Getting Keywords With Google Adwords

Another key to having a successful online business is making sure that every single person who is even the slightest bit interested in your product sees your advertisement. The best way to do this is by creating a very huge keyword list (thousands of keywords). By the way, to give you an idea on how many keywords I am talking about, I have one website which has so many keywords that I reached the keyword limit for TWO AdWords accounts. That means I had so many keywords that it took two Google Accounts to hold them. Google will not let you have more than 55,000 keywords in an account.

Some products have many keywords while others have very few. Don’t ever give up on adding keywords to your accounts. I never realized how many keywords existed which had literally no competition until I researched them (you will find how I did this in a few paragraphs). Usually, the more keywords there are available for the product, the better. Not just because it is searched more often but also because most people who are also selling the same product will only select a few general keywords which may be very broad keywords. For example, most people who sell DVD software usually favor keywords such as “copy DVD”, “DVD copying software” or “DVD duplication”. The thing wrong with this is that people who are searching for DVD copying software don’t type in exactly “DVD duplication”, but instead they usually type in something like “download DVD copying software” or “free DVD to CD burning software” or “how can I copy a DVD”. Most online advertisers are so busy that they usually miss these valuable keywords which you can get an ad rank under 8.0 with a max bid of $0.05 per click. So, the best way to get every possible click you can is to develop an unimaginably huge keyword list. By the way, when you have over 45,000 keywords in your Google AdWords account, Google will alert you and will tell you to delete some but instead, just create a new AdWords account with a different email address and keep adding keywords. Remember, you can’t go over 55,000-60,000 keywords per account.

For those of you who are following this guide and creating a campaign at the same time, read on. For those of you who are skimming this guide and already have a campaign created, go to the paragraph titled “Now You Have Your Campaign Created”.

Now you have written your text ad and now you just need to add your keywords. Well, since you are going to make such a huge list, I am recommending that you go ahead and finish creating your campaign before you create a massive keyword list. Here is what to do. You should now be on a page which is asking you to Choose Keywords. On this page, just type in the keywords that Google recommended for your website when you used their Keyword Research Tool earlier. If you forgot these keywords you will need to go back to the section of this guide that talks about using Google’s Keyword Research tool to find the keywords you’re going to use. When you finish doing this, hit the continue button.

On the next page, you will be asked to enter your daily budget. You can edit this later. So, for now set your daily budget somewhere in-between $8 and $100 (I recommend setting your daily budget at $8-$10 per day until you find a profitable website). Most of the time, you will never spend your maximum budget every single day so don’t think that you will spend this amount every day.

Now set your keyword’s Max CPC to $0.05. Don’t worry if later it says that this keyword is inactive because the Max CPC is too low. Now, hit continue and go to the next page.

On the next page, you will see the details about the Campaign you just created. If everything appears correct, click on the “Save Campaign” button.

Now, click on the “Campaign Management” tab near the top of the page to display your current campaigns.

Click on the campaign you just created and then click on the AdGroup associated with that campaign.

Now You Have Your Campaign Created:

Now it’s time to create a huge list of keywords for your AdGroup but before you learn how to generate a huge list, it is important that you know the different keyword matching types.

Keyword Matching Options:

I recommend watching the following video by Google that explains keyword matching options:

Google uses four different keyword-matching options to make your keyword searches more specific. There is usually a bit of confusion over these keywords, especially for AdWord beginners so read over this carefully. The four keyword match options are Broad Matched, Phrase Matched, Exact Matched, and Negative Matched.

Broad Matched – ex. keyword. The keyword is entered without any modifications.

Broad matched keywords are the most common type of keywords used by advertisers. They usually bring in the largest amounts of traffic but generally don’t have the highest conversion rates because they are so broad. Basically, if you add a keyword into the keyword box, then that keyword is broad. According to Google, Broad matched keywords display your advertisement whenever a single word within the key phrase is searched. For example: if your keyword is “funny Simpsons movie”, then your advertisement will be displayed when someone searches for “funny”, “simpsons” or “movie”. Google says that your advertisement will also be displayed if someone uses a search phrase which contains any one of those terms, for example: “that was funny” or “I like movies” will also display your advertisement. Even though Google says that your advertisement will display for all of those irrelevant searches, I have found that your advertisement will be displayed 99% of the time if most of the search term is similar to your keyword, such as “Simpsons movie”, or “funny Simpsons”. I would recommend making a broad matched copy of every keyword you have, because broad matched keywords are mainly what Google’s Contextual Advertisement analyzes when they place your Ads on other websites (I will talk more about this later).

Phrase Matched – ex. “keyword”. Keyword is within quotation marks.

Phrase matched keywords are displayed only when your keyword(s) appears inside their search phrase in order. For example, if your keyword is “red shoes”, your advertisement will be displayed on searches for “green or red shoes”, “colorful red shoes”, but it will not be displayed for searches for “red or green shoes”, or “red colorful shoes”. You see, when you are using phrase match, your Ad will only be displayed when your keywords are next to each other in the web surfers search phrase. Phrase matched keyword performance is in between Broad Matched and Exact Matched. They usually give you more traffic than Exact Match, but less traffic than Broad Match. They usually give you higher conversion rates than Broad Match, but not as many as Exact Match.

Exact Matched – ex. [keyword]. Keyword is within brackets.

Exact matched keywords do what they say. They are only displayed if the user wants to search for a keyword that is exactly the same as one of your keywords. Exact match keywords usually don’t receive many clicks, but they usually have the highest conversion rates.

Negative Matched – ex. –Keyword. Keyword has a minus sign in front of it.

Negative Matched keywords may be a little confusing, but they are good to use if you are advertising for a product with a popular name that has several other completely different products. Negative Matched keywords purpose is to allow people to filter their keywords from certain searches which will not give them good results. Here is an example. Let’s say someone was advertising for Pepsi Cola and one of their keywords was “cola”. Then that person would not expect many sales from people who searched for Coca-Cola, so to keep their advertisement from being viewed by anyone who was searching for Coca-Cola products, they would add the negative keyword –coca to their keyword list. When they did this their advertisement would show anytime someone searched for Pepsi or Cola, but it would not show if anyone typed the word “cola” into their search phrase.

Examples for Broad, Phrase, & Exact matched keywords

This is when Google says your keywords will show:

Users Key phrase	Broad Matched keyword	Phrase Matched keyword	Exact Matched keyword
	red shoe	“red shoe”	[red shoe]
tennis shoes	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red candy tastes good	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
I hate red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red Nike shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red tennis shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red shoe	displayed	displayed	displayed

When actually this is when they will really show:

Users Key phrase	Broad Matched keyword	Phrase Matched keyword	Exact Matched keyword
	red shoe	“red shoe”	[red shoe]
tennis shoes	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red candy tastes good	not displayed	not displayed	not displayed
I hate red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red Nike shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red tennis shoes	displayed	not displayed	not displayed
red shoes	displayed	displayed	not displayed
red shoe	displayed	displayed	displayed

When you read about Broad Matched keywords, Google makes you think that they will appear any time someone’s search phrase contains one word in your keyword. This is not true, I have found that most of the time the keyword will only appear when some searches for that keyword.

Benefits of Keyword Matching

You may be thinking, “So why would I want to use keyword matching…it sounds really complicated?”. The main advantage of using keyword matching options is that you reach 100% of your potential customers.

You may think, “But broad matched keywords will cover both phrase and exact match types, why should I use anything other than broad match?”. That is true, but broad matched keywords are designed to show your advertisements for a variety of different keyword searches. Phrase and exact match are designed to show your ad for more specific searches. Think about it. If you have a 6 competitors with the broad matched keyword “Motorola cell phone”, but you have the exact match keyword “Motorola cell phone”, whose advertisement do you think Google will display first. Well, Google doesn’t directly say “We display exact matched advertisements over everything else”, but Google does say that they give the most targeted and appropriate text advertisements a higher quality score, and I can say that phrase and exact matched keywords are more targeted than broad matched.

So basically keyword matching options give you more traffic, higher quality scores, and higher profit rates.

I recommend you watch the following video below by Google. It will help to further explain the benefits of Keyword Matching Options.

Steps to Generating a Huge Keyword List

Finally, you will learn how to create an extremely huge keyword list. This will greatly increase the amount of sales you get because of the increased traffic you receive. You will need to do the following for each of your AdGroups.

1. Go back to Google’s Keyword Tool, click on the Site-Related Keywords tab and enter the main address of the website your advertising, then hit “Get Keywords”. I went over this in more detail earlier in this guide, so if you get lost you can always go to that section and re-read how to do this.
2. Now make sure that your AdGroup contains all of the keywords that Google recommended for that group.
3. Either write down these keywords or copy and paste them to notepad or excel.

   The AdGroup I’m working on (Money Maker) contains the following keywords:

   • Money making opportunities
   • Money making scams
   • Money making ideas
   • Online money making opportunities
   • Money making opportunity online
   • Money making secrets
   • Top money making affiliate program
   • Easy money making
   • Money maker
   • Internet money making opportunity
   • Money making opportunity
   • Money making websites
   • Money making web sites
   • Money making
4. Now click on the “Keyword Variations” tab, enter the first keyword from Google’s recommended keywords into the text box, and click on the “Get More Keywords” button.

   You will notice that Google will find many more keywords related to the keyword that you entered. You should quickly scan this keyword list and click on the “Add >>” button to add each keyword that appropriately describes the website you’re advertising. Here’s a picture of what this looks like when I search for the keyword “money making opportunities”.

   
5. You will notice that each keyword you add will appear on the right side of the page in a green box. When you are done adding the keywords, enter the next keyword in the list into the text box. For me this keyword will be “money making scams”. Then go through the process of adding all of the keywords to the keyword list (the green box on the right side of the page) and repeat with the next keyword in your list. Do this until you have searched for and added all of the related keywords in the keyword group Google created for you. By now you should have a hundred or even hundreds of keywords to use.
6. Now you will need to download these keywords so you can add them into your Google AdGroup. To do this look near the bottom of the green box that’s on the right side of the Google Keyword Tool page and you should see something that says “Download these keywords:”. I recommend choosing the text download, but you can choose .csv (Comma Separated Value) download instead.
7. When you download these keywords I recommend you save them to your computer somewhere, just incase you want to access them later. After you save these keywords you will need to wrap them (remember broad, phrase, and exact matched keywords) so you can receive the highest amount of traffic possible. Don’t worry, you’re not going to need to type out each keyword and add quotations and brackets around each keyword, there is a free tool that will do this quickly for you. To access this tool go to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwrapper.cgi

   To use this tool simply copy your keywords in the text file (you can do this by highlighting all of your keywords and right clicking on them and select “Copy”) and then paste (right click in the text box and select “Paste”) them into the text box titled “Enter Keywords” in the keyword wrapping tool. Now click on the button titled “Wrap AdWords” and you will see the four boxes below the “Enter Keywords” box fill up with keywords.

   Since we have already grouped our keywords, we will not need to worry about using any grouping features. One of the four text boxes that filled with keywords is titled “Broad, “Phrase”, & [Exact] Match”, this is the box that we will get all of our keywords from. To get your keywords from this box click on the button above the box titled “Copy”. This will copy the keywords to your clipboard.

8. No go to the AdGroup in your Google account that you’re going to add these keyword to. Click on the “Keywords” tab and click on the text link titled “Edit Keywords”. Now right click in the text area box and select “Paste”. All you have to do now is click on “Save Changes” and you will have added a ton of relevant keywords to your AdGroup.

Remember, as I said above you should do this for every one of your AdGroups. If you follow the above information you will have found and selected very specific and targeted keywords which is exactly what Google wants. If you receive keywords that say “Inactive for Search” don’t worry because I’m about to tell you how to fix this.

Question Asked: How Many Keywords Do You Have Per Product?

It depends on the product/webpage, some products have a larger number of keywords due to different phrases, misspellings, popularity, etc., while others do not. One of the websites I advertise has over 20,000 unique keywords (not counting phrase and exact match), but if I can’t easily find 2,000 keywords for a website then I assume it’s not too popular of a product.

Question Asked: What do I do when I have reached the keyword limit for one of my AdGroups?

First off, the keyword limit for an AdGroup is 2,000 keywords. Unless you are only wanting to advertise using Contextual Advertising, I highly recommend that you separate similar keywords into different AdGroups.

Setting Your Keyword Costs

When you bid on Google, you will not always pay the price you enter. The price you enter is the MCPC (Max Cost Per Click) you are willing to pay for that keyword. Google is constantly updating the bids for keywords in their search engine. For example if your MCPC is $0.15 and the advertiser in front of you is bidding $0.16 and the Ad one-position behind you is bidding $0.05, you will only pay $0.06 per click, because there is no reason why you should have to pay $0.15 per click if you can get the same Ad position for $0.06 per click.

Don’t set the same bid for every keyword because every keyword performs differently. For example, let’s say you are selling wallets and you can only afford a Max $0.10 per click. Don’t you think if web surfer 1 searches for “Brown wallet for sale”, and web surfer 2 searches for “picture sizes for wallets” and they both click on your ad that web surfer 1 is most likely going to buy a wallet? The chances are that he will. So even if your max CPC is $0.10, don’t be hesitant to go to $0.20 per click on keywords which generate targeted traffic, because they will generate higher than average sales. The same concept applies to poorly performing keywords. If the keyword performs very poorly, then don’t bid the same amount you bid on your best performing keywords.

How Much Should You Bid?

Most online advertisers make the mistake of bidding too much for keywords. Their logic being that an increased bid amount will give you a higher ad position, which leads to more sales.

Unfortunately, spending more money doesn’t mean more profit. For example some people bid $0.10 to $0.20 more per click just to receive a ranking two positions above their previous ranking. These are usually the people who say they spend $500 per day in advertising, yet receive only $550 in sales.

I recommend bidding just enough to receive placement on the first search results page (ad positions 1.0-8.0). This will give you the impressions you need without having to pay large advertising fees. Remember, just because first, second, and third positions are the most sought after; it doesn’t mean they always generate the highest profit. There are other ways to get higher advertisement positions without having to raise your Max CPC. Look at the Quality Score section to see how.

Do not raise your max bid more than $0.20 just because your keyword is inactive for search. Doing this is a bad move that many internet marketers make. I personally probably only have 1 keyword out of 1,000 that has a max bid of more than $0.20 per click.

What Should My Initial Max Bid Be?

This depends on many things. Some products have more popular keywords which require a larger bid just to be within the first ten search results pages, while other keywords have no competition.

Here is what I do:

When ever I start a new AdGroup I set all of my Max CPC to $0.05, then depending if the keyword has a poor rank or if it is inactive, I raise the keyword’s Max CPC to $0.10 per click. I rarely have keywords more than $0.20 per click.

Should You Bid Differently for Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Keywords?

Yes, you should have different bids for broad, phrase, and exact matched keywords. Phrase and Exact matched keywords are more specific and usually receive a higher sales rate, therefore you can afford to bid higher on them. Broad matched keywords usually receive the most traffic, but are not usually the best performing so I only bid high on the broad keywords that describe my product exactly.

Adjusting Max CPC & URL for Individual Keywords

A quick way to edit individual keyword’s bids is to go to your AdGroup and click on the “Keywords” tab. Then to the left of each keyword you will see a check box. Simply check each of the keywords you want to adjust the bid and click on the “Edit Keyword Settings” at the top of the keyword list. You will then be taken to a page which allows you to change the bids for your keywords.

Google also offers its advertisers another way to edit the Max CPC and destination URL for individual keywords.

This feature is extremely useful. It is perfect for editing your keywords without having to move them to a different AdGroup or campaign. Notice in the picture above I said that the bid price and custom URL settings were optional. This is because you can change the bid price for a keyword without changing the destination URL and vise versa. Here’s what to do if you want to use this feature:

Keyword **0.15 – Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15
Keyword **http://www.google.com – Sets the keyword’s URL to google.com
Keyword **0.15**http://www.google.com – Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15 and the URL to google.com

What to do with good performing Keywords:

If you have a good performing keyword, you don’t want it to stay just good. Instead you want to make it better than good. You want to make it perfect. You can do this by adjusting the bids of your keywords. If you have a keyword which is making a good profit, it has a high rank, and has a great CTR. Then you can take your MCPC down a little bit, because your quality score should be high enough that if you take your MCPC down one or two cents, then your keywords performance will remain the same, but you will pay less per click, thus giving you a greater profit for that keyword. Before you check to see if your keyword is performing well you will want to see its conversion rate. You can find the conversion rate (the % of clicks that result in a sale) by enabling the Conversion Tracking feature in Google AdWords. I talk more about this later.

What to do with keywords that are barely making a profit:

There are two ways in which you can fix this. The first is the easiest, and is that you simply lower your MCPC. This will keep you from spending more money than the keyword generates. The second way is that you create a new ad group with the poorly performing keywords and target the text in the ad towards the keywords. This way you will improve your CTR because people are more likely to click on your advertisement when they see the keywords they’ve searched for in the title or body of your text ad.

Google’s Budget Optimizer

Google also has a tool which will take all of the pain out of setting individual bids for your keywords. This tool is called “Budget Optimizer”. Basically, when you have this tool turned on, Google will ask you for you monthly maximum budget (the amount of money you are willing to spend that month) and then Google will automatically and continually adjust the bids for all of the keywords in that campaign. Doing this will “maximize the number of clicks for your ad”.

I have used this tool and I would not recommend it for people who like having control over their account. If you have certain keywords that have a high amount of traffic and even more advertisers, then don’t be surprised if Google sets those keywords MCPC very high so you can receive the most amounts of clicks off of that keyword. If you use this tool and your Maximum Monthly Budget is $1000, expect to receive less clicks than you would if you edited the bids yourself.

Incase you’re wondering where you can access this tool, go to “edit campaign settings” and look for the Bidding category.

Google’s Max Daily Budget

I recommend you watch the following video from Google which talks about your daily budget:

Earlier you were prompted to enter the max amount of money you were willing to pay each day for clicks. This is called your Max Daily Budget. Unfortunately, this is usually way off. According to Google you will not spend more than your daily budget over a month’s time. Let’s say that your daily budget is $10, and this month has 30 days in it. You will not spend more than $300 in advertising that month, and if you do, Google will credit your account.

You can set your daily budget anywhere from $1.00 to $250,000.00. If you have your daily budget set low, don’t expect to receive many clicks from Google. You used to be able to set a very low daily budget and receive 200 or so clicks from it, meaning that you could get about 90% of those clicks for free. But you can’t do that anymore. So if you read anything about people making money online by spending only $1.00 per day in advertising, don’t read that material because it is a few years outdated.

Sometimes Google’s Budget can get messed up. For example, your daily cost could be well below your daily budget, but Google stops running your Ads saying that “Your daily budget has been exceeded…” (you can see why your advertisements are not being displayed by going to and using the Ad Diagnostics tool). If this happens it means that your account is currently under review. This usually happens with newer accounts but can sometimes happen when you are creating a new advertising campaign. It should be fixed when a Google account reviewer looks over your account; this usually takes about three days.

Invalid Clicks

What are Invalid Clicks, and How Does Google Handle Them?

An invalid click is when someone clicks on your advertisement more than once, and Google bills you for both clicks. An invalid click can also be caused by a robot, internet spider, or a person that repeatedly clicks on your text advertisement. I personally don’t see why people think it hurts their competitors to click on their text advertisement multiple times, because all it does is help them. When they click on a text advertisement you will only be billed once and it helps increase your CTR.

So what does Google do to help prevent invalid clicks? First off, Google takes invalid clicks very seriously (they’ve been sued over it before) and Google currently has a specific team of employees whose only job is to monitor and prevent invalid clicks. If you receive an invalid click, Google will refund you the money. In fact, you can see how many invalid clicks you’ve gotten by running a report in your account and in the report settings, just specify that you would like to see invalid clicks.

For more information on invalid clicks, I recommend watching the following video by Google.

Inactive Keywords

Everyone has inactive keywords in their account (if they have several keywords). Google marks a keyword Inactive when your Max CPC is lower than the minimum bid for that keyword. The biggest determining factor which makes a keyword Inactive is your Quality Score. If your Quality Score is low and your bid isn’t high, then that keyword will be Inactive. When keywords are Inactive, they are only Inactive for Search. This means that these keywords are not appearing in the Google Search, but they are still appearing in the Content Search. You should be careful with inactive keywords, because an AdGroup with a large amount of inactive keywords can affect the performance of your active keywords.

If you have inactive keywords that are too expensive to increase the bid, you should either move the keyword to a new AdGroup and create a more targeted text advertisement (put keywords in the text ad) or remove/delete the keyword(s) from your account.

Causes for Inactive Keywords

There is no way to know if a certain keyword is going to be inactive, but if one of your keywords becomes inactive, it is either because it is completely irrelevant or it is not targeted enough.

A completely irrelevant keyword is a keyword which has nothing to do with what you are selling. An example would be if you were selling computers and you had a keyword “satellite dishes”.

Another reason for a keyword to become inactive is because it isn’t targeted enough in the Ad or website. This means that your advertisement doesn’t relate to this specific keyword as well as it does with the other keywords in the AdGroup. The best way to activate this type of inactive keyword is to move it to a new AdGroup where the text in the advertisement is more related to the keyword.

How to fix Inactive Keywords without Raising Bids

Google usually sets most if not all the irrelevant keywords in your account to the Inactive for Search state, but sometimes Google will make relevant keywords inactive.

If you have a relevant keyword become inactive, it is not because your keyword is irrelevant, but it is most likely because of the text in your Advertisement.

According to Google, ad text can sometimes cause relevant keywords to become inactive. If these keywords are important to you, then the best way to get them re-activated without having to pay a high bids per keyword is to move these keywords to a new Ad Group, with new text advertisements. When you create a new text advertisement for the inactive keyword, be sure to include the keyword in your text ad. This will not only tell Google that this keyword is an important part of your text ad, but it will also cause more people to click on your advertisement because the web surfers search phrase is always bolded in the title and/or description of your advertisement.

You should create a new ad group and text advertisement for any inactive or active keyword which would benefit from different ad text.

How to Activate Thousands of Inactive Keywords in Seconds

An easier way that will always activate a keyword is to raise the bid to the required price needed to activate the keyword. If you plan to activate your keywords using this technique, then I would highly recommend using Google’s Adjust Max CPC tool, which can activate hundreds of inactive keywords at a time by raising the bids for each of them. I show you how to do this later in this guide in the section titled “Google Tools”.

Now you know how to adjust that Max Cost Per Click for each of your keywords individually. But before you start changing your bids, you should read the next step.

Ranking & Advertisement Placement

You should have your campaign set up with appropriate text ads, AdGroups, and a huge list of keywords. Now its time that you should completely understand how everything else works in Google so you begin to receive record breaking sales days.

For more information about Google’s Ad Ranking, I recommend you watch the following video by Google:

Rules

Google is very strict and serious about their advertising, this is one of the many reasons why Google AdWords has high conversion rates and is so popular. Here is a simple list of rules which every advertiser must follow, that is, if they want to continue advertising. These are some basic things everyone should know about Advertising in Google.

1. Almost always 8 Advertisements are shown per search page. Sometimes it can be as many as 10 advertisements per page. Don’t expect to have your ad appear on the first results page if its average rank is above 10.
2. Google gives each webpage one advertising slot per keyword. This means you can’t create another Google account and advertise the same webpage for the same keyword to get two Advertisements instead of one. The way Google determines this is by your Display URL and Target URL. They will never allow two advertisements with the same Display URL to be shown in the search results for the same keyword.
3. If a merchant is advertising for a certain keyword and you’re an affiliate for that merchant, Google will not show your Ad for that keyword unless your Quality Score is higher than your competitors.
4. Your text ad can not have any misspelled words, unless they are commonly misspelled words. If you break this rule Google will take your ad offline.
5. Your text ad can’t be all capitalized, but the first letter of each word can be capitalized.
6. If you are an affiliate, Google only allows one affiliate advertisement per website per search query. This also means that if you are a merchant and you want to advertise for a certain keyword, but one of your affiliates has an advertisement for that keyword, your advertisement will not be shown. You can override this rule if you bid higher than the other advertiser or if you have a higher Quality Score than the other advertiser.
7. Your destination URL cannot have a popup window on the page. Google defines a popup window as any window that opens up into a new browser window. This includes pop-under ads. They do not mention anything about dynamic or flash pop up windows.
8. Your destination URL cannot link to a webpage that is under construction.
9. If you state your price in your text ad, then you must show this price on your webpage within 1-2 pages of your destination page.
10. You cannot use superlatives (Best, Most, Top, etc…) in your advertisement unless it is backed by a legitimate 3rd party support.
11. If you advertise a free offer in your text ad, it must be supported within 1-2 clicks of your destination page.

Tips

Increase Your Ad’s Position So it is On the Next Page

If you want to receive the most impressions and the most clicks, you will want your Ad to be displayed on the first page. If your ranking for a keyword is 8.0 or less, then your advertisement is definitely on the first search page. If your advertisements ranking is 8.1-10.0 then your advertisement may be on the first search page, but is most likely on the second search page. If your average ranking is 10.1 and up, then your text ad is not on the first search results page.

You may have heard that the first three ranking positions always receive the most traffic, and are therefore should be where you want your advertisement to be. This is not always true. Usually the first, second, and third advertising positions are very pricey, especially when compared to the fourth through eighth positions on the same page. I would not recommend increasing your bid(s) just to receive a 1st to 3rd ranking position. Doing this would cut into your profits. Instead I would recommend aiming just to receive a first page position. This way you will receive the same amount of impressions as all of the ads on the first page giving you the same chances that your text advertisement will be the one that is clicked.

What if you can’t afford to display your advertisement on the first search page?

If you can’t afford to put your Ad on the first search page you should bid what you can afford. Never bid too much for a keyword, especially a poorly performing keyword, because this will cause you to lose money.

How does Google Determine the Position of my Advertisement?

The way Google ranks their advertisements is probably one of the most confusing things to understand. They rate your website using a ranking formula, which they call a Quality Score. Unfortunately, they do not release much information about their Ad Ranking formula but they do say that it is something like this:

Ad Rank = Cost Per Click x Quality Score

It may not look too complicated, but Google uses a complex algorithm called the Quality Score to determine a lot of things about your advertisement.

Google’s Quality Score

Here is everything about the Quality Score you can know, unless you work directly for Google.

So what’s all of this talk about Google’s Quality Score and why is it so important? Google’s Quality Score is everything in Google AdWords. It’s a new thing Google introduced into AdWords in 2005 and it is the reason why people are complaining about AdWords.

Basically, Google’s Quality Score is a mathematical formula that Google keeps secret from everyone. The Quality Score was designed and created to help Google’s search results to only display the text advertisements that meet Google’s web surfers needs as best as possible.

Unfortunately, if Google doesn’t think your text ad, AdGroup, keywords, Campaign, etc. isn’t performing as well as it could be, you will experience things like poor advertising positions, high minimum bids, and of course “inactive for search” keywords.

Here are the important things that the Quality Score Determines:
Your minimum required bid
Your advertisement’s ranking
Whether or not your keywords are inactive for search

Here’s the actual formula for Google’s Quality Score:

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give us too much information about the quality score. But I can tell you that the quality score formula looks more like this…which is a little bit more than what Google tells you:

Keyword CTR
+ Ad text relevance to keyword
+ Ad text relevance to landing page
+ Keyword relevance to landing page
+ Current max bid (max CPC)
+ Your ad’s performance history
+ Other unknown factors
__________________________
= Your Quality Score

Your CPC – The more you pay Google per click, the higher your advertisement’s position and the higher your Quality Score. Google sees your bid as the most important thing when determining your Quality Score.

Your CTR – The higher your Click Through Rate, the better Google thinks your product(s) and service(s) are, therefore your ad position will increase as well as your Quality Score.

The Historical Performance of your Advertisement – If your advertisement has been relevant to your website, has had a high CTR, and has performed well for a good bid of time, then your position and Quality Score will increase. Because of this you should NEVER Change the target URL of your Advertisement. If you do, your Quality Score will go to 0.0, and all of the progress you have made will disappear. In case you didn’t read what I said earlier about changing your quality score, here’s what would happen if you did change your target URL:

• Google would have to recheck your entire website and text ad for relevance.
• This would make almost all of your keywords inactive.
• You will receive about 10% as many impressions as you did before.
• You will receive hardly any clicks.

If you do decide to change your target URL, you should pause the AdGroup which contains your old URL and create an entirely new AdGroup which contains your new target URL.

The Relevance of your Ad Text – Is the overall theme of your advertisement the same as the overall theme of your website? If so then your position and Quality Score will go up.

Other Unknown Factors – Google will not release these to the public.

Ad Text Relevance to your Keyword – This means if you have your keyword in your text advertisement, Google will increase your quality score. This is why you should group your keywords into separate AdGroups by similarity.

Ad Text Relevance to Landing Page – If your text advertisement contains words that are found on your text advertisement’s landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Keyword Relevance to Landing Page – If your keywords in your AdGroup can be found in the text of your text ad’s landing page, then Google will increase your quality score.

Your quality score is calculated for each individual keyword in your account, but at the same time Google looks at the overall historical performance of your account. So if you do have some poorly performing keywords in your account, they can affect the performance of your better performing keywords.

Benefits of Quality Score AdWords ranking system:

The higher your Quality Score the better the average position of your Ad’s.

The higher your Quality Score the less you pay per click, no matter what your rank is. (This means that it is possible for you to only pay $0.01 per click for the #1 AdWords position if your Quality Score is high enough)

Google will automatically adjust your Max Cost Per Click and ranking based on your Quality Score. (If you have a low quality score you will pay your Max CPC in full and you will have a poor ranking. If you have a high quality score you will pay well below your Max CPC and you will have a higher ranking.

If you have a high Quality Score you will receive more impressions which will lead to more clicks and more sales

Your ads position will be increased for contextual advertising

Accounts that perform very well will cause new keywords to automatically receive a higher quality score than if you added the new keywords to a new Google account.

Here is a good Quality Score idea to go by:

High Quality Score -> Better Ad Ranking -> More Impressions -> More Clicks -> More Sales -> More Profit

Disadvantages of the Quality Score

Besides the whole, if you change your target URL thing, the only other disadvantage is that if you don’t know what you are doing, you will run your ads incorrectly causing you to spend your Max CPC for each click, yet because of your mistakes your ranking will continually be lowered and your keywords will become inactive. This will again cause you to raise your Max CPC only to have the same loop happen again. So in summary, following the quality score guidelines correctly is the difference between online success and online failure.

So it is very important that you create your text ads in a way to receive a high quality score.

How to Find Your Quality Score

There are two ways to find your Quality Score.

The first way is to login to your Google Account and go to the AdGroup you want to find the Quality Score for. Remember, your quality score is determined by each keyword, so each keyword will have a different quality score.

After you get into the AdGroup, click on the “Keywords” tab, and near the top of your keyword list you will see a text link titled “Customize Colums”. Click on this text link and a drop down menu will appear. From that drop down menu select “Quality Score”. Then wait for the page to load and you will see your quality score appear next to each keyword. You will want your quality score to say “Great” or “Good”. Anything else means you may need to work on it some. Here’s a picture of one of my account’s Quality Score:

The second way to find your quality score is to do the following:

• Look at the minimum bid for your keyword. The lower your minimum bid for your keyword, the better your quality score is for that keyword. In my opinion, any average bid below $0.05 is a very good Quality Score. Likewise the keywords which are displayed “Inactive for Search” (Your Max CPC is lower than the minimum bid Google requires) have a very poor quality score, and are most likely irrelevant.
  1. If you don’t know how to see your minimum bids then simply create a custom report for minimum bids in the reports tab. You can search your entire account to find your minimum bids. Remember Google changes these daily, so you may want to search the past 7 days of history to get the keyword(s) average minimum bid.
• Look at the position estimates Google gives you for your keywords. The keywords with the lowest position estimates have the best quality scores.

How to Get A High Quality Score

There is no easy way to achieve an instantly high Quality Score. You can, however, do it rather quickly by optimizing your Search Campaigns the proper way. Here are some things you should consider when wanting a higher Quality Score:

1. Are you putting your related keywords into separate AdGroups and optimizing the ad text to be related to your keywords?
2. Are you putting your high performing keywords into the ad text’s title and/or description?
3. Are you deleting the text ads which are performing poorly and replacing them with new text ads so the majority of your advertisements have a high CTR?
4. Did you accidentally adjust your destination URL?
5. Are you increasing your keyword bids so the majority of your Advertisements are displayed on the first search page?
6. Is your daily budget high enough so you are receiving the most amount of traffic?
7. Are you removing the keywords from your AdGroup that have a poor quality score and putting the poor performing keywords in a new AdGroup of their own?

Now you know how AdWords advertisements are ranked, how to achieve a high ranking, and how to adjust the bids for your keywords to help give you more traffic.

Your keywords now should be generating a fairly decent amount of traffic. Of course this depends on how new your Google Account is. If your account is three days old or less, then you may have to wait a few days before Google approves your account. You will still receive some traffic, but you will only receive 100% of the traffic after your Google Account is approved by a Google employee. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t tell you if or when an employee will review your account, but it usually takes 1-3 business days.

You should begin to receive sales within a few days. If you don’t begin to receive sales, don’t worry. I know it would be a difficult thing to ignore but you need to make sure that it is the websites fault with the sales. Here’s a good way to determine this:

A good website will bring in about 1 sale for every 100 targeted visitors (targeted visitors means that the people were searching for your product, and didn’t just happen to click on it because they were bored). Now, this depends on many things, such as the price, the popularity, and the demand. But most good websites should average 1 sale for every 100-300 targeted visitors. If it takes more visitors than that, it will probably mean that you have spent more than you would have received in commission from a sale.

Make sure your bid prices are not too high. It is easier to determine this when you have more sales coming in, but don’t make your bids too high if you have few sales coming in.

The Quality Score Triangle

Occasionally when you know a lot about a subject, things come together and make sense. One of these things is the “Quality Score Triangle”. The Quality Score Triangle is a term I came up with, so you probably won’t find it on Google.

This will probably help explain why some of your keywords are inactive for search even though you think they may be very relevant to the website you’re advertising. Please note, this may be difficult to do if you’re a beginner with Google AdWords. If you are a beginner I don’t recommend attempting this yet.

The Quality Score Triangle is something I came up with to better explain how Google’s relevancy works.

Basically Google looks at three things to determine how relevant your keywords and advertisements are. These three things are:

• Your Keyword
• The text in your text advertisement
• The text on your landing page.

If your keyword is relevant to the text in your advertisement as well as your landing page and vies versa, then you will have a very relevant text advertisement giving you a higher quality score.

So how can you make your text advertisement more relevant? This will be easier to explain in an example.

Let’s say you are selling televisions on Google. And you want the keyword “plasma TV for sale” to be very relevant (in Google’s eyes) to your webpage. The way to do this would be to put the phrase “plasma TV for sale” and all of the other keywords that contain all the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” into an AdGroup titled “Plasma TV Sale”.

Now that you have all your keywords grouped you will need to find some relevant text on the landing page you’re using. You will want to see the words “plasma”, “tv”, and “sale” in text somewhere on the landing page. If you can’t find any of these words on your landing page then this keyword isn’t going to be very relevant to your website. Ideally the most relevant websites would have this somewhere in the destination URL (like: websiteexample.com/plasma-tv-sale.html), the title of the website (in the title bar), and bolded. But this can’t be the case unless you’re designing your own website (which we will talk about later).

So now you have your keyword relevant to your website which is very good. All you have left to do is finish it by making your text advertisement relevant to both your website and your keyword.

The easiest way to do this is to include this keyword into your text advertisement. Doing this will let Google see that the keyword is relevant to your website as well as your text advertisement, which will give you a very high relevancy score, thus increasing your Quality Score.

Here’s an example of what this advertisement may look like below:

Now this text advertisement would be even more relevant if the webpage also contains the words “Online”, “name brand”, “limited quantity”, and “free shipping”. This is because your text advertisement would be even more relevant to your website.

You can easily replicate what I’ve done above on other websites and text ads. Just replace the “plasma TV sale” keywords with those of your own.

Content Advertising (Contextual Advertising)

This is the type of advertising where your text ads are displayed with Google AdSense on participating websites. You will often see these ads on other web pages inside advertising boxes that look very similar to Google AdWords advertising boxes. There are several people who think contextual advertising is a big waste of time and money…I 100% completely disagree with this. Contextual advertising gives you a ton of traffic, which you can turn into large amounts of sales. I HIGHLY recommend Contextual Advertising.

The way Content Advertising works is that Google looks through your entire keyword list and compares those keywords in your AdGroup to the words found in the text of all the sites that participate in Google AdSense. So basically Google is trying to perfectly match your advertisement to the appropriate web site. Once Google finds the right web sites to display your advertisement, you will begin to receive Content impressions and clicks.

Common Mistake: Google Content Advertising only looks at broad matched keywords (they don’t use the keywords that are wrapped in “ ” or [ ] to help determine which site to advertise your campaign).

What Really Happens: In my testing, Google Content Advertising looks at ALL of your Keywords. This includes broad keywords, phrase match keywords “”, and exact match keywords [].

How Contextual Ads are Ranked

Google claims that the ranking position of your contextual advertisements is based solely on the Quality Score for that keyword on the Google Search.

You should also know that it is not possible to know when or where you ads will appear in Google’s Content Network. You can find out where they have appeared in the past by looking at the web log data for your website (this is only if you own your website), which will show where users visited your webpage from.

Google also only displays your ads on websites that match the theme of your high quality advertisements and keywords. Google will also stop displaying your advertisements if they begin to have poor results.

Luckily, Google also has a smart payment system, which insures that you don’t pay the full Max CPC on a website that will not bring you as many sales versus a website that brings in a lot of conversions.

Should You Have A Separate Campaign Just For Contextual Ad’s?

Some people like to make two separate campaigns, one just for Google Search Advertising and one just for Google Content Advertising. The only benefits of this is that it would give you more control over the pricing and wording for each keyword and text ad. If you decide to make two different campaigns you will notice that when you only have the Google Search Advertising selected for one campaign, that campaign will only show advertisements on Google.com. Whereas if you only have Content Advertising selected, your ads will be displayed on the participating AdSense websites and they will also be displayed on Google.com search engine. This could be a bad thing because Google will test and compete your Ad groups against each other if they contain the same keyword(s) Google will display the dominate advertisement (the one with the highest Quality Score).

Advertising Preference	Content Network	Search Network
Only Content Advertising	Displayed	Displayed
Only Search Advertising		Displayed

I have tested putting keywords into two different Campaigns (one campaign for Google Search keywords, and one campaign only for Google Contextual Keywords). And I would recommend keeping your content ads in the same campaign as your search ads. This will make it much easier to control and your Content Keywords will not be competing with your Search keywords.

Different Advertisements For Contextual Ads?

Some people may tell you that you should have different advertisements for your Contextual ads than your Google Search Ads. Their point being that when people are searching Google they are looking for information so they are scanning the whole page, whereas if they are on a website reading an article they are concentrating on the article and are ignoring the advertisements on the webpage.

You do not need to create two different advertisements for Contextual and Google Search. Google actually recommends that you don’t make two separate text advertisements. Your ad should do one thing and only one thing… it should make the webpage viewer want to click on it. In my testing I have found that an advertisement with a high CTR on the Google Search will usually also have a high CTR on the Google Content Network. Also, Google uses your keywords Quality Score in the Google Search to help aid in the ranking of that keyword in Contextual Advertising. In order for you to use the same text successfully for both the Google Search and the Google Content Network your keywords have to be targeted and related to your text Ad.

If You Think Contextual Advertisements is A Waste of Time & Money…

Then you may want to change your views on Contextual Advertising after I show you how to take advantage of it.

Above is a screenshot of the activity for one of my Ad Groups. As you can see my Content Ad’s are converting twice as well as my Search Network ads.

The Good things about Google Content Ads (Also called Contextual Ads).

1. Content Ads CTR doesn’t affect the CTR of your Google Search Advertisements and it doesn’t affect the performance or ad ranking of your Google Search Ads. This means your content advertisements could have a Click Through Rate of 0.01% and it will not affect your Quality Score for the Google Search network.
2. You get way more traffic.

The Bad things about Google Content Ads:

1. You pay full bid price for each click (depending on the websites your ad is displayed on. Remember earlier I said Google will not charge you your full Max CPC on websites that are not expected to bring you a lot of conversions).
2. You cannot see which keywords brought in the most clicks.
3. You can get too much traffic costing you a lot of money.

Here’s the main thing with Contextual Advertising…you get a TON of traffic. This can be a very good thing if your Ad’s have a high CTR or it can be a very bad thing if your Ad’s have a poor CTR.

Here are the ways you can improve your contextual advertising:

1. Find and add more specific keywords to your AdGroup, the more specific the better. For example if you are advertising for PDA’s use key phrases like “cheap Ipaq 6315”, “low cost Ipaq 6315”, “Ipaq 6315 sale”, etc. Don’t worry about finding every single key phrase possible, but try to generate a good keyword list. If you do this correctly then you can use Google’s Keyword Tool (I talked about this earlier) to its fullest potential.
2. Do not just have one Text Advertisement per AdGroup. I would recommend having at least 3-4 text ads per Ad Group. Use the techniques mentioned earlier to write successful text advertisements, and once you get four Ad’s monitor their performance (don’t worry Google will display the performance information you need so you don’t need to write it down daily). After 2-3 days pass you will hopefully see one or two ads performing well (or better than the other ads), when this happens change your poorest performing text ad completely by giving it a new title, and description. Keep on doing this until your ads CTR’s meet your standards.

Managing Content Network Bids

We all know that the content network performs very differently from Google’s Search Network. Sometimes the content network will have higher conversion rates, and other times the content network will have lower conversion rates. Either way, you can do things to increase your profits.

The easiest and best way to do this is to enable separate bids for the content network. To do this, go into your Campaign Settings and click “Content Bids”.

Doing this will allow you to specify different bids for Google’s Content Network and Google’s Search Network. You will specify these bids in your AdGroups, not in your campaign.

If your Content Network is performing very well, then I would recommend lowering your bids 1-2 cents.

If you’re losing money through the Content Network, then I recommend you lower your bids by at least 3-5 cents to lower your advertising costs.

Image Ads

The Google Content Network allows you to display image ads instead of text advertisements. Image ads will only appear on contextual websites that allow image ads, so don’t expect to see images appear on Google’s search network. I don’t recommend image ads for those of you who are new to internet marketing with Google AdWords.

There are rules that apply to image ads, but I recommend you watch the following video from Google about images ads to get a better idea:

Video Ads

The Google Content Network also allows you to advertise video ads on participating contextual websites. With video ads the user will usually have to click on the advertisement twice before they will go to your website. This is because the users first click will cause the video ad to play and then the users second click will take them to the website.

I recommend watching the following video by Google to learn more about image ads.

Mobile Ads

Since it’s becoming more and more common for people to have internet access on their cell phones, Google allows you to create Mobile Advertisements. Mobile Ads appear on the Google search results when people search Google.com using their cell phones. The advantage of using mobile text ads is that these ads will re-direct the web surfer to a mobile phone webpage or it will connect them to your business phone.

If you want to know more information about Mobile Ads, I recommend you watch the following video from Google.

Random Information on Contextual Advertising

Image advertisements (where a picture you choose is approved by Google and is displayed next to your text advertisement) will only appear on contextual advertising and they will only appear on the websites which accept it.

Your contextual advertisements will only be displayed in the countries or regions which you specified in your campaign settings earlier. This means if you have an advertisement in English, it will not appear on a website which is in a language other than English.

How to Manage Your Account

You will want to manage your account as much as possible, but for many beginners they don’t know quite what to do. Here is a simple list to follow every time you log onto your Google account.

1. Make sure your last payment was received. Sometimes if you pay your fee’s using a debit card, Google will say it was denied. I’m not sure what causes this error, but all you have to do is re-enter your debit card information. You may also want to take advantage of Google’s payment feature, which lets you enter two credit cards in case one of your credit cards is not accepted by Google.
2. Make sure your Campaigns are receiving close to average traffic. If a Campaign seems like it is receiving less than usual traffic, then something is wrong with your advertisement and you will need to find the problem to fix it.
3. Re-activate as many inactive keywords as you can. I will show you a simple way to do this later in this guide.
4. Make sure your daily budgets is set higher than Google recommends, because Google rarely updates its recommended budget, so if you are spending more than your recommended budget and you think that is good since Google’s rule is your MAX DAILY BUDGET X DAYS IN THE MONTH = MOST AMOUNT OF $$ YOU WILL BE CHARGED, think again. One time I thought the same thing, then one day I saw a message from Google which said “You Need To Increase Your Daily Budget for this Campaign. Doing so will increase the amount of clicks you receive. Last month you missed 73% of your traffic because your daily budget was set too low.”
5. Check your Text Advertisements and make sure that they are still all active and have a good CTR.
6. Increase the bids of your keywords which are ranked above 10.0 (Don’t do this if you can’t afford it).

Also Don’t Forget…

Always make smart decisions about individual keywords, AdGroups, and campaigns by looking at the history of the specific item. This will help tell you what things you did to improve your account, and also what things you screwed up on which hurt your account.

You will also want to make sure your Account is structured properly. I recommend watching the following video by Google which shows you how and why to do this.

Site Targeted Advertising

I recommend watching this introduction video by Google on Site Targeted Advertising:

When you advertise using Site Targeted Advertising you write your Text Ads, Name your Campaigns and AdGroups, and view your performance exactly the same way as you do in Contextual Advertising. The biggest difference is that in site targeted advertising, you do not choose which keywords you want to use to advertise your website. Instead you choose which websites you want to advertise on. Other than this difference, site targeted advertising is set up the same way as Contextual Advertising is. This means that your advertisements will be displayed on other websites rather than the Google Search (although I have seen impressions in the Google Search network for some of my Site Targeted campaigns).

Creating a Site Targeted Campaign

I recommend watching this video by Google on creating a site targeted campaign for your AdWords account:

It may sound confusing at first, but its pretty straight foreword. You set up your campaign as you would normally, but instead of adding keywords Google will ask you to choose which websites you want to advertise on. Don’t worry if you don’t know specifically which websites you want to use. Google will ask you to make a small list of keywords which accurately describe your website, and from that list Google will display a list of websites which have similar content.

Once you see a website you want to advertise on, you can select that website and have Google show you even more websites which have similar content to that website.

You will notice that some of these sites will accept image ads, while others only allow text ads. Google will also display the amount of impressions you can get from each website (remember that Google’s estimated impressions, clicks, and cost are usually way off, usually too high, so don’t expect these to be completely accurate).

Once you select the websites you want to advertise on, you select your Maximum Bid. This bid is different from normal bids. Instead of paying per click, you pay for every 1,000 impressions. This is where you can see the term CPM (Cost Per Thousand). You can choose to pay more for a specific website, or you can have the same CPM for all of the websites you choose. The minimum you can bid for 1,000 impressions is $0.25, and the more you bid the higher your rank.

Benefits of Site Targeted Advertising

A few of the benefits are that you can select which website you want to advertise on. This is good if you see that one of your competitors has a higher ranking than you in AdWords, but also allows AdSense on their website. If this is the case then you can simply choose that website to advertise on, and compete for his customers on his own web site.

Technically, you can get 1,000 clicks for as little as $0.25, but don’t expect that. Site Targeted advertising is usually more expensive than pay per click advertising. This is because you usually get one to five people to click on your advertisement out of 1,000 impressions.

Disadvantages of Site Targeted Advertising

The bad things about site targeted advertising are that most of the time your advertisement doesn’t show on the more popular websites (the ones you actually want your advertisements displayed on) and it is usually more expensive, not to mention confusing selecting the appropriate websites to advertise on.

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