AdWords Tips: How to Get More Traffic for Less

Google's AdWords program has quickly become one of the best ways to deliver targeted traffic to your website, but its popularity creates a problem for advertisers: How do you beat your competition and maximize profit?

(PRWEB) January 29, 2005 -- With that in mind, here are a few simple AdWords tips that will get you off on the right foot.

Start with the basics:
Visit the official AdWords Learning Center, and get a good understanding of how the system works. The more you know about AdWords, the less money you'll waste on campaigns that don't work. http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

Target more keywords:
As many as you can. Start with 1,000-2,000 keywords per ad group. Perhaps 10-20 of them will perform well. The ones that do are not easy to predict, and and keywords you expect to do well may fall to the bottom of your click list. There are lots of great ways to build quality keyword lists. Here are some of the best:

- http://www.keyword-helper.com - A tool that merges lists of keywords and creates an AdWords-optimized list for you to copy and paste. This is the secret weapon of the AdWords pros. With it, you can generate hundreds of quality keywords in a matter of minutes.
-Google's Keyword Sandbox. One of the best ways to find good alternative terms.
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
- Overture's Keyword Selector Tool - Another great way to get keyword suggestions, including search counts.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Use these tools in combination to side-step your competition and get quality traffic for the minimum bid.

If you have a lot of ads or keywords to manage, take advantage of the report features that AdWords offers. With it, you can build custom reports, and even schedule automatic report delivery. Automated Reports go out weekly or monthly, but you can download your reports as often as you like using the web interface. My suggestion is to take advantage of the automated reports to manage keywords that need less attention. You may want to use the interactive interface to manage keywords that need to be watched more closely.

Track performance over time. With the downloadable reports, it's not too difficult to merge data from your AdWords campaigns with data from your server logs and other sources. This data can give you a much more comprehensive overview of which keywords are performing well for you, and which ones need more attention.

If you have keywords that get lots of impressions, and few clicks, don't let them fall into the "disabled" bin permanently. Create dedicated ad groups to focus on problem keywords.

Work on landing pages to improve your conversion rates. You may be able to generate a lot of clickthrus for your site, but you'll still want to spend some time fine-tuning your landing page. Create dedicated landing pages for your most important keywords. You could double or triple your sales without increasing your ad spend.

About the Author: Eric Hamilton is CEO of the newly formed AllStar Makeovers, Inc. in Salt Lake City, Utah. AllStar's primary focus is to help small business owners improve their website performance.

http://www.allstarmakeovers.com/

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