How to Properly Manage an AdWords Campaign
Kirt Christensen
Managing a profitable Adwords campaign is much more complex of a project than most businessmen and women know. It isn't simply looking at a topic and making a little 3-line ad on that topic. (How many times have you looked at those ads and thought of the money you could make writing those 3 lines of copy?) The job is to compare costs and expenses and keep an eye on your bids and the number of sales, and a constant tweaking of the ads being used to make sure the are functioning optimally.
One main key to a successful Adwords campaign is the positioning on the search results page of the ad. If a keyword term is popular there can be hundreds of pages of search results, and that means stiff competition for that key position.
The best way to be profitable is to attract a large group of potential purchasers. The way to do that is to do what you need to do to get your advertisement in a visible and prominent location.
Web surfers have an extremely short attention span, meaning they will only look through the first 5 or maybe 10 pages of search results/ads. This means the most desirable place for an ad is on the first 5 pages.
Because nearly every keyword has at least two ads listed on them the one that is first on the list is going to be the one whose author will pay the greatest amount for a click. (Any keyword that doesn't have more than one ad is probably so way-out-there that it is not worth bidding on as the chances of getting a click is remote. Who would think of using it?)
The process of bidding on a keyword is a tricky one. It is essential that the advertiser take into consideration not only the amount of money which their competitors are building but the amount of money they have at their disposal to spend.
A ppc ad campaign that uses general keywords and gets placed in the top spot in the Sponsored Links section is most likely to attract more false leads between good profitable leads.
It has to be worth it.
If an ad can only be clicked one hundred times before the advertising budget is reached there are probably only going to be ten sales made. Unless those ten sales justify the amount of money spent on the campaign (as in the case of real estate) it is probably not going to be sufficient.
Keeping close track of the quantity of successful leads attracted by an ad is very important also.
An ad which is generating a great deal of false interest (it is being clicked but no sales are being made) is going to need to be pulled out of circulation and altered, either through a reformatting of the ad or a selection of a totally different keyword.
Whatever the case, micromanagement is the key factor in a successful AdWords campaign.
About the Author:
Need to optimize or "fix" your Adwords & PPC campaigns? Kirt Christensen manages over $600k in PPC spending & knows what it takes to make your account hum! When you need an adwords expert, he's the man!
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