Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Maintaining Your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

By Brian Basch

You've finally gotten your campaign off the ground. Keywords have been researched and bid on, synonyms and relevant words taken advantage of, and you're set up for the next six months. Now, how do keep things working properly? Pay per click campaign management is an important skill that many people forget about.

Ideally it would be great if you could just set up your campaign and leave it alone. However this will not work. In reality you will need to track and test every ad for performance. There are many ways that you can do this.

Traffic and sales can be accessed by tools from Google Adwords itself. This will allow you to know just how much traffic and sales a particular keyword may be giving you. Remember one thing, robot traffic will not produce sales.

Why should you do this? A keyword ad that's not effective actually drains resources. If it's idle, it'll keep you from doing more effective thing. If it brings in traffic that doesn't lead to sales, you're paying for that traffic, but you get nothing out of it. Remember that you pay for every click, even if it doesn't lead to a sale.

Do not give up hope there are ways to fix ads that are not doing well. Check its position. It should appear within the first 5-10 pages of the search results. If this is alright then your next step is to check your keywords.

Initially most people think of popular keywords before they consider anything else. They feel that they will drive lots of traffic to their website. This is true but unfortunately this will not result in sales, because it is untargeted. Searchers use these popular keywords when they first start searching but these keywords do not usually take them to where they want to go.

That means that people using these keywords are often not sure what they're looking for. They'll look at a lot of sites before they buy. Good keywords are general enough to be searched for by someone who's not sure what they're looking for, but specific enough to reach the audience that will buy your product or service.

You should think about searching with your own keywords. The results may surprise you, as you view other sites that are using the same keyword. Be sure to check out the top 10 competitors in the search results. Look at their sites carefully and see if these are the right sites for your market. If they do not match your site you may have to adjust your keywords. Bear in mind if your keyword is wrong you can be losing money.

Careful monitoring of your results will tell you which keywords to keep and which ones to replace. Choose the right words, and you'll end up with productive ads that bring in real, useful traffic. Paying close attention to your pay per click campaign is an important part of being successful and making a profit. - 15432

About the Author: