A couple of months ago as I was learning about AdWords strategies, I stumbled upon a software called SpeedPPC. Basically what this tool does is that it generates a set of ad groups automatically from sets of keywords and ads you’ve given it. The output is CSV data that can be pasted into Google AdWords Editor (not the web interface). Although this software seemed to be a real time-saver, its price was totally out of reach for a beginner like me with little or no budget: $497.

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.

In my last post, I’ve shown you how to create your first AdWords campaign. In the example campaign I created, there were like 30 inactive keywords. Now let’s see how to activate them without raising our bids too much.

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.

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Last time I’ve wrote about find low competition keywords. Now that you’ve built your huge keyword list, we’re going to see how to create a new campaign.

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.

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