you enable "content bidding" if you have "content targeting" enabled. Then set different bids on content, ad group by ad group. If you're bidding around $.50 on a set of keywords, I'd recommend bidding $.15$.20 on content, or even less. The only way to know for sure is to use sophisticated analytics.

Control Your Geography

During campaign setup, you're offered "location targeting options." For existing campaigns, you can edit these settings. Specify countries and territories, regions and cities, or custom. Whatever you do, don't show your ad to the whole world unless that's your intention. Using custom geography, you can even target a radius of a few hundred miles, or a geographic "shape," if you're handy with the tools, which are now easier to use with a WYSIWYG-type interface on a map.

Boo-yah! This functionality works fairly well subject to the limitations of mapping users' IP addresses to exact locations. It's currently available in about 15 countries. Even national advertisers may find this highly useful, running campaigns in several dozen major metropolitan areas and adjusting their bids upwards in some of them to reflect the cities that are most responsive in terms of sales conversions.

A lot of these features can be a downright blast to use, especially for junkies. Don't forget your goals: acquiring new customers and communicating with them effectively and consistently. Ultimately, it's about customers, growth, and profitwhatever those concepts mean to you and your business. Many of the most advanced features have the effectwhen boiled downof causing you to buy too much media, or too little. Keep that in mind as you build and refine a campaign that runs consistently in an optimal range.

This is Part 6 of 9

Part 5 - Being a winner in your Competition

Quality Score

If you have not heard of Quality Score, then you are not running your Google Adwords campaign as optimally as you could be. Quality Score is Google's point system that ranks each and every ad and determines where it is positioned within the sponsored results. It also determines what the minimum bid price will be on keywords you wish to advertise and how much you pay-per-click.

If you can reach a high Quality Score you can get a higher ad position than a competitor who is paying more per click. This is one reason that Google Adwords is an Internet Marketer's dream system. Unlike Yahoo! Marketing and other pay per click networks, you can attain great ad positioning without having to spend more than the other competitors. Quality Score has enabled Google to reach the highest quality paid search results of all other advertising networks.

Quality Score is based on 5 different variables, all of which impact your ad's overall score. These variables include CTR, Ad Content, Ad Grouping, Ad History, and Landing page content. This section is very important so please make sure that you understand the following information well.

1. CTR - Click-Through Rate

Your campaign click-through rate is the ratio of impressions you serve to the number of clicks those impressions generate (clicks divided by impressions measured in page views). Click-through rate tells you whether the particular message you're using is well written, well presented, and well targeted to the particular audience you're trying to reach

Your campaign click-through rates can be difficult to calculate because impressions are often served by external servers and usually require that data is imported into your measurement solution. Also, some advertising servers don't actually measure or report on clicks, forcing you to use responses as a proxy for clicks.

As mentioned earlier, CTR or Click-Through Ratio is the percentage of clicks your ad receives in relation to the number of search impressions. CTR directly relates to how compelling your ad is to the target audience. There are several tricks that can be implemented to increase CTR, some of which have been spoke earlier in the Ad Copy section.

CTR is one of the most important factors that you want to master in order to reach a high Quality Score. If you are experiencing CTR of 1% or less, you can easily increase this to 5%+ by using the Common keyword technique. We have helped many Internet Marketers cut their advertising costs in half by implementing this technique.

Having keyword-relative content within your ad will increase your Quality Score. One suggestion is to have the keywords from your Ad Group within your ad. For example, if you are promoting the keywords money, make money, how to make money, you could build a single Ad Group with a title like the following: This not only increases your Quality Score (as the ad is relevant to the keywords), it will increase your CTR as people will be more inclined to click your ad because the search terms are bolded.

2. Your Ad Content

Having keyword relatives content within your ad increase your Quality Score

3. Ad Grouping

Building ad groups is very important to not only building a good Quality Score, but increases the relevance of your ad copy to your keywords. Try to keep your Ad Groups to a size of 25 keywords or less. Although Quality Score is a particular rating given to a keyword, the bigger your Ad Group, the less targeted your ad becomes, thus decreasing your Quality Score value.

4. The History

Whether you like it or not, Google makes account predictions. If your Google Adwords account has performed poorly in the past, it automatically assumes that your ad & Ad Group quality is going to be low with any new Ad Groups (or additional keywords). If you have noticed that your ad is inactive, it is because your maximum bid is not set high enough for Google to display it in the search results. This may be a result of poor ad performance in the past. Do not worry, you can lower the minimum CPC if you improve your CTR, which is obviously in direct relation to the quality of your ad.

If you have an ad that has performed well in the past, you can use Google's historical predictions to your advantage. You can add highly related keywords to your top performing campaigns Ad Groups and you will find that the minimum CPC will be much lower than that of an account with poor ad history.

Put effort into initially setting up quality Ad Groups and this will greatly improve the predictions Google makes.

5. Landing Page Content

The most recent addition to Google Adwords Quality Score formula is landing page content. The idea is that the more relevant the landing page, the higher the quality the search results. With quality being one of Google's main focal points, they have put a system in place to monitor the quality of the sponsored search results, and the actual relevance of the landing pages to the search terms. This will have a negative effect on your overall Quality Score if your ad is not relevant to your landing page, or if you are using particular tricks to alter or hide page content (cloaking, redirects).

Your landing page must include relevant content to the search term or your Quality Score will be negatively affected.

Another Landing Page Relevance

With Google's latest Big Daddy upgrade that took place, the Quality Score algorithm has seen a major shift. In addition to many to the other components of Quality Score, landing page relevance has been added as a significant aspect. In order to reach a high QS now (and good positioning), a landing page that is highly relevant to the initial search query is required. This means that if someone searched the term fix my golf swing , you should have these exact terms on your website. It is also good to include related information.

Google put in place to improve the quality of the paid search listings. We have done tests to validate the importance of landing page relevance and in some instances a relevant page cut 25% of the overall Cost-Per-Click and got ad positioning that was 3-5 spots higher. Landing page relevance is KEY and you should not ignore it.

Tips for a Relevant Landing Page:

• Include a Relevant Title : Within the “title”“/title” tags on your webpage, you should include the keywords that were used in the search query. If someone typed in fix golf swing and came to your webpage, your title should include golf swing and ideally, the exact phrase.
• Use Relevant Headlines : Headlines, in particular ones that are larger text or are included within “h1” tags should be highly relevant and include the keywords from the search query.
• Relevant Content :Google searches the content within your webpage as well as the header and title.
  The content should be relevant to your title and content anyways, because if you are trying to just optimize your website for Google, then you may be missing the boat on your actual customers. The higher the relevance, the higher the conversions never overlook this fact.
• Build Static Web Pages : Many people have scripts in place for to insert the keywords from the search query dynamically into their webpage (see DPO section). This is great, but you may be lowering your Quality Score slightly as Google does not interpret dynamic content.
  Building static web pages will obviously generate the highest Quality Score but will take the longest to implement. If you are going to use DPO, make sure that you have relevant content on your webpage to lessen the affects that it may have.

If you notice that your minimum CPC is very high, it is quite likely due a lack of landing page relevance.

What Effects on Ad Placement ?

Now that you are familiar with Quality Score it is important to implement the correct tricks so that you can reach the best return on investment while keeping the relevance and overall quality of your campaign high.

There is a fine balance between bidding, ad placement, Quality Score, web traffic, and overall cost.

Get Position and Bid

When you build a new ad campaign, the web traffic that you generate should be very important to you. Remember, the more quality web traffic that you can achieve, the more potential you have to convert a visitor into a buyer. With this in mind, make sure that you are not paying too much for this web traffic as your advertising expenses need to be less than your overall sales in order for you to turn a profit.

When starting a new campaign it is a good idea to get your ads placed on the first page of search results. Each page has up to 10 places where paid listings will appear so positions between 1 and 10 will be on the first page, thus getting more web traffic. Most search web traffic does not go beyond the first page when doing a search.

How do you know what position your ads are going to be placed in? You can use Google's web traffic Estimator for this.

The Web traffic Estimator is a powerful tool but it is not 100% accurate. The results are based on previous data that Google has collected from the searches that were done in a specific time period. For this reason the Web traffic Estimator can only be used as a guide. Regardless of the accuracy of the Web traffic Estimator, it is a great tool to use as it will help you determine how much you should begin your bidding at.

After you enter the keywords into an Ad Group, you will be taken to a page that looks like the image below. The page will ask you to enter your maximum CPC into a textbox. After doing this, click the link that says View Web traffic Estimator. A page will be displayed that shows you how much each keyword will cost, the estimated average CPC and position. You will want to play with your bid so that you can get the most web traffic for the least cost. You can enter different bids and update the page by clicking the Get New Estimates button.

It is also a good idea to sort the estimates by clicks per day. Click the Clicks Per Day link at the top of the column to sort. This will bring the keywords that will get the most web traffic to the top of the list so you can see where you may be spending your money. We want to keep the average position between 1 and 10 so that your ads appear on the first page. To do this you may have to adjust your maximum bid. Once finished, you can click the Continue button and save your ad.

If you cannot afford the bid price to be on the first page, you can still test out your Ad Group with a lower maximum bid. This is still effective but it will take you longer to generate web traffic.

What Cost of Web traffic ?

It is always difficult to know which keywords will convert into sales, so it is important that you keep a close eye on all of your new campaigns. As soon as you start getting impressions and clicks you will be able to see where you are spending money, and what keywords are costing you. Web traffic is very important, and the more relevant web traffic the better, but if you are not converting sales then the web traffic that you are getting is not worth the money. We have a rule of thumb that all Internet Marketers should apply to their advertising efforts:

When starting a new campaign you need to calculate how much you will earn for a single commission for the product you are promoting. Once calculated, you will have a threshold to follow. Once web traffic starts coming to your site you need to look at your Google Adwords campaign data. More importantly, look at the cost of your campaign. Once your cost exceeds the single commission amount, you should put your campaign on pause and look further into things.

For example, if you make $45 per sale in commissions, the maximum you should spend on the campaign without a sale is $45 before making changes.

What do we mean by Looking further into things ? You can look at your advertising campaign and see how much you have spent on a campaign. Look at the average cost per click, average position and web traffic per keyword. You may see that one keyword has triggered all of the hits to your site. In this case you may want to lower the bid for this keyword or even delete it all together.

Web traffic is great, but if it does not convert into sales you need to make some adjustments to your Ad Group. Following the single commission threshold above is a good way to test your campaigns at the beginning.

Get the Profit in Maximum Bids

You will notice that some keywords and industries are more expensive to advertise than others. For this reason we need to talk high cost bidding. Some keywords cost over $1.00 to have your ads displayed on the first page of search results. $1.00 per click is quite high, but depending on how much your commissions are it can be a good idea to pay this much for a click.

If you have a product that pays you $70 commission per conversion then you can break even by converting at 1 in 70 (1:70). However, to be profitable, you should be aiming for conversions of 1:35. It is always important to calculate what your Break Even Point is. To make the calculation you can use the following formula.

Single Commission Cost per Click = Break Even Point
Here is an Example:
Single Commission = $45
Average Cost per Click = $0.87
Break Even Point = 52 (approx).

To break even you will need to convert at 1:52. Any conversion ratio above this will be profitable for you. A successful campaign can easily yield 100% return on investment and in this example you would have to convert at 1:26 to reach 100% ROI. Using

the Break Even Point will help you judge how much you can spend on average per click at a specific conversion rate to earn profits.

You always want to get the most clicks for the least cost so when estimating your web traffic you can start by entering the minimum bid price ($0.01 USD). Raise the price until you are comfortable with the estimated web traffic results & CPC keeping in mind that the positions 1 to 10 generate the most clicks.

How can these tricks actually save you money? It is simple. As your Quality Score increases, the amount of money you actually spend on each click decreases, and your ad position rises. Google rewards people with high Quality Scores because their ads are highly relevant and perform better.

Did you know that as your Quality Score rises you can actually lower your Maximum bid price and reach the same positioning within the search results? This is true, and we have tested the trick many times before. When you start a new Google Adwords campaign your Quality Score is very low and if you have a poor performing account your Quality Score will also be low. Google will place your ads in the search results according to your Quality Score and Max bid, but as your Quality Score rises, you can actually lower your Max bid prices on your keywords and still reach the same positioning.

This is also how you can reach higher ad placements than your competition, and pay less per click. If you follow our tricks you will increase your revenue, decrease your advertising costs, and your increase your overall performance.

This is Part 5 of 9