Part of managing your PPC advertising campaign will be tweaking and optimizing your campaigns so that you can get maximum ROI from them. You will do this in a number of ways. There are three areas that you will be concentrating on.

The keywords in your PPC advertising campaign are critical to its success. This is one of the main areas you should address when it comes to adjustment. Keyword performance should be analyzed and adjustments will be made to improve it. You can add new matches and keywords to draw as many sectors of your market that you can to your website. Poor performing keywords should be put on pause as you do not know when they might come in useful again. This is because searchers change the sets of keywords that they use to look for a topic.

Your bidding will also play a crucial role in your PPC advertising campaign and hence should be analyzed and adjusted as needed. A high bid on a strongly performing keyword is vital to maximize your profits as it will get a better position for your ad. If you see a keyword which is bringing in decent sales from a low position you should almost definitely bid stronger on that keyword. Another good idea would be to add similar keywords to your list.

Adversely a low performing keyword in a high position can be adjusted, so that you are paying less for it and it will be in a lower position. This will save you money, which can be spent improving better performing keywords, sometimes if the keyword is really performing badly you can just put it on pause and replace it.

Next you will want to examine your PPC campaign’s ads. Just as the search trends can change, so too can the effectiveness of your ads. You can’t just let your ads sit and remain the same for long periods of time. By simply spilt testing your ads you can find which ads are strong performers and will in turn bring in the most profit. This can be crucial to optimizing your campaign.

Landing pages can also be adjusted. You can do this by split testing, using more than one landing page for a campaign. The success of your campaign is also determined by landing pages and sales pages. It is no good having a great campaign if it is not pointing to a pulling sales page. Similarly you can split test any sales pages that your campaign is pointing to.

Now that you know how to make the most of your PPC advertising campaign, there is just one more thing to keep in mind. When making all of these changes, it is a good idea to keep a log of each and every adjustment which you make. By doing so you will be able quickly see which changes are positively affecting your campaign.

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As you begin creating and writing compelling ads for your Google Adwords campaign, it’s important to know which keywords and keyphrases to use so that people can identify your ad with ease. Google Adwords expert Perry Marshall encourages all Adwords users and pay-per-click managers to make full use of the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool when creating each ad. This free tool allows you to find the most profitable and popular keywords in your niche, and can also help you drill down related keywords that you can use for other campaigns or just general keyword research. The Keyword Tool is especially helpful for fine-tuning your efforts when ads are performing poorly; if you’ve written an ad using low-traffic keywords, there is a good chance that your ads are not being clicked enough to make your ad effective.

There are several ways to use Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool so that you can optimize your Adwords campaign:

1. Come up with a broad search. Many people make the mistake of using very specific keywords or keyphrases when they first begin conducting research with Google Adwords, but this can leave you with only mediocre results. Do a broad search instead and use the ’synonyms’ tool that recommends variations as part of the results.

2. Create different ad groups using a set of similar keywords. An entirely new ad group for every campaign makes your monitoring tasks easier and less complicated. In addition, you can refer to the ‘relevant keywords’ feature already built into the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool so you can easily narrow down your search.

3. Employ a ‘negative keywords’ strategy. Google Adwords campaign’s optimization may require evaluating words and phrases that do not in favor of your market; you may adjust the Google Adwords tool so that it will only display relevant words. For example, if you are selling greeting cards but your basic search keeps showing results for ‘free greeting cards,’ you can eliminate the word ‘free’ by designating it as a negative keyword. Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool now shows results but the word ‘free’ will not be seen.’

4. Use the Site Content feature if you don’t know where to start. Based on your site’s content, Google systematically scans your webpage and recommends related keywords. For instance, if your webpage has information on your marketplace’s services and trends, your particular niche may have these strong keywords. The results will show highly targeted keywords connected to these ideas and topics after scanning completes.

5. Specify your location. Many people seem to ignore the significance of adding a specific location (whether town, city, or state) to the key phrase or key term. If you are currently establishing a service or product in a specific area or location, it can be very useful since the traffic you get out of these keywords will definitely be higher and qualified ones compared to general search. To determine your ad campaign’s best combinations, append a keyword or keyphrase with a location.

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As Co-CEO of one of the leading Adwords Management Services I absolutely hate to see people get ripped off by adwords management services that don’t live up to the golden rules of adwords management. Not only do these certain companies hurt their clients but they also hurt the entire adwords management industry by giving the rest of us a bad reputation. I am writing this article to show you exactly what to look for so you won’t get burned by sorry, so called “adwords management”. I will show you exactly what to look for so you can be sure to find a top-of the-line adwords management service.

There are 5 specific, very important things you must look for when selecting a quality adwords management service. While it can be quite complicated to understand these 5 critical things or processes rather, I will tell you exactly what questions to ask so that you will find an adwords management service that is truly professional and on top of the adwords game. True Adwords professionals can answer the following questions. Be sure to ask and get answers to all of these questions before you dare outsource your adwords management. If the adwords management service representative can answer these 5 questions with answers similar or identical to the ones below, I’d say you are in good hands.

Do You Offer Split Testing? What is the importance of it? Firstly, the rep should of course answer. “Yes” to the fist part of this question. Split testing is a vital part of successful adwords management. Split testing is extremely important because it helps find which ads are most effective and which ads draw in the most clicks. It also helps decrease click costs because Google rewards better performing ads with lower click costs and higher ad placement.

How do you organize my adwords campaigns? Adwords campaigns should be organized and totally rearranged so that the keywords are divided into very closely knit, relevant adgroups. It is important that the top performing keywords are put into adgroups of their own in order to achieve perfect relevancy.

What steps do you take to Optimize my Ads? Don’t be fooled if a rep says, “We know exactly which headlines convert the best and we know how to write professional ad copy. Blah blah blah..” That is crap. Optimizing ads mean insuring the keyword searched on shows up 3 times in the ad; once in the headline, once in the ad text and once in the display URL. Google rewards these kinds of ads with higher ad placement and lower click costs. Google loves relevancy. Also Insure that the adwords management service writes a specific ad for each keyword you have. Anything less is simply lazy.

How Do You Adjust My Bidding? What’s the most efficient form of bidding in Google adwords right now? Its definitely bidding using Google’s Conversion Optimizer. If they don’t mention anything about that then guess what? That adwords management service is officially out-dated! Any professional adwords management service knows bid management with Google’s Conversion optimizer is the way to go. Nothing else beats it.

What Continuing education does your staff go through? You’d better believe continuing education is a huge part of successful adwords management. The Google Adwords world is always changing. If you’re not consistently studying and spending money on research then you will quickly fall behind. The most advanced adwords management services spend tens of thousands of dollars on continuing education. Don’t be afraid to ask for proof of continuing education. After all it is you money at risk.

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Things don’t always go as we plan them in life, and the same is true for ad campaigns. If you have a campaign which is falling short of your performance goals you will need to look at the specific areas of the campaign and make changes quickly to minimize your losses.

While there may be any number of concerns with your campaign, the top 3 problems are: keywords, improper bidding, and ineffective ads.

Key words will be the first area you will want to look at. The easiest way to do this is with the tracking systems available from the PPC engine. This tool will allow you to see which keywords are performing well and which ones are not doing so hot. With this information you can then remove the poor performers.

There may be a few reasons why a keyword would not be performing well. First, the keyword might not be specific enough. What this means is that while it may be bringing traffic, it is generating few leads or sales. If people are drawn to your site but not interested in your product, you may need change the keyword to something a bit more targeted.

Secondly search trends may have changed and searchers are using different keywords to look for products and services. In this case you will need to put the “bad” keyword on pause and replace with one that is being used more.

Now let’s move on to bidding. Since bidding will determine both the cost and placement of your ad, it is crucial to have an effective bid. When you overbid on a keyword which has a poor performance, you will essentially be wasting money. However, having too low a bid on a hot keyword can really hurt your sales conversions. If you have a superstar keyword in a low position you should probably consider increasing your bid in order to move it up in position.

Because sales conversions are key in determining the efficiency of a keyword, you should use this data to come up with your maximum bid. These conversions are calculated by evaluating the number of sales generated from the total number of clicks received. In order to maintain a decent profit you will need to bid effectively. In order to do so, multiply the cost per click by this average number of clicks per sale and subtract that amount from the value of each sale. This will give you an idea of your profit margin and allow you to bid accordingly.

Ads for your campaigns need to be examined. It is no good having great keywords if your ad is not drawing people to your site. Be sure to split test your ads to get optimum performance from them.

A failing PPC advertising campaign can be fixed but you will need to go through each of the above areas to do it. Attention to detail is the key to success and you will need to go through your campaign methodically. You will need to record all adjustments and replacement keywords. This does take time but is well worth it.

Although these steps can help you turn your campaign around there is also an easier option available if you are unsure of what to do or you don’t have the necessary time to perform these evaluations. There are services which will manage your PPC advertising campaign and help return it to optimal working order. These services can save you a lot of time and the increase in profits will easily offset the price.

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Do you want your websites to click and convert better for you? The peel and stick procedure is the solution. It’s just that this instant you’re not peeling and sticking keywords; you’re peeling and sticking targeted web sites. This way your ads more closely match the content of the sites that you’re marketing on.

You delete a web site from one ad group, insert it into a new ad group, and write an ad that matches the thinking of the folks who are coming from that website or group of landing pages. That’s means to understand the people who are coming from those sites: their hang-ups, their psychology and their wants. Then again, that’s exactly what you do with keywords, isn’t it?

With site-targeted ads there’s no more blending results and statistics from Google, search, and AdSense visitors. When you create ads and they start to show, the comparison with other ads you’ve been showing is direct or apples-to-apples. You can equate the click-through rate of one ad with another without having to include in all of the vastly different types of places that it’s being serviced.

You’ve got a choice of numerous sizes for your ads. And it’s not shock that larger ad sizes will earn you more clicks. They’re more intrusive, more visible. Tiny strip-ads squeezed in at the very top or very bottom of the page are less so, and likely to bring you a lesser CTR.

Just as the lowest image ad can obtain a click-through rate two to three times that of a text ad. The greatest reason for this is that visuals are more convincing than mere words. Plus with image ads there’s less competition; you may be the single Google customer that’s showing on a particular page.

The flip side to this is that your image ads will get fewer impressions than text ads. There’s simply no way that image ads can be served as frequently as text ads. It’s not unheard of for some image ads to pull in CTRs ten times as high as text ads with identical copy.

But even with their good CTRs, image ads get shown much less, and because of their impulse appeal, the traffic they bring in tends to be lower value and won’t convert as well to sales.

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Are you like most of the people who begin their Google Adwords campaign at Google’s website and not their own? They sign up for an account, load up some keywords, and sit back and wait for the sales to come in. But many times, unless they already have a high-converting website to begin with, this strategy will only accelerate failure.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am the first person to tell you that a great tactic for testing your website conversion percentages is to use a Google Adwords campaign to drive immediate traffic to your site; but there IS one catch to this strategy. You have to be TESTING. If you haven’t done something to your website - in other words, if you haven’t changed a headline, an order button, a color, or something…then what variable are you going to be testing against?

If you are already failing miserably at getting people to buy something from you, then in your case, throwing thousands of dollars into Google Adwords may be futile. However, what I notice is that most companies are somewhere in between this scenario. That is, they have a decent website with an acceptable level of conversions and they use Google Adwords to drive more traffic to that site in the hopes of making more money. And some of them are hugely successful in spite of themselves.

But what if you spent a little money to “fix” your website. Maybe you need an updated logo and a fresh website design. Next, you need to make sure that your web pages are actually relevant to what your visitors are searching for. Maybe you need to consult a professional who knows a little about SEO (search engine optimization) and can help you come up with good, optimized copy and a smooth presentation with a strong call to action. For the sake of discussion, let’s say that you can get all of this for $2,000.

So you spend $2,000, but here is what you get back. First of all, Google will “see” these changes and determine that your site is more relevant than it used to be. If you are doing other things correctly in your Adwords campaign, you will be rewarded with a lower price per click. But that’s not all. Because your site is now more relevant, Google has a tendency to reward that relevancy with higher organic rankings. “Organic’ listings are the FREE listings that are underneath and to the left of the paid ads. Keeping in mind that if paid clicks cost you $5, it does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that 400 free visitors to your site brings you to break-even on your website expenditures ($2,000 / $5).

But don’t forget…your click cost with Google will more than likely drop as well - so you get the best of BOTH worlds - lower paid clicks and more free clicks. What? You already have an Adwords campaign management company and they haven’t worked with you on your website? Or you have been managing your own campaign and haven’t ever heard about this strategy? Or did you formerly use Google Adwords, but gave up because you couldn’t make the numbers work for you?

These days, competition is fierce and it takes a lot more than just clever bidding and deep keyword research to become successful in search marketing programs, such as Google Adwords. It takes what we at AbsolutelyDominate.com call the “total package”, which includes not only knowing how to use Google’s website, but how to structure your OWN website as well. If you can master these two with efficiency, then you, my friend, are going to be successful in managing a profitable Google Adwords campaign.

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