Google Adwords is a great tool! Careful use can lead to legions of highly targeted visitors breaching
moat around your site, and demanding to pillage your products! On other hand...Adwords is also a great place to drain your advertising dollars if you're not careful. Like any other automated system, it requires constant feeding and attention to keep you from wondering just why you spent hundreds of dollars and received a paltry return on your investment. Here's 7 great ways I've found to do just that, (and yes I've been guilty of several of these to one degree or another.)
1. - Not getting enough keywords, and I don't mean just numbers. Good ones. A lot of people run a search on their favorite keyword tool and pick top ten or twenty words or phrases getting most traffic, thinking somehow that THEY will beat all others using these keywords. There is a reason why these keywords are so popular: everybody and their grandmother are bidding on them! A much better approach is to come up with at least a couple hundred, better a couple thousand words that you have a shot at getting a high ranking for. After all, if you have 1800 keywords and can get a top 8 (first page) position for most of them, you'll see a lot more clicks than you will chasing top dollar words. If you get a hundred of lower tier words giving you a couple of visitors a day, well, you do math. Not only that, but often less expensive words are altogether more specific, delivering far more targeted visitors.
2. - Not creating adgroups. You should use this function! It can help you focus your advertising much more effectively. By arranging your keywords in tightly focused groups of 10- 30 phrases, and writng a keyword-specific headline for each of them, you have a much greater ability to see what's working and what's not. Also gives you a chance to test different headlines and text copy.
3. - No negative keywords. This you gotta do. And it's so easy. Simply add -free (or whatever else you don't want associated with your searches) and you won't end up paying for a lot of clicks for people who weren't interested in first place.
4. - Using only broad keyword searches for their keywords. When you're paying for this stuff, you want to be as specific as you can, particularly if you're playing in a very competitive market. Why hope that a broad search will return someone interested in what you're selling? Better to get as focused as you can on words they may be searching for. Google helps you with this by giving you more information on impressions and click-throughs than you can handle, but be pro-active, and prune dead wood after 100 or so impressions. If they haven't produced by then, odds of them improving by leaps and bounds are not great.
