Growing Your Site with Adwords

By Justin Harrison

Do you know just a little about Google AdWords? Want to know more? Mastering the basics of Adwords will give you one of the most powerful tools the Internet provides to get the attention of Google's search engine and its search partners, raise your page rankings on Google and its search partners, and reach the largest community of Internet users in the world. No other method of paid advertising will bring more traffic to your site. But if you don't master the basics of Google Adwords, what it is and how it works, you may get disappointing results and waste your advertising budget. Step #1 for creating ads that get traffic to your site from Adwords is to make sure you know what your potential visitors are looking for. It's not all about keywords. You need to get into your visitors' heads to know what they are looking for when they visit your site. One way to understand what drives customers to your site is basic keyword research. Look at the keywords that are already on your site. Do some additional basic keyword research with tools like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Don't limit yourself to the high KEI keywords you get from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. Once you use the keyword search services, do some brainstorming to think of additional words and phrases that potential customers may be searching for that will lead them to content that your site can deliver. Make your list as long as you can. You can whittle it down as you get your campaign underway. Eventually you will have a few high-performing gems that bring you the highest Click Thru Rates (CTR) and conversions. After you have your master list of keywords, create and fund your Adwords account. You will choose the most promising keywords from your brainstorming list to start an initial campaign. Start with just one ad for the keywords you choose. Then write at least one variation of your ad to see which copy brings you the most visitors. This process of testing one ad against another is called split testing. The process of split testing allows you to establish which ad's wording is more effective. You do this by analyzing your conversion rates and CTRs. As your Adwords campaign matures, you will repeat this fine tuning of your ad copy and your choice of keywords over and over again. You will create new ads that are slightly different each time to see if small changes in copy and keyword lead to small (and occasionally large) improvements in CTR and conversions. Don't spend all your advertising budget up front. Be sure you set your budget low until you know which ads and which keywords work best for you. In some niches, $100 a week on Adwords can create a huge impact on site traffic. In other niches, you may need to spend a lot more. But whether you spend a little or a lot, make sure you check your return on investment. Adwords allows you to do this by setting a performance goal, such as units sold. This tool allows you to determine whether your Adwords campaign has earned your investment back, and by how much. The measure of a financially successful Adwords campaign is that it earns at least 50% return on investment. A 50% return will ensure that you can take some profits while still having money to grown your site. If you carefully test and retest every advertising decision as you go along, you can increase your ROI, pumping up your ad budget from the sales you get from Adwords.

About the Author:

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.