Making Google AdWords work for you
Google has a pay per click program called Google AdWords. This refers to advertising within its search results sold by Google. These are the listings that appear on the right hand side of the page when you search for a term in Google. For the record, regular search engine result pages or 'serps' as they are referred to are known as organic listings and traffic originating through these results is called organic traffic. Traffic originating through advertisments within search results is called paid traffic. There are a maximum of 8 entries per page and you can appear with a bid from a little as 5 cents.
Google AdWords will let you run an advertisment within its network for a running per click fee. So, you can specify a title, description and url and bid a per click fee to get traffic to your site. Google charges a per click fee for each visitor you get through its AdWords program. So this is called 'pay per click' advertising or ppc advertising. The minimum fee for this is $0.05 or five cents for a click. This is half the minimum bid of Yahoo search (erstwhile Overture/ GOTO) which pegs its minimum bid at $0.10. While the minimum is $0.05, the maximum can go up to as high as $1.50-$2.00 quite often. At the extreme are certain keywords for which bids can be as much as $50. This is $50 for just one visitor!
Despite this seemingly exhorbitant fee for advertising on the Google network, it is worthwhile for most advertisers. This is due to a gamut of factors. Google allows targeting by country, so you can get traffic only from the region you want. If I'm selling debt consolidation advice to Americans, I don't want people from China visiting my site, atleast not when I have to spend money bringing them there.
Besides this, you don't have to pay for traffic with AdWords unless a visitor actually clicks and visits your website. So, you're only paying for highly qualified visitors to your website. For the affiliate marketer, this is a great deal! What Google doesn't take into account, however are your conversions. Whether you sell or not, as long as Google sends you traffic through AdWords it charges you for it. Yet, with some sound research and a good strategy it's hard to go wrong with Google AdWords.
Google will even let you target states and cities within the United States. So if you run a pub in New York, you can push it online. Besides this, the fraud protection measures of Google are among the best in the industry and traffic is usually very valuable.
If I had to put the Google AdWords strategy in a few words it would be, to get as much traffic as possible with the lowest spend per visitor.
In Affiliate marketing specially, this gets difficult. The most competitive markets have their bids up to crazy levels and you can go bankrupt trying to outbid them. Just because someone is paying a lot per click doesn't mean it makes sense to emulate that person.
To start off you must have an idea for a new campaign. There are tons of products and services offered by merchants with affiliate programs you could choose from.
Do some groundwork. Find out how many people are already promoting that product or service. Find out what are people searching for. A single product doesn't necessarily ahev to be advertised with a single onvious keyword. In fact the most obvious and searched for keywords are the most expensive. Put together a keyword list. An excellent service for researching what people are searching for is WordTracker. Wordtracker is a very large database or rather, many databases together of search engine terms. They compile together information from the major search engines and are able to quantify the total searches for any keyword over the last few weeks. You can use Wordtracker to find words for which many people are searching but for which very few sites are listed. Wordtracker will tell you whether the plural is more searched for than the singular (used car v/s used cars). You can get abbreviations, hyphenated words, synonyms, related words, misspellings and have a large list of words for use in Google AdWords.
Save all these words in a text file or even better a spreadsheet such as MS Excel.
Write your advertisements and submit them to Google. Monitor your campaign regularly. Compare the earnings from the affiliate program to the expenditure on Google AdWords. As long as there is a comfotable spread, keep at it.
With AdWords, you can set a daily budget at the campaign level and you can also pause specific AdGroups. This will let you try and then adjust as you go along. Keywords within Adgroups can have their own individual bid amounts. You can raise bids for specific keywords. Some keywords will convert much better than others. For instance 'buy hallowen costume' will work much better than 'hallowen' if you're selling hallowen costumes.
Qualify your title and description so you don't get junk traffic. Say you're offering a loan only to people who earn over $3,000 a month, mention that in the ad. That way, someone who earns less than that won't click on the ad and you save your money.
Use the keyword in the title and description. This dramatically improves CTR (Click through rate). Sort your keyword phrases into groups and write ads that reflect the phrase the person searching has typed in. Put similar keywords targeting the same product into one group.
Use unique landing pages. Take your surfer straight to the page he expects. In one click he must get what he's there for or that may be his last click and you've lost a potential customer for your merchant and in turn your commission.
How much will you be earning per sale? What percentage of your visitors are going to buy? How much are you spending per click? Set a bid limit based on your calculation of what a visitor is worth to you. Sometimes if you expect a visitor to return again and become a lifelong customer, he may be worth much more.
Improve CTR
Make efforts to improve the CTR all the time. Google places ads with good CTR higher than the others. So you save money and get more clicks if your CTR is higher. Don't put hundreds of keywords in one camapign. Make different groups and thereby improve your CTR. Keep in mind that if it falls below 1% Google will disable your ad.
Writing AdWords ads that work for you
Write about your product/ service's USP (Unique selling proposition). If you're selling products or services for a merchant, find out from his web site or ask him, what is the USP of his product. Mention this in your ad. This is the selling point. If you're selling hard disks and this one comes with a lifetime warranty, it's probably a great selling point. Mention it in the ad copy and watch the CTR go high! Pick up some books on ad copy. The guidelines for making the best of adcopy remain the same, whatever the medium. Some changes are due to technology but the buyers are still regular people.
Go over Google's editorial guidelines for ads to make sure your ads are not flouting any guidelines. You're not perimitted to hype, exaggerate or lie to entice visitors. Google wants to remain a bankable source of credible visitor traffic and has guidelines in place to ensure this. Google always is concerned about the user experience. If your ad is disabled, just make amendments based on the feedback given to you and it will automatically be re-submitted.
The AdWords support guys are usually receptive to feedback and if you feel an ad was disapproved without a good reason, email them and explain. They'll hear you out.
- By Vikram Chandiramani, Affiliate Mantra. All rights reserved. This article may not be copied or reproduced in any form without prior permission.
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