As you already know, it’s important to build relevant keyword groups. Putting irrelevant keywords into the same adgroup will result into a low Quality Score, therefore increasing your PPC costs.

At first I only used Google AdWords web-based interface. I tried to group keywords with Microsoft Access and Excel which was a total pain. I finally decided to have a look into Google’s AdWords editor. To my surprise, it offers the possibility to group your keywords automatically! Hurray!

Google AdWords Editor is an offline management software for your Google AdWords account. This means that it downloads your whole account locally and when you’re done making changes, it uploads data back to your account.

Grouping your keywords with this software is a piece of cake. Here’s how I did it:

1. Import all your keywords into a single (or multiple) adgroup. An adgroup can hold up to 2000 keywords so you may need to have more than one. I named my adgroup “Default AdGroup”.
2. From the left column, select your newly created adgroup (Default AdGroup in my case) and click on Tools => Keyword Grouper from the main menu.
3. From the Keyword Grouper window, hit the Generate common terms button and then click on Next.
4. The keyword grouper will then give you the possibility of importing text ads in each new adgroup to be created. At this point, this is up to you. Personnally I don’t import any ads since they probably won’t be relevant enough, thus resulting in a low Quality Score.
5. Click on Finish when you’re done. The keyword grouper will build new adgroups automatically.
6. Delete the initial adgroup you’ve created (Default AdGroup).

And voilà! You’ve got some brand new adgroups with relevant keywords grouped together.

At this point, I’ve got no text ads for these adgroups so I pause them all. All that’s left to do is to go through each adgroups, write relevant ads and set the default bid. When you’re done, activate the adgroups and post the changes to your AdWords account.

Taking Advantage Of Geotargeting

Google AdWords gives you the possibility to advertise only to visitors from within a limited area. This is done by detecting their IP address and figuring out where it comes from.

Now suppose you’ve got a visitor from the Boston area that searched for “lawyers” on Google. Even though he didn’t refine his search by using “boston lawyers”, chances are he isn’t searching for lawyers in Los Angeles (while this is not impossible).

This is where AdWords’ geotargeting comes in handy. By limiting your campaign to the Boston area, you can bid on keywords that do not include “boston” while still offering your services (or products) to people from there.

When you create a new campaign, select Regions and cities in the Target customers by location box:

On the next page, you will be prompted to specify for which state and / or city you want your ads to be displayed:

When you write your ad, you probably want to include the region or city name in it so that the visitor knows that you offer a product or service in his area.

Now that you’ve targeted visitors from a particular region, you could also create a second campaign without using geotargeting this time. In this campaign, you would bid on keywords that include the region name (Boston in this case).

Note that using geotargeting does not affect your ads’ performance. You will not get lower bids because of this. The same bidding rules apply.

Here are some of the best AdWords / PPC tips I’ve found so far:

14 AdWords Tips For Beginners
GoogleLady often posts some great AdWords tips. This one gives great tips for beginners going from using negative keywords to optimizing your landing page.

The Super Affiliate Guide To PPC Marketing
Ok this is a lot more than a PPC guide, it offers a really good startup point to those who wants to get into affiliate marketing. If you’ve wasted money on so called get-righ-quick ebooks, then this post from ZacJohnson.com is for you.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Brainstorming new keyword ideas
While the Inside AdWords blog from the almighty Google itself is far from providing great tips, some posts like this one can be interesting… when you’re done reading all the other blogs.

AdWords Landing Page Quality
Another good post from GoogleLady, she explains here how to lower your cost per click by optimizing your landing pages.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion finally explained by Google
Making use of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can be really tricky (from a strategic point of view) if you don’t know what you’re getting into. In fact I never use them myself but if you really want to make use of DKY, read this post.

How long does it take for the minimum bids to come down?
Lowering your advertising costs are part of running an efficient PPC campaign. Did you know that you could lower your advertising costs while performing better than your competitors?

AdWords Optimization Tips: Managing and Optimizing Bids
While Google’s take and knowledge on affiliate marketing is questionnable, they sure know how to make to most out of AdWords.

49 Killer Adwords Tips from Googlelady
This has got to be one of the best AdWords post by GoogleLady. It’s straight to the point while not neglecting any details. The comments made on this post by Amit at SuperAffiliateMindset.com are a must-read also.

Google says: Here’s Why Your Adwords Quality Score is Low
Your Quality Score (or QS) affects how much you pay per click. Learn why you may have a low quality score.

13 PPC Engines: Which Ones Actually Convert?
Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You ought to know what other PPC solutions are out there.

How to Instantly Boost Your ROI on Adwords
Having a good clickthrough rate (CTR) and a high conversion rate is not all. At the end of the day, having a good profit margin is what matters.

Keyword Research : Go Deep or Going Wide First?
Learn how to start building your PPC keyword list. Amit is one of the best super affiliate out there. Lately he’s been stuck in a too-many-lifestyle-posts-not-enough-useful-tips controversy but nonetheless he offers some really great PPC tips. One of my favorite blogs.

Google Adwords Ad Variations
It will never be said enough: test your ads, tweak them and test again! A good post from Zac Johnson.

How to calculate feasibility for a PPC campaign?
Is PPC the right option and will your campaign be profitable?

Q&A 1: Internet Marketing, Keyword Lists, PPC Traffic, And Failed Campaigns
A great Q&A session from another of my favorite blogs, DerekBeau.com.

Free Campaign Builder From DerekBeau.com
While this is not about PPC / AdWords tips, keep an eye on this promising tool.

The Definitive Guide To Google AdWords
I usually do not recommend any ebooks but this one from Perry Marshall is a really awesome read if you’re just getting into AdWords. This ebook saved me lots of hours of searching the web.

If you’ve found some good AdWords / PPC articles, post them here!

To me it seemed a bit discouraging that some people could afford this kind of software, I mean how could I compete with this AdWords tool by creating my ad groups manually (watch their video)? Unfortunately there were no *cough* torrents *cough* of this software so I couldn’t get my hands on it although I thought it looked really simple.

A few days ago, Derek Beauchemin posted on his blog that he was about to develop a free PPC tool and that he needed beta testers. I was pretty sure it was a SpeedPPC clone although I didn’t remember exactly where I saw the original tool and what was the name.

On October 13th, Derek finally release v1.0 of his yet-to-be-named PPC tool. Unlike SpeedPPC, it is developed in PHP and needs a web server. Support for MSN AdCenter and YPN maybe developed in the future but there’s no confirmation at this point.

The current version of Derek’s PPC tool seems quite resource consuming as he had to remove access to the online demo on his web server. I installed it on mine and despite a few minor Javascript bugs and display bugs, it seemed to work well.
Click here to view a screenshot

I’ll give it some more testing with bigger keyword lists in a few days and let you know about it. In the meantime, visit derekbeau.com for more information.

Google AdWords Quality Score

One of the factors that affects heavily your ads’ pricing is the Quality Score (or QS). The higher your Quality Score, the lower you need to bid. To see the QS of each keyword you’ve bid on, go into the Campaign Management tab. Click on your campaign and the on the ad group. From the dropdown menu, select Show Quality Score.

Your will then see the QS for each of your keywords. The QS can be Great, OK or Poor. There several factors that affect the QS. Let’s see some of them:

Ad Relevancy

To gain a higher QS, your ad’s content must be relevant to your keyword list. To get a better QS, try to use your main keyword(s) into your ad’s title and content.

Landing Page Relevancy

The landing page is the page where your visitor is sent when they click on your ad. The more this page is relevant to your keywords and ad content, the higher your QS will be.

Landing Page PageRank

Google evaluates the value of page by its PageRank (PR). The PR is a value from 0 to 10 that is attributed to a particular web page. There are a number of factors that affect the PR like the quality of incoming links, unique content, etc. I won’t go into this today though.

The Click Through Rate (CTR)

The more your ads are clicked, the higher your Quality Score will be. If you have a good CTR, it means that your ads appeal to visitors and the more clicks you get, the more Google love you get. That’s why it’s important to always tweak, test and tweak your ads some more. Always have two or three ads per ad group. Delete the ad that performs less and create a new one. Always try to beat your best performing ad.

Other Landing Page Factors

There are other factors that affect your QS: the presence of ads on the landing page, having a privacy policy statement page and a contact page, having outbound links, etc.

Amit at SuperAffiliateMindset.com has some great tips about AdWords’ Quality Score.

Bidding On Keywords And Avoid Going Broke

On a strategic point of view, there are numerous ways to increase your ad performance and lower your costs. GoogleLady has posted 49 Google AdWords Tips which were commented at SuperAffiliateMindset.com.

If you are really serious about advertising your online business, I highly recommend Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords™. This is a really long read but totally worth it. You’ll save by avoiding common mistakes and performing more rapidly at the AdWords game.

First log into your Google AdWords account. From the “Campaign Management” tab, select “Campaign Summary”. To create a new campaign, click on “keyword-targeted”:

First, you need to specify a name for your new campaign and ad group. Don’t worry, you will be able to add more ad groups later on.

For the example above, I want to create a campaign to promote TheWebmastersCafe.net. My first ad group will target visitors that who search for linux-related keywords.

You also need to target your customers by language and geographic location. As my website is in english, I will promote it to english-speaking visitors only. I have also selected “Countries and territories” as I want to promote it to U.S. visitors only (you will be able to specify countries on the next page). Click on “Continue”.

Now specify in which country you want your ads to be displayed and click on “Continue”:

Now it’s time to create your first ad.

This is pretty self-explanatory:

• Headline: this it the title of your ad.
• Description line 1 : the first line of your ad. You may want to try to express a benefit of your product or service.
• Description line 2: the second line of your ad. Try to have the visitor take action or give a feature of your product or service (example.: Free 30 Day Trial, Get Help Now!, etc).
• Display URL : this URL is for display purposes only but it must resolve to a true, working URL.
• Destination URL : this is where you want to send your visitors to. This can be different than the Display URL.

Click on “Continue” when you’re done. Don’t forget you will be able to add more ads to your ad group later.

You have now targeted your customers and you’ve created an ad. Now you need to choose some keywords. Before you copy and paste your huge keyword list (because it’s a really huge list you got, right?), I strongly suggest you go through Mike’s AdWords Wrapper to generate broad, phrase and exact match terms.

So what are broad, phrase and exact match terms? When you bid on keywords, chances are your visitors may not search exactly for the keywords you chose. For example, suppose you bid on “redhat linux”, people may search for “how to install redhat linux”, “how to use redhat linux”, etc. So you want (or you don’t want) your ad to be displayed even though they haven’t searched exactly for the keywords you bid on.

So back to my example. Let’s say I’ve bid on “redhat linux”. Here are the different variations of that keyword:

• Broad : redhat linux
• Phrase: “redhat linux”
• Exact: [redhat linux]

So if a visitor searched for “installing redhat linux”, here’s when my ad will show:

• Broad: my ads are being displayed.
• Phrase: my ads are being displayed.
• Exact: my ads are not being displayed

So now that you know what broad, phrase and exact match are, head over to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/adwords-wrapper.html. Now simply copy and paste your keywords into the text area and click on “Wrap AdWords”:

Now click on the “Copy” button from the “Broad, Phrase & Exact Match” text area.

Then all you have to do is paste your keyword list into Google AdWords and click on “Continue”:

Now you have to set your maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) and your daily budget:

You have to understand that your daily budget will affect your ad performance. The less you are willing to spend, the less your ads will be shown. As for the default CPC, I always start at $0.06 per click and I adjust it later on. Click on “Continue” when you’re done.

Google will now allow you to review your selections. Click on “Save Campaign” if everything is ok. Your newly created campaign is now active! But now you need to make sure every keywords you chose are active too. Click on your ad group name to see it’s keywords.

There are 30 inactive keywords in my ad group. That means that my ad will never be shown (I have 30 keywords total). You must understand that I didn’t take time to research keywords properly prior to writing this post. Now how do you activate those keywords? Sure, you can increase your bids and spend a lot of money but there are better techniques to save on CPC.

Stay tuned for my next post as I will tell you how to activate your keywords and save money.

Start by logging into your AdWords account. Click on the “Tools” link from the “Campaign Management” tab and then go to “Ads Diagnostic Tool”.

Then all you have to do is enter the keyword, the Google domain and the display language for which you want to advertise in. Specify the country in which you wish to advertise and click on “Continue”.

At this point, if you haven’t created any adgroups, it’s normal that you don’t have any ads that match the search term you entered but click on it anyway.

On the right are the ads from your competitors that will be displayed for the keywords you entered:

Now browse through the search result pages and see through how many pages ads are being displayed. If there are like 50 competiting ads, you might want to go back and do some more research unless you’ve got some big bucks to spend.

In my next post, I’ll show you how to create your first AdWords campaign.

When I setup an AdWords campaign, I try to find at least a few hundred keywords if not thousands. You just can’t go in there, throw in a bunch of keywords and hope for the best. Not only you must have some good keywords, you got to have a whole lot of them.

Finding Keywords

There are various tools online to help you find keywords. Some are free while some are commercial.

Overture (a.k.a. Yahoo! Search Marketing) has a free tool available at http://inventory.overture.com. Unfortunately Overture’s results are somewhat outdated. There was a time when it would give us a monthly count of searches for the previous month but right now it seems that the latest data is from January 2007.

According to Overture there were 15,459 searches for “dog breeding” on Yahoo in January 2007. You can also see similar terms people searched on.

There is another free keyword tool located at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ which works about the same way as Overture. Wordtracker offers a free and a commercial service for which you can have a free trial.

Although free tools are good to initiate yourself to keyword research, don’t forget that your competitors are probably using some much more powerful tools such as KeyCompete.com and KeywordCountry. I won’t go into details about such tools right now.

For my next post, I will try to show you how to find out how many competitors you’ve got.

Wait a minute, where do those ads appear?

When you advertise on Google AdWords, you can choose to display your ads on either Google’s content network or Google’s search engine result pages, or both. The content network is made of various web publishers who display ads on their website through Google’s AdSense program.

Have a look at the bottom of this very web page. You will see an AdSense ad. Look for “Ads by Google” at the bottom right corner of the ad. If it’s not showing, hit F5 a few times to refresh this page, it should eventually appear.

On the other hand, you might prefer to advertise on Google’s search result page. This is where the ads will appear :

When you want to advertise your product or service through AdWords, you need to bid on keywords. For example, if you want to advertise a customer relationship software, you may want to bid on keywords like “crm software”, “customer relationship software”, “crm software comparison”, etc. If you chose to advertise on the content network, your ads will be displayed on what Google considers to be relevant websites. If you want to advertise on Google’s search result pages, your ads will appear when a visitor searches for a keyword you bid on.

That sounds easy!

But it’s not. You’ve probably got some competitors bidding on the same keywords as you. That will increase the price you have to pay for each click your ad receives and it will also affect the position of your ads. The higher you bid on keywords, the more your ads will be displayed. But the thing is, you don’t want to go into a bidding war ending up eating all your profit margin.

There are a lot of factors that affect your ad’s positioning and the price you pay per click such as how you grouped keywords together, the destination page’s PageRank, the relancy between your keywords and your ads, etc.

This is why it’s really important to play the game well: Google AdWords is a Formula 1 to success or… failure.

Stay tuned for Google AdWords for Dummies – Part 2.

When you’re building backlinks on forums and blogs, just don’t go out there and spam every board you find. Try to find communities with topics that really interest you. Find some forums and blogs that you will be visiting often so you can contribute to it’s community. Make posts relevant and useful to others and add your website’s URL in your signature. Don’t make shitty posts just in order to have a backlink, people will notice it and you will probably get banned one day or another.

You can also exchange links with other websites relevant to yours. Don’t just post your link everywhere, make sure that your website will attract visitors that stumble on your link. You should also avoid link farms at all cost. Chances are it will affect your PageRank.

Here are some tips I’ve found over Kirsty’s blog (http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/) when you’re building links:

• Try to find the right balance between quality and quantity. A crappy site will bring your crappy traffic.
• Check out the site’s PageRank (just get Google’s toolbar over at http://toolbar.google.com) and try to go for websites with a PR of 4 or higher.
• See what your competitor’s backlinks are. To do this, simply type “link:www.domain.com” in Google’s search box (of course you gotta type your competitor’s URL instead of domain.com!). See what their best backlinks are and try to get your site listed there also.
• Do a search on Google to find some related websites that allows you to add your link. Here are some search terms suggestions to help you find those sites:
  • [topic] add url
  • [topic] exchange links
  • [topic] submit links
  • [topic] link submission
  • [topic] link exchange

  So for example, if you have a website on dog breading, you could search for “dog breading submit links”.

• When you submit a link, try to use some useful keywords and not just your URL when you can. For example, you could put a link like “Find Dog Breading Info at http://www.ilovedogs.com”. This will help your SERP.
• When you get your link added to another website, submit the web page to Google in order to get it indexed faster (http://www.google.com/addurl).

Of course there is a lot more than this to link building but this is a good start!