Google is a search engine that millions of people use daily to search for specific topics, and it is no affiliate online secrets that Google AdWords is quickly becoming a favorite for marketers to use for their advertising. Most everyone knows what Google is, it is advertised on television and when you ask someone how to search for something they will tell you, “Do a Google search!” Google AdWords is an advertising network that allows you to pick and choose your advertising preferences. It is one of the greatest affiliate online secrets available to market your product, service or business.
How AdWords Works
Google AdWords is Google’s answer to PPC or pay-per-click advertising. AdWords uses the advantage that millions of people use Google to search the Web, and as a captivated audience they utilize its search pages to advertise for businesses in an area on the page that would otherwise be “dead space”. If you go to Google.com and type in Internet Service Providers, you will receive a results page with more than 60 million results. On the left side of the page is “sponsored links”. This is where your ad would appear.
AdWords is virtually an auction-based ad system. There are several methods of cost you can choose from:
- CPC or Cost-per-click method - You tell Google AdWords how much you are willing to pay for every click your ad receives. AdWords uses that price in their auction system to place your ad. This is a great affiliate online secret that you can use if you simply want to drive traffic to your website with your ads.
- CPM or Cost-per-thousand-impression method - With this method, you set how much you are willing to pay for impressions or views of your ad. For instance; if you want a guaranteed 1000 people to click your ad in one month, you tell them how much you are willing to pay for each of the 1000 clicks. They guarantee you will get 1000 people clicking your ad each month and your cost is what you are willing to pay times1000.
- CPA or Cost-per-acquision method - This method involves your willingness to pay for customers performing a specific action on your website. This means if you want customers to sign up for your newsletter, you will pay X amount for each customer that actually performs this task on your website from your Google AdWords ad.
- Adsense Content method - This is a method where instead of paying per click, impression or acquision, you pay for your ad appearing on relevant sites. In other words, if you are finding that you are not getting enough traffic from the other 3 methods, you can pay for your ad being placed on sites that have relevant content to your products or services.
Pricing - Affiliate Online Secrets Revealed
The above methods of setting up your ad is one of the best affiliate online secrets to controlling your advertising costs. You decide what you want to spend on a daily or monthly basis. In addition to this, you can change your budget and increase your bids whenever you so choose.
When you initially open you Google AdWords account, you will pay a small activation fee on your account. Besides this, the only costs you will incur is your costs associated with the method you have chosen to pay for such as the CPC, CPM, CPA or Adsense content method. There is a minimum on the CPC and the CPM methods. The CPC minimum bid is .01 cents and the CPM minimum bid is .25 cents.
You may also opt for a Prepay account. With prepay accounts you pay for your advertising upfront. If your budget allows you to spend $300 a month, you would prepay the $300 for the month and when that has been depleted, your ads will cease to be run. If your budget allows for more on a month, simply pay the additional and your ads will begin running again. This is one of the great affiliate online secrets to controlling your advertising budget. If your account is in jeopardy of falling to zero again, you will receive an email notifying you that within seven to ten days your balance will be depleted
Another affiliate online secret is using the AdWords discounter. The discounter keeps track of the competition and will reduce your ad cost-per-click so that you pay the lowest possible cost for your ad position on the page. Once Google Adwords’ position auction is run, the discounter will adjust your cost to help keep your ad in the rank it is currently holding. In addition to the discounter AdWords uses “smart pricing” which is a tool that allows Google to reduce your cost-per-click price when they see your ad is placed on a particular web page that is not likely to convert your ad into a customer. This is used with cost-per-conversion on content pages and can help control the cost of your advertising as well.
Ad Placement Through Google AdWords
When you think of placement, you think of putting something in a specific place. This is what ad placement does. The Google content network allows you to place your ad on any website or another ad position within the network that you would like your ad to appear. Google AdWords has a placement tool that can be used to help you find the right placement for your ads.
An excellent affiliate online secret is website placement. Website placement can consist of an entire website and can also be a collection of pages that shares an ad unit on several different pages. For example: your ad for baseball equipment could be placed on a sporting section of a new website, on a page of movie reviews or within a specific area that is always in the same position in a specific web page.
Placements can also be placed in RSS feeds, in an online gaming site or on a mobile device such as a cell phone. Some are not available in some areas but there is a wide variety of Google AdWords placements to choose from and the variety is too vast to mention them all.
AdWords Campaign With Keywords
When you decide to begin your ad campaigns, you can make your campaigns target keywords, placements or both at the same time. This is a great affiliate online secret that gives you many advantages to help attract the exact audience you are seeking. More of the advantages include:
- The flexibility to use one campaign for both targets without the hassle of duplicating campaigns.
- The ability to target your ad more precisely by mixing keywords and placements together.
- Gives you more control over your bidding on the content network using contextual targeting.
Targeting Through AdWords
The Google Network is a group of websites along with other products like email programs and blogs that have partnered up with Google to aid in displaying Adwords ads. Marketers can opt to run their ads on Google, the Google Network or both. The affiliate online secret to this is there is no extra cost for running your ads on the Google Network, so you can virtually hit 2 target audiences with one ad.
There are several ways for your ads to appear on Google:
- Keyword targeted ads
- Search Network
- Content Network
Keyword targeted advertisers are eligible to run their campaigns and keywords on the Google Network.
The search network ads uses a queries search term to target your ad. For instance; if you were searching for bridal lace, you would likely find other bridal ads next to your results. The keyword here being bridal would bring up ads that use bridal as one of their keywords.
Content network ads are used for content themes instead of specific keywords. For example; you may be viewing a webpage about patio furniture. On the same page you could see various ads on camping equipment, lawn games or lawn supplies with the theme being outdoors activities or simply outdoors.
There is again, no additional charge for advertising on the Google Network that can be your affiliate online secret. Using additional formats for your ads like video ads or pictorial ads can increase your traffic flow to your website because people like to see what they are getting and not simply read about it. Sometimes your ad will appear on Google first before appearing on the Google Network because all ads are reviewed before they appear on the Google Network. Editing a previous ad will result in your ad being reviewed again before appearing on the Google Network again.
Performance Tracking with Google AdWords
With Google AdWords, you can monitor your ads and track how well your campaign is doing. This is particularly good for checking to see if your ads are running, how much traffic they have received and how the traffic is converted into sales or sign ups for your website. Here are a few affiliate online secrets that will help you track your ad’s performances:
Ad Status - This is an affiliate online secret used to see if your ads are running you may use the “Ads Diagnostic Tool” that is located in your account. This also allows you to see if your ads are being clicked on and how many times they are being clicked on. This is not done in real time so it could take several hours for your statistics to update.
Success - This holds several key statistics for you to check:
- Clickthroughs - The CTR or the clickthrough rate tells you how often your ad is being clicked after it is displayed. If your CTR is 1% or lower, you may want to think about changing your targets to a more relevant audience. You can do this by optimizing your account with Google AdWords Optimization Tips.
- Keywords - This system also allows you to monitor keyword performance and lets you know how effective your keywords are. Each keyword is evaluated and its results are displayed to you in this system.
- First Page Bids - If you have a low bid estimate, this means that your ads are doing well. A high bid estimate means that your ads are not working as well so you may want to optimize them.
- Return on investment or ROI - This is the ratio of your cost to the profits you have made. This system shows whether your advertising fees are greater than the profit your business is receiving from your ads. The ROI requires additional tools from Google AdWords free conversion tracking tool or Google Analytics.
Google AdWords Basic Tools - These are the basic tools used to help you track and optimize your ads so they target the best audience they can possibly target:
- Keyword Analysis - This gives you all the details about your keyword’s performance. It will show how your score will impact your keywords and ad’s performances and what you can do to improve it.
- Conversion Tracking - When you take advantage of this tool you can track your ads results and see which keywords are working for you and which ones you may need to change.
Remember that your ads or keyword’s performances will fluctuate according to the web traffic on a daily basis. So it isn’t so much how many clicks you are getting as it is how many of those clicks are converted to actions taken within your own website.
Improving Your Campaign Performance
Sometimes when you start an ad campaign, you feel like you have done the best that you could to depict your product or service. After the statistics come in we realize that we could have done better but are completely at a loss as to how we can fix the problem. Here are some affiliate online secret techniques that will aid in improving your campaign performance:
- Fine Tuning Your Keywords - You should experiment with keyword to see which ones work better as exact matches with other keyword phrases. Sometimes a negative match or a complete opposite renders terrific results. You should try the keyword matching options within the google website to help you match keywords. Sometimes simply adding plurals, synonyms or related phrases improves your keyword performance too.
- Your Ad Text - Another great affiliate online secret is to use a call-to-action within your ad. These entice the customer and get them curious enough to click your ad and visit your website. Maybe you should try giveaways to move your stock too.
- Ad Groups - A great affiliate online secret tells us that sometimes grouping our ads based on themes can boost your sales. For instance: if you are selling several lawn mowers and additional shelving, perhaps grouping these into 2 different groups will help your ads target more customers. Place them in one group for lawn equipment and one under indoor shelving. This way you can run several ads under each group instead of clumping them together in one larger group.
- Your Landing Page - The destination that your ads send your customers to must contain the product or service your ads promise. Here are some ways to do that:
- Keep your objective in mind which is sales and leads
- Check out your keywords for your landing pages as well as any offers or calls to action
- Make navigating your landing page easy for the layman. It shouldn’t take a scientist to navigate through your page to purchase an item.
- Make it easy for customers to get what they want by using three clicks or less
- Clear any obstacles that may discourage your customers from purchasing
- Content Bids - Enable your content bids within Google AdWords so you can set your pricing for Google and its partners at one rate and for Google Network and products at another. You can go to “content bids FAQ” for more information on this feature.
- Keep Track of Your Results - You can track how your keywords, ads and click rates are doing by using your performance tracker within AdWords. It is one of the best affiliate online secrets to assisting you in converting your clickers into customers.
With Google AdWords Optimization Tips page you can find more ways to optimize your ads to bring in more traffic and more buying customers. You should experiment with your ad’s text and targeting in order to find what works best for you, your business or your product. If you are still stumped, an affiliate online secret is that AdWords has a team of people who can help you optimize. Simply request a free optimization and you will be taken to a page to fill out with your contact information and a little bit about your ad itself.
Creating Your Google AdWords Account
It is easy to sign up for a Google AdWords account by going to Google and typing in “AdWords Homepage”. This will bring up the homepage and allow you to begin your application.
1. Click on the “Start Now” button.
2. Select the “Standard Edition” button if you have more than one item, business or service to advertise for or the “Starter Edition” if you have only one to advertise for.
3. Use the buttons on the screen to choose your user name and password. This should be something easy for you to remember but difficult for others.
4. If you have an existing Google account you will now sign into that account. Simply make sure this account has not been linked with AdWords.
5. Click on the “Create Account” button if you do not already have a Google account. If you do have a Google account, click on the “Continue” button.
a. For existing accounts, you can now sign in to your Google AdWords account.
b. New accounts, will use your new login information. Wait a few minutes and you will receive an email asking your to click or copy and paste a link to verify your email address. Once you have clicked on the link or copied and pasted the link and gone to the link address you are ready to sign into your account with the email address you used to create the account and your password.
Your new Google AdWords account has 3 levels to it. The account, campaign and the ad group:
- The account is associated with your email address, password and the billing information you enter.
- The campaign level is where you will choose your budget, targeting, distribution and end dates.
- Your group level is where you create your ads and choose which keywords you will associate your ads with and their placements. Here is where you will also set bids for the ad group or for each of your individual keywords or placements. You will create one or more ad and select keywords for that ad, placement for the ad or both. This is what will trigger that ad to appear within or on a specific page. If you create more than one ad for an ad group, your ads will rotate.
After you have signed up for your account, gotten your email, activated your account and made your first ad campaign, it is time to think about paying for the advertising. We discussed payment options earlier so this will be a quick recap of the payment options.
You can choose to Postpay by submitting your debit card information but this method can take several days before your ads will actually start running. A debit authorization must be performed before your ads begin to make sure the debit is authorized.
Prepaying is probably the best way to begin your account. You can always register your debit card and change payment methods later. Prepay is the best way to pay because you can control your advertising spending with prepay. If you opt to prepay, once payment has been made and it has been processed, your ads will begin to run. Google Adwords is one of the most loved affiliate online secrets by not only marketers but by searchers and users as well.
