Growing Your Site with Adwords

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.

The first thing you need to do to write effective ads for Google Adwords is to determine what your visitors are looking for when they do their Google search. You want to make sure you attract the customers who will find the content they want on your site. If you get inside their heads, you’ll know what they need and you will develop a better rounded keyword strategy.

You still start with keywords before you use Adwords. Look at the keywords you have on your website right now. Use WordTracker to find additional options and long-tail keywords that place your site in a unique niche. Make the list of keywords as long as you can. Later, as you narrow down your list of keywords, you will find a few high-performing gems that are perfectly matched to your content. Right now, just get all the keywords you can. The match between keyword and content that bumps up high Click Thru Rates (CTR) and conversion rates comes in Step #2.

Don’t try to use all your keywords all at once. After you set up your Adwords account, Step #2 is to begin bringing a manageable list of search terms from your comprehensive list of keywords into your campaign. Create that first ad from the most promising keywords. Write just one more ad with the same keywords but different ad copy to see what really encourages your CTR. Making the ads slightly different helps you establish which wording gets you more traffic for your money. You will repeat this process over and over again as your AdWords campaign matures. You will find small changes in wording, punctuation, and capitalization that bring in incremental improvement?and sometimes dramatic improvement?in your click thrus and conversions.

If there’s a basic rule for Adwords survival, it’s setting your advertising budgets low until you have completed your Adwords testing. Sometimes just $100 a week will get you the data you need to make your site truly profitable. Other times, it takes a lot more than $100 a week to test ads for a broader niche. Either way, always check your returns against your investment. Adwords allows you to do this by inserting values for goals, such as a sale of a product. You will measure conversions to compute whether you have made your money back and by how much.

Always aim to make at least 50% return on your investment. A 50% return will ensure a profitable campaign that allows you to fund expansion of your site and gives you some profits to pocket. Paying attention to CTR and conversion rates makes it possible for you to grow your site from the sales you make with Adwords.

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