Strategy #3 - Use 'Keyword Matching' option to better target your ads

Unlike conventional pay-per-click models, AdWords ads are ranked based following formula: Cost-Per-Click (CPC) X Click-Through Rate (CTR) Keyword matching helps you achieve a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for your ads and therefore, a higher ad ranking - without increasing Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of your campaign.

For example, a phrase match keyword like "popup generator" will show up for search query "best popup generator" but will not display for search query "popup a generator" - so using 'Phrase Match' option will minimize 'untargeted' impressions and result in Click-Through-Rate (CTR) improvements.

Strategy #4 - Limit ad impressions to certain countries and/or regions once you've received customer data from initial sales generated

For example, if most of your customers are from USA, you may wish to focus your advertising revenue on US market and target your ads to only US customers.

This strategy will also help you to achieve a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for your ads.

Strategy #5 - Add a subscriber sign-up box on ALL websites you're promoting

This will allow you to build your subscriber list at same time! Place your subscriber sign-up box at top left or right side of your webpage to increase subscriber sign-up rate.

Strategy #6 - Add a DHTML (Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language) pop-up on your websites

Here's a 5-STAR SECRET Google doesn't want you to know: You CAN use pop-ups on your landing page (i.e. page a prospect sees when he/she clicks on your AdWords ad) as long as pop-up does not result in OPENING OF A NEW WINDOW!

A DHTML pop-up is technically not a pop-up - it is really a 'floating menu', made to look and act like a pop-up! PopupMaster Pro is one such 'new-generation' pop-up software (that also beats pop-up blockers).

You can find out more about PopupMaster Pro here: http://PopupMaster.net

Installing a DHTML pop-up on your websites WILL dramatically increase your sales and subscriber sign-ups!

Strategy #7 - Monitor and manage your campaigns

You'll be able to access valuable information and find out which keywords have highest impressions, which keywords generate highest click-throughs etc. once your campaign is live.

And you should use this information to tweak your headline, description and cost-per-click accordingly - to maximize your campaign effectiveness.

Use various strategies described above and monitor effectiveness of each of them. It will help you maximize your Google AdWords campaigns and reduce your campaign costs.

Here’s an example...

Using our measurement system, we recently made a study of how people used our website. We found that landing page was converting 68% of readers. The objective of landing page is simple: get reader to move to another page. The landing page headline is “Are you driving qualified traffic to your website but not getting enough customers or prospects?” This headline, fact that we go on to describe target visitors dilemma in first paragraph, and fact that there are links to articles which educate reader (more headlines, to pique curious among you) mean that we get a good percentage of readers who arrive and continue further into site. We’re always working on other 32%, but by analyzing bounces, we found that 50% of them were possibly irrelevant traffic. We have an article starring Winston Churchill that describes how colorful language can grip a reader, and many visitors were arriving at our pages looking for a history of great man. And as we mentioned above, we also found that some readers were looking for catalytic converters (the keyword conversion brought them to our website). So overall, it meant that only 16% of our target audience left without doing anything. Maybe phone rang. We can’t measure that!

Our tests on landing page have been numerous, but now we’re frightened to change headline. Seriously! Because simply by changing landing page headline, we improved clickthrough by 36%. That’s nearly double what we were getting over same time period six months ago. So if you think you can write a better headline for us than one that currently grabs attention of 68% of our readers, email me and I’ll test if it is better than one we’re using!

Another thing we tested was urgency. We had a section on our landing page that said you could get a free e-book by subscribing before a given date. The date was cunningly set to change every day to same day’s date. It worked. We got high numbers of subscribers in a short space of time and hit a 35% conversion rate, which we considered incredible. Over 1 in 3 people subscribed to get book. Why did we stop? We listened to our readers who were getting annoyed by irrelevant information on landing page. New subscribers didn’t mind seeing message, but returning visitors, ones you should really pay attention to, complained about same message with an updated date. It proves one thing though. If you have a special offer in mind, urgency works.

Incidentally, fact that all of above was tested on landing page doesn’t mean you should forget about rest of your website. For instance, one of our recent articles is very well visited and got terrific feedback from critics and other web publications. But as an entry page, URL also has a very high 79% bounce rate. We have analyzed it and have drawn a tentative conclusion. We think it’s because we haven’t given readers anything to do when they finish reading. They get to bottom of page and that’s it. The end. Article over. And they leave. So now we’re going to add a new section at bottom of our articles which encourages subscription or clickthrough. Again, by analyzing and changing things, we hope to improve. If it doesn’t make any difference, or in fact makes rate worse, we have lost very little, we simply put page back to way it was. Testing is about trial and error.

In Summary

I will never be too clever to ever stop measuring how people use our website. I don’t know what will work with our visitors first time around. I couldn’t have said that one headline would work better than another until I tested it. I couldn’t have said that using great copy that instills a sense of urgency in reader would work better than not instilling urgency in reader until I tested it. I couldn’t have told you whether adding article links to first landing page would improve click through until I measured it. I couldn’t have said whether one graphic would work better than another until I measured it. I couldn’t have told you that all these small changes altogether would improve our subscription rate to over 15% every month, until I measured it. In other words, by measuring how people use your website, you can continuously improve it and therefore improve conversion rate, which eventually has a positive impact on your bank balance.

In other words what you don’t know about your visitors movement through your website would make a great book.

Steve Jackson is Editor of the Conversion Chronicles, (http://www.conversionchronicles.com) and CEO of Aboavista a Finnish company which improves web prospect and sales conversion rates.