Overview of Google Adwords

Google Adwords is one of the fastest ways to get your website in front of your ideal customer.

Google Adwords is a form of advertising called Pay Per Click (PPC). With PPC, you can turn a website with no traffic into a high-traffic money-making machine overnight. But if you don't plan your PPC campaign carefully, you can waste a lot of money.

First, I'll talk about what PPC advertising is. Basically, it's a form of advertising where you make a small ad with only two or three lines of text. The ad will have a clickable headline that goes to your website.

Here's what I mean:

Top Cruise Deals

We have great prices on all kinds of cruises.

Online purchases get a discount of 30%

www.your-url.com

You can see examples of how these ads work by going to Google.com and searching for anything. The PPC ads will be on the right side of the screen after you run your search. Every time someone clicks on one of the ads, its owner pays Google a fee. Depending on how popular and in-demand the keyword is, this fee can be anywhere from.10 cents to several dollars.

The goal of the ad owner is to get as many good clicks as possible. A good click comes from someone who is interested in what you are selling. A low-quality click is one from someone who doesn't really care about what you're selling.

Since space in the Google Sponsored Links area is limited (about 10 slots per page), and there are a lot of people using PPC to advertise their products, there needs to be a way to control who gets what placement (also called Adrank) in the Sponsored Links hierarchy.

Google has three ways to control this placement:

1. Bid price
2. Score for Quality
3. Keywords/keyphrases

The goal is to have your ad show up in the Sponsored Links section of the first (or at most the second) page of Google's search results. So, your ad could be anywhere from 1 to 10 in the Sponsored Links section, or 1 to 20 if you count the second page. People usually don't look past the first couple of pages of search results, so putting your ad on the third page (or further) makes it less likely that it will be seen.

To get your ad on the first or second page of Google's Sponsored Links and get the most quality clicks, you need three things:

1. A good score for quality
2. Useful words and phrases
3. Place a bid in the active bid range.

Using the Right Keywords:

People type keywords or keyphrases into Google when they want to do a search. So Google knows when to show your ad, you need to choose keywords that are related to your product. From your point of view as an online marketer, good keywords are words that have something to do with your product. For instance, if you run a Google PPC ad campaign to sell a course on how to train dogs, a good list of keywords might include:

• dog
• "Dog training"
• "Train my dog"
• "Training for dogs"
• "dog obedience"
• "dog growling"

Note that using quotes tells Google to only show your ad when the words being searched for are in that order.

Then, your Google PPC campaign will use the list of keywords from above. Now, whenever a user searches Google for any of these keywords, your ad COULD show up in the "Sponsored Links" section of the search results.

As we've already said, keywords are not the only thing that determines which ads show up in Google. Remember that there are probably a lot of other people running PPC campaigns with the same keywords as you. And since there are only about 10 spots for sponsored ads on the first page of Google, the ads that get to be there are the ones that are willing to pay the most per click and have a higher Quality Score.

Use the Google Adwords Keyword Finder at: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox to find keywords for your product.

Putting in a bid in an Active Bid Range:

All popular keywords (and a lot of keywords that aren't as popular) have a bid range. The active bid range is the cost per click (CPC) range that puts your ad in a better position in Google's Sponsored Links area (usually position 1-20). Obviously, the higher up your ad is, the more likely it is that people will click on it.

So, how much should you pay for each click to make sure your ad is in the actual bid range? You should first find out how much that keyword usually goes for. Use the Google Keyword Tool to get a good idea of how much people are willing to pay for a certain keyword.

Note that your goal is to be on the first page or, at most, the second page of Google's search results, so you don't have to make sure you have the highest bid. In fact, you can make even more money if you bid a lot less than the highest bid. For example, let's say you're bidding on the key phrase "dog training" and you see that the first position for that key phrase costs $1.50 per click. You might find that the fourth or fifth spot costs $0.30 to $0.40 per click. In this case, I'd choose the fourth or fifth spot. The savings in costs are pretty big.

How to Get a Good Score:

What does "Quality Score" mean? So, it's a couple of things... The Quality Score is based on the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the keyword, how well the keyword has been done in the past, how relevant the text in the ad is to the keyword, and other things that Google has decided not to share. Since there are some unknowns, it's best to focus on what you can do to improve your Quality Score.

One thing you can do is try to get a high CTR (CTR). CTR is a percentage that is found by dividing the number of clicks by the number of times your ad was shown. Say, for example, that your ad was shown 100 times and only one person clicked on it. Your click-through rate (CTR) for that ad would then be 1%.

You can also make sure that the text of your ad is related to the keyword. For example, if your ad is for a dog training course and your keyword is "cars," the keyword is not very relevant to the ad.

So, that's the basic information about Google Adwords. Just try it! There is no better way to learn than by doing things yourself.