1 Comment Written by Anders on April 21, 2008 – 2:13 am

A successful AdWords ad will attract a certain amount of clicks compared to the number of times the ad is viewed. Simply having an ad that’s viewed 1,000 times per day with 0 clicks doesn’t result in any success for you.

An ad that gets 1,000 views and perhaps 50 to 100 clicks is highly successful, however. To induce those clicks, it’s important to select ‘‘action’’ words that prompt shoppers to take the steps that will bring you money.

Good action words include ‘‘Shop,’’ ‘‘Buy!’’ ‘‘Choose,’’ ‘‘Try,’’ or ‘‘Explore.’’ Bad ones include ‘‘Think,’’ ‘‘Be,’’ ‘‘Wonder,’’ ‘‘Consider,’’ or other terms that don’t encourage the shopper to actually do something. You have to be careful not to violate a company’s trademark, but here, the AdWords ad creation tool will help you; it’s ‘‘smart’’ enough to tell you when it thinks you’re violating a company’s rules.

Also keep in mind the general business principle that, if you want to make money, you first have to spend money. That’s as true in cost-per-click advertising as it is selling online. With AdWords, though, your expenses come in a manageable few cents at a time. Before anyone registers or signs up for the product you’re advertising, you’re going to get some ‘‘clickers’’ people who click on your ads, take a look at what is being offered, and don’t follow through by buying something.

These lookers will cost you something each time they click on a link. To keep your expenses from ‘‘clickers’’ from costing you too much, be sure to establish a reasonable budget. You agree to pay a reasonable per-click fee, and you set a maximum for the amount you’ll spend in any given day. It’s also important to monitor your ads and adjust the text or the keywords, or both, to get better results.

On the other hand, don’t give up on an ad immediately just because it doesn’t get any attention at all. If you see that shoppers clicked on an ad 50 times in a day without buying anything, you can end that campaign and start another. Remember that with AdWords, you are in control.

Choosing Keywords

The part of your ad that shoppers don’t see, but that is just as important as the ad copy that appears on Google’s search results, is the keyword selection. Enter a term in the text box shown in the Choose keywords section of the form.

The best keywords are those that uniquely describe the item or service you are advertising. Use the ones you might enter yourself. Do a search for the item you are advertising, and scan the search results for likely terms either in the body of the ad or the title. If you need help coming up with keywords, click Search to view some suggestions. Enter as many keywords as you can in the box but keep them as specific as possible, or you’ll get lots of impressions with no clicks or purchases.

Such an ad doesn’t cost you anything you only pay for clicks, not impressions but it doesn’t accomplish your goal, either. The keywords can be a single word or a short phrase. The trick is picking words or phrases that are likely to attract people to your ad and not only that, but get them to follow through with a purchase or registration.

If you click the link Advanced option: match types near the bottom of the keywords section of the page, four examples appear showing how you can use punctuation to control exactly how and when your keywords will match someone’s search terms and cause your ad to appear. The first option is not to use any punctuation at all. If you don’t add punctuation and simply type the keyword, you attract a ‘‘broad match.’’ In a broad match, your ad will appear whenever the keyword is entered. The other three options are:

• Exact match. Your ad will appear if someone enters the exact word or phrase you specify, without any other keywords. Enclose the keyword in [brackets]. For example, if you specify [Nike shoes], your ad will appear when someone searches only for that phrase; it will not appear for the search phrase ‘‘Men’s Nike shoes.’’
• Phrase match. Your ad will appear only if someone enters the exact word or phrase you have specified, whether that word or phrase is alone or with other search terms. You enclose the phrase match in parentheses, like this: ‘‘phrase match.’’ For example, your ad will appear if you specify ‘‘Nike shoes’’ and someone enters the phrase ‘‘Women’s Nike shoes.’’
• Negative match. Your ad will only appear if the specified keyword is not entered. Use this option in conjunction with other search terms, or else your ad will appear more often than you wish. This option narrows your original search terms, for instance: ‘‘Nike shoes-trainers’’ will cause your ad to appear when someone searches for ‘‘Nike shoes’’ but not when they add the word ‘‘trainers.’’ When you’re done entering keywords or phrases, scroll down to the next section, where you choose your preferred currency from the drop-down list. Then scroll down to the next section.

There’s no limit to the number of keywords you can enter, though Google recommends you use 20 or less for best results. A service called Wordtracker provides search marketers (people who use search services like Google or Yahoo! to market their businesses) with suggestions of keywords that should drive some traffic toward the products they are trying to sell. The service is free to try out and will instantly supply you with a selection of keywords based on a product description you submit. If you sign up for a subscription, you get hundreds of keywords for each submission.

Deciding on Ad Placement

Where your ad appears on a Web page depends in part on how much you have bid per click, and whether or not you have bid the most in the category.

Cost per click advertising enables you to choose keywords that will cause your ad to appear in a set of search results. You place a bid on the keyword; the bid indicates how much you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad. The higher you bid, the better placement you have in ads.

Here’s an example: Suppose you want to place an affiliate ad for an iPod Nano. This is a popular item, so you can expect to have a lot of competition from other search marketers who want to promote the same product. Suppose you have five other marketers who bid on the keyword ‘‘iPod Nano.’’

How can you stand out from the crowd? One option is to be as specific as possible: if the other marketers bid on the keyword ‘‘iPod Nano’’ and you bid on ‘‘4GB iPod Nano’’ you’ll distinguish yourself and attract a more targeted audience.

You’ll get fewer clicks overall, but the chances will be better that the people who see your ad will click on it and make a purchase of the iPod Nano you are promoting.

Another way to stand out from the crowd is to bid higher than everyone else. Suppose you have five people bidding on the keywords ‘‘iPod Nano.’’ When the keywords are the same, the thing that determines placement on a page full of search results is the amount of the bid.