Adwords Marketing

[frenchie55]

I'm sure you guys know this but was wondering if you have any comments on the new google adwords format. I find it a little confusing,mostly finding my old campaign to change and how to delete some keywords. They show you how to add them but not how to delete the ones you don't want. Just thought maybe you could give some insight on navigating on it. They aren't very newbie at it!
Thanks, Gayle

[luckystrike]

This thread is for all questions regarding adwords marketing. Questions about user interface, strategies, and how to's are welcome in this thread!

[Simon]

I've been experimenting with Adwords the last few months and got a couple of very useful tips on how to use Adwords and not lose your shirt in the process. I'm going to use the example of soap here since this is one of my businesses and provides a good simple example.

This business is mainly focused on gift giving and sells three main products, soap, guest towels and candles that can be engraved with any text or logo a client desires. I have outsourced packaging and drop shipment to a third party, so all I do is market the products, ok so that is a very brief background.

I blog a lot to get my products to grow organically with google (blog) but since this is a new site (< 3months old) I needed to get my website visible more quickly so I ventured into Adwords. I setup a campaign with three main groups; soaps, towels and candles. I immediately setup a daily spending limit for my campaign(YOU must do this or you could lose a ton of money). For each group, I setup three Ads; example three Ads for soap, three Ads for towels and three Ads for Candles. The reason for this was I wanted to see how my different Ads performed (Google show this by rotating the Ads, giving you feedback on how often people found your Ad then clicked on it)This quickly shows you which Ads are getting the clicks. In each Ad I embedded my main keywords that I wanted to bid on.

Now here is the good bit, I was competing in an industry where people were paying $2.50 and more per click. I could not compete at this level and I tried finding long tailed keywords but even they were competitive (>$1.00). What I found was that for each keyword if I competed at three levels;broad, phrase and exact, see Google Definition I found that I could get to the front page of Google for about 30-40 cents in most cases. So for each keyword, I created three keywords, for example;

• engraved soap - broad search
• "engraved soap" - exact phrase match search as inicated by the quotes
• [engraved soap] - exact search as indicated by the square brackets

Using these three keywords in my Ad keyword list I was finding that I was getting on most occasion to page one, ranking around positions 5 to 9 on the frontpage for about 30 cents. I found out very quickly what were the profitable keywords (High click through rate (CTR)) and got rid of keywords where the CTR was low. This resulted in a real upsurge in my business and got my name recognition quickly compared with waiting for google to organically rank me from blogging. This approach allowed me to compete better with the big boys in soap without breaking the bank. I also found out keywords that let me into small niches and where I was paying less than 10 cents. So combining Adwords with simple blogging got my website off to a fairly good start without investing much money. (I used wordpress for my blog, works great and easy to install and use, each time I make an entry it's like adding fresh content to my website)

If you are new to Adwords and you have a new site try out this technique, it will save you time and money but REMEMBER setup a daily campaign budget before you start your campaign so you don't lose your shirt!

If anyone else has found any good tips it would be great to share them on any subject. Might even be worth setting up a tips and tricks section. In this industry it is knowing the REAL tips that will save you time and make you money