1. A Brief Overview of Online Affiliate Marketing

What is Online Affiliate Marketing?

Basically, online affiliate marketing is where someone advertises for another persons website and in return the advertiser receives commission for each sale their advertising brings to that website. You are considered an affiliate if youre advertising for a website that you dont own, and you are getting paid for each sale your advertising produces.

Heres an example: Lets say I want to sell computers, but I dont have a website and/or I dont have any computers to sell. Well instead of starting a company, I can just find a company online which already sells computers and offers an affiliate program. Now that I have searched and found a company, I look at what they offer. Lets say they are giving 10% commission on every sale I make. I decide to use that company and I set up my affiliate account with them and they give me a special URL (a web address that will let the company know that it was my advertising which gave them the sale), which I use in my advertisements.

Now I make an advertisement, and display it on Google. Whenever someone sees and clicks on my advertisement it will go to the companys webpage. Lets say that one hundred people click on my text advertisement and one of them buys a computer that cost $1,200. Because that person who bought the computer clicked on my advertisement the company will give me 10% of $1,200 which means that I made $120.00.

Finding Affiliate Companies

Almost every large company online has an affiliate program. There are also companies online where all they do is offer other online business a way to have an affiliate program. I call these companies Affiliate Companies.

These Affiliate Companies manage affiliate programs for thousands of online companies and websites. This means that if you have an affiliate account with an Affiliate Company (dont worry, they are completely free), you can advertise for any of the thousands of websites that use the Affiliate Company to manage their affiliate sales. If you want to, you can search Google for affiliate programs just to see how big online marketing currently is.

When you are looking at these Affiliate Companies you will notice two things. They will offer services to both Affiliates and Merchants (also called vendors). Heres the difference between the two:

Affiliate Person who promotes a website to receive commission for each product they sell.
Merchant Person or company which owns the website being promoted by the affiliates.

Here are a few of the most popular Affiliate Companies

ClickBank www.clickbank.com Having an affiliate account with ClickBank will allow you to sell digital products (only available via download) for over 10,000 online businesses. Their commission rates on average run anywhere from 10%-75% per each sale the affiliate makes on that webpage. I highly recommend starting off with ClickBank.

PayDotCom www.paydotcom.com PayDotCom is a fairly new affiliate network that is similar to ClickBank. Unlike ClickBank, PayDotCom accepts affiliates from a much broader range of countries and also pays affiliate commissions directly into each affiliates PayPal account.

Commission Junction www.cj.com Having an affiliate account with Commission Junction will allow you to sell mostly physical products (must be shipped to the buyer). A few of the big companies which use them are eBay, Dell, Best Buy and Yahoo, and many more.

Signing Up with ClickBank

Heres how to sign up for ClickBanks free affiliate program so you can start making money online with them. This will allow you to promote any website/product in their Marketplace. Once you have a ClickBank affiliate account you can advertise for several different web pages simultaneously and whenever you get a sale, your commissions will go into one account. After 16 days you will receive a check in the mail for the sales you made.

It can be difficult or confusing to find the location to sign up for ClickBanks affiliate program. Because of this I will give you the link which will take you directly to their Affiliate Signup page. It is very straightforward.

After you sign up you will have your ClickBank nickname, and you will have a password to access your account. Whenever you want to access your account and view your sales click on the Login link near the top of every ClickBank page.

Now that youve signed up with ClickBank, its time you begin learning about your advertising strategy. To do this, go to Section 2. Signing up with Google AdWords which is right after the Commission Junction section.

How to Find A Website to Promote on ClickBank

Please Note Dont read how to find a website to promote on ClickBank unless youre already reading the section about signing up with Google AdWords. Im simply putting this section here because it makes the most sense to put all of the ClickBank information in one spot rather than having it spread around throughout the guide. I will tell you when to use this section.

First off, go to www.clickbank.com. When you visit ClickBanks webpage you will notice the following screen:

To see which products ClickBank Affiliates can promote, click on the Marketplace link on the top of the ClickBank home page:

You will now see a new page which offers two things.

1. It offers a search so you can search ClickBanks marketplace for a particular product.
2. Near the bottom of the page it will show you the different categories ClickBank uses to separate merchants. Scroll to the bottom of the page to view the categories.

You will then see 9 different categories. If you click on one of those categories you will see a large list of companies which you can promote. They are organized by popularity.This doesnt mean the best web pages to promote are always on the first few pages. If you look towards the top of the page when you are in a Category, you will see a search tool which will help you to further narrow your search for finding a merchant to advertise for.

This search tool allows you to specify what type of product you want to find and possibly want to advertise. This search tool contains the following to help you to narrow your search:

Category This is where you can choose the general subject of the products you wish ClickBank to display. In the screenshot above, I am in the “Fun & Entertainment” category, so ClickBank is only displaying websites which sell products that are Fun and Entertain people.

Sub-Category This is where you can further narrow down the products ClickBank will display. Some of the Sub-Categories in the Fun & Entertainment category include: Novels, Humor, Music, Etc.

Keywords Lets you specifically search for a certain product. For example, if I wanted to search for Computer Software, I would type this into the keyword text box and then I would click “Go”.

Sort By Tells ClickBank to sort the search results in the market place. The Sort By function contains the following:

Popularity Displays the most popular products first.
High Gravity Displays the products with the most affiliates first.
Low Gravity Displays the products with the least affiliates first.
$Earned/Sale Displays the average amount of money earned by affiliates.
%Earned/Sale Displays the average commission rate earned by affiliates.
%Referred Displays the percentage of sales made by affiliates only.

When you look at the listings, you will see something that looks similar to the following picture:

1. This is the current rank of the merchants website for the category or sub category.
2. This is the title, and you can click on this to see what the webpage of this company looks like.
3. This is the description of the website so you get a general idea of what the product is without having to visit each website.
4. This is the average amount of money each affiliate earns for each sale.
5. This is the average commission each affiliate earns for each sale.
6. This means 90% of sales are produced by affiliates and 10% of sales of produced by the owner of the website (this is referring to the picture above).
7. This is the current number of affiliates promoting the product.
8. This is another link to view the merchants website.
9. This is what you click on to receive your unique Affiliate URL or Hoplink. This is the link you advertise with.

So What Happens Next?

You should already have an affiliate account setup. Now you are going to simply find a company you want to promote.

Remember to follow the rules in the section titled Finding a Website to Advertise.

Signing Up with PayDotCom

PayDotCom is very similar to ClickBank, except its newer and you get paid via PayPal. Currently ClickBank is more popular with more merchants and affiliates, but this doesnt mean you should overlook PayDotCom.

To signup with PayDotCom, go to http://www.paydotcom.com and click on the Signup link at the top of the main page.

Once you click on that link it will take you to a very easy to follow signup page where you simply enter the information it asks. Please note you need to have a PayPal account before you signup with PayDotCom. After youve signed up with PayDotCom you will be able to promote any of the products listed in their marketplace and get paid commissions on every sale you make.

Signing Up with Commission Junction

Besides ClickBank and PayDotCom, there is also Commission Junction. Commission Junction is probably the biggest affiliate network online. Some of the companies that use them are Apple, Expedia, Staples, Dell, Best Buy, etc. The main difference between Commission Junction and other affiliate networks is that Commission Junction offers mainly physical products, which means that the products are shipped to the customer rather than downloaded by the customer.

The only disadvantage with Commission Junction is that they want you to have your own website to use them. Although they require this, its not actually required as you can advertise their products just as easily on search engines.

To signup with Commission Junction go to http://www.cj.com/publishers/ and click on the link at the bottom of the page titled Apply for a Commission Junction publisher account.

You will then be taken to a page that will ask you for some basic information before completing the creation of your free affiliate account. After you complete the signup, you will have a Commission Junction account.

2. Signing Up with Google AdWords

What is Google Adwords

Google AdWords is a pay per click program that allows you to advertise on Google’s search engine as well as their partner sites and millions of other smaller websites. In Google AdWords you will create appealing text advertisements to convince people to visit your website and you will also generate keyword lists which tell Google when to display your text advertisement. These are the two things that determine how much money you will make online.

Sounds easy right? Two things stand between you and online success. Unfortunately not many people can master these two things because it is harder than it seems. Lucky for you, you’re going to have a Certified Google Advertising Professional guide you through everything to make sure you succeed online.

I recommend you watch the following video by Google that tells you what Google AdWords is:

How Advertising on Google Works

Whenever you search for something on Google you will see something similar to the following picture:

Notice I have highlighted results in two different colors, red and green.

The green highlighted web pages are Google’s organic search results. These are the pages which are displayed for free and are the web pages that most people click on when searching for something.

The red highlighted web pages are the Google AdWords paid advertisements. These advertisements are always shown to the right of the search results and are sometimes shown above the search results.The AdWords advertisements are Pay Per Click (PPC), which means that the owner of that advertisement pays Google a few cents every time someone clicks on their ad.The red sections are where your advertisement will appear when you sign up for Google AdWords.

I recommend watching this video by Google to get more information about where your advertisements are displayed:

Why would I want to Pay-Per-Click, when I can get free traffic on Google?

The main reason for wanting to pay for traffic is because it is very very difficult to receive free traffic on Google.

When you sign up for Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click advertising your advertisement will be displayed almost immediately in Google’s search results (usually within 5 minutes). You can also decide which search results page you want your advertisements to appear on (the first page always receives more visitors than the other pages).

If you want to receive free advertising, you would have to own the website you were promoting. It would be really difficult to do otherwise. Then, you would have to optimize your website for Google and then submit it to Google to be displayed in their search. This may sound good but it can take up to 6 months and that will not even guarantee you a 1st page position.

Affiliate Marketing on Google AdWords

Contrary to what most people say about affiliate advertising on Google AdWords, it is not required that you have your own landing page or web page in order to advertise for another website on AdWords. Most people think they need to have their own landing page because Google doesn’t allow two or more advertisements for the same web page to appear for the same search. This is not true. In fact, videos included in this guide prove this isn’t true.

Here is how this rule works: when you create an advertisement for Google you are asked to enter two different types of URLs (web addresses). One is the Display URL which is the URL that the web surfer sees on your text advertisement and the other is the Destination URL which is the actual URL that the web surfer goes to when they click on your advertisement.

Google then looks at these URLs and compares them with your competitors URLs for each keyword in your keyword list. If there is another advertisement that uses the same display URL, Google will not display your advertisement because there is already another advertiser advertising the same website as you for that keyword. Google will only display your advertisement in place of the competitor’s ad only if your text ad is better than theirs. Google uses an algorithm called the Quality Score (we talk about this later) to determine this. So if your quality score is better than the other advertisers, then your advertisement will always be shown.

There are two ways to always have your advertisement shown:

1. Create your own landing page. If you do this your text ad’s display URL will be unique, so your advertisement will always be shown. Unfortunately, using this technique requires that you know how to make a webpage.
2. Optimize your advertisement so its quality score will be higher than your competitors. This is the best approach in my opinion.

How to Start A Google AdWords Account

Here’s how to sign up:

Go to www.google.com and look towards the bottom of the page. You will see a link which says, “Advertising Programs”. Once you click on that link, you will be taken to the following page:

http://www.google.com/ads/

Once there you should click on the link which says “Google AdWords”.

You will then be taken to a page which looks like the following picture. I would recommend book marking this page or add it to your favorites because you will visit it often. Click on the button titled “Sign up now” to sign up for your AdWords account.

After clicking “Sign up now”, you will be taken to a couple of pages which will ask you how you want to set up your advertising group(s) with Google. As for now, we will just set up a dummy campaign, meaning that you are not going to advertise anything in this campaign. Why are you creating a dummy campaign? I am going to go over in extreme detail how to set up a perfect campaign later in this guide, but for now, I don’t want you to worry about advertising, I just want you to have a Google Account.

After you hit the “Sign up now” button, you will be taken to a page where it asks you what type of AdWords account you want to create. Select the “Standard Edition” and click on the “Continue” button.

I recommend watching this Google video which gives you information about starting a Standard Edition account with Google AdWords:

After you hit the “Continue” button you will see a selection where it asks you to Target Customers By Language, choose which language you wish to advertise in (this should be the language the webpage is in that you’re thinking about advertising).

In the Target Customers By Location selection you will select where you want to advertise. There are three sections; I would recommend the Countries and Territories selection for now.

Countries & Territories This is where you will advertise in certain countries or territories. For example if I wanted to advertise in North America only, I would choose the Countries and Territories option and I would select the countries Canada, Mexico, and United States.

Regions & Cities This is where you will advertise in specific cities and regions. This works best if you’re advertising for a local flower shop or a furniture store located in one or many cities. If this was the case you could specify Regions & Cities and if you lived in the USA you could advertise in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia if the business was located in the North East.

Customized This is where you customize where you want your ads to be displayed. You can choose very specific places to advertiselike certain cities, regions, etc.

Next you will be prompted to choose more specific areas to advertise, such as individual countries, regions, or cities. You will only need to choose one city, country, or region for the dummy campaign. Since I live in the United States, I chose “United States”.

When you hit the “Continue” button you will be asked to make the advertisement for the website you are promoting. Again, you can edit this later so just make a quick advertisement. If you don’t know what to do, simply do the following:

Headline: “Search Engine Advertising”
Description line 1: “Learn How to Make Money Online”
Description line 2: “by Advertising on Search Engines”
Display URL: www.homeincome4all.co.uk
Destination URL: www.homeincome4all.co.uk

Don’t worry, you’re not even going to use this advertisement. Google just wants you to have something entered here before you can continue.

After you click on the “Continue” button you will be prompted to enter keywords, this can be edited later so just enter one keyword which is related to your website and hit continue. If you used the previous advertisement, just enter “steven holdaway” as your only keyword.

On the next page you will be asked to choose which currency you want Google to use to bill you. Select the appropriate currency, because you cannot edit this later. Then you will see a section where it asks you What is the most you would like to spend, on average, per day? This is your Max Daily Budget, set this anywhere from $8.00 – $10.00 and go to the next section (don’t worry, you’re not going to get billed this amount). The next section is What is the maximum you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad? This is your Maximum Cost Per Click. Enter $0.05 here and click on the “Continue” button on the bottom of the page.

Now hit the continue button and you will see a page which shows you all of the current settings to your Advertisement Group. Read through them and click on the “Continue to Sign Up” button at the bottom of the page.

The next page will ask you if you already have a Google Account. If you do, simply enter your email address and password and click on the button titled “Create AdWords Account”. If you don’t have a Google Account look for a link on the page which says “Create a new Google Account to be your login to AdWords”. This will create a new Google Account for you.

If you don’t already have a Google account it will ask you to enter your email address and a password, make sure this information is correct because Google will send you an email right after you create your account. After you enter this information, click on the “Create AdWords Account” button.

Google will now send you an email to the email address you specified which will contain a link that you will need to click on in order to activate your account. Simply click on the URL in your email from Google.

After you go to that URL you can log into Google AdWords using your email address as your User Name and the password you created earlier. Once you are in your account, you will need to specify a credit card for Google to use in order to bill you. Here’s how to do this.

1. Click on the “Billing” tab located near the top of the Google Account webpage.
2. Then select “Billing Preferences” from the drop down menu.

This will take you to the appropriate location where you need to enter your credit card information.

You will be charged a $5.00 activation fee, but don’t worry this is not a lot at all, most other search engines charge you much more than this. After you enter your credit card and personal information your account will be activated.

Beginners Introduction To Your New Account

If you’re new to Google AdWords, the following information is an introduction for you to your new account. It will start off by giving you basic information and features of your AdWords account, but first I will show you how to pause the “dummy” Campaign you currently have active.

Pausing Your Dummy Campaign

Now it is time to pause the dummy campaign so you will not receive any traffic to it. To do this click on the “Campaign” tab. You will see something that looks a bit like this:

Notice that in the “Status” column in the picture above it says “Paused”. Unless you’ve already paused your campaign, the Current Status for your campaign will say “Active”.

Remember earlier when I said to just choose one country, one keyword, and a basic advertisement and not to worry about it being perfect because I would get into that later in more detail. Well, now is when you are going to learn more information about those things. So, to make sure you don’t receive any activity in your account until you know how to properly manage it, you will need to Pause your Campaign.

It is fairly easy to pause your campaign, and there are two ways you can do it.

1. You can tick the check box next to the campaign you want to pause and then click on the “Status” button and select “Pause.
2. 2. Click on the green circle to the left of your campaign and click on the “Pause” image.

Now that you have an account set up, you are ready to learn how to create a perfect Campaign so you can begin making money online.

Background Information with Your Account

It’s about time that you need to know basic AdWords Account information such as definitions and meanings of keywords, campaigns, and AdGroups.

Keywords Keywords are what people search for in Google. Whatever someone types into Google’s search box is a keyword. If someone searched for “Google Money Pro” on Google, the keyword is “Google Money Pro”. If someone searched for “red hat with eBay logo” their keyword is “red hat with eBay logo”.

So basically a search query is a keyword. Whenever you have a keyword that matches someone’s search query, you’re advertisement will be displayed. So the more keywords you have, the better the chances are that someone’s going to see your advertisement. This is why it’s important to have keyword lists, which is basically a list of many keywords.

Text Advertisement Text advertisements are pretty self explanatory. They are the advertisements you use on Pay Per Click search engines. Of course, text advertisements are only text, which means you can only use text (if you want your ad to be viewable to everyone, Google allows image ads but they won’t be displayed to everyone).

AdGroup An AdGroup is where you store your keyword lists and text advertisements in your Google account. Your keyword lists can contain a maximum of 2,000 keywords and you should have at least two to four different text advertisements in each AdGroup.

Campaign A campaign is where you store your AdGroups. If you’re selling computers, I would name my campaign “Computers” and I would name my AdGroups within that campaign names like “Dell”, “Apple”, “Gateway”, “HP”, etc. You also control your daily budget as well as what countries you advertise in from your Campaign settings.

Google Billing

If you live in the USA I recommend watching this video that explains the basics of Google Billing in the USA:

How AdWords Billing Works

Google will bill you for all the clicks you received once every thirty days. They may bill you sooner depending on your Google Credit Limit. This credit limit depends on your account’s history and the limit can be anywhere from $50 – $500 max. Although they say your credit limit can’t be more than $500, I have had a few charges above $2000. Also, unlike other pay per click search engines, Google will never bill you in advance. If you spend large amount of money every day, Google will usually charge you $500 multiple times.

Google also has a feature which will allow you to enter more than one credit card incase one of your credit cards cannot pay the bill for your advertisements. I would strongly recommend doing this, especially if you rarely check your Google Account(s).

AdWords Account Layout

Below is a picture/diagram that will help explain your AdWords account layout.

Basically, within an AdWords account there are campaigns that consist of AdGroups which contain keywords and text ads (your advertisements). It’s not too hard to grasp, but it’s much easier to understand when you see a diagram of it.

Google’s New Advertising Policy

As some of you are aware, Google changed their advertising algorithm in July August 2006. This change affected many advertisers and has caused several advertisers to drastically increase their bids or leave Google AdWords.

What happened?
Around July 12th, 2006 many advertisers noticed nearly all of their keywords were inactive for search in their campaigns. While normally (before the policy change) advertisers can raise their max bid $0.03 or so to re-activate their keywords, this was not the case anymore. Instead of seeing a note telling them to raise their bid a couple of cents, Google was telling them in order to activate this keyword they would need to set their keyword’s bid to $1.00, $5.00, and sometimes $10.00 per click.

Why the new policy change?
Most people who were negatively affected by the policy change say or think that Google changed AdWords just to make more money. This is not true. Google’s new change was intended to remove most of the undesirable paid search results from Google’s Search Network.

Changes Keep Coming
In the beginning of October 2008 Google changed their display and a little bit of their policy. What they did is instead of making keywords with “Low Quality” scores inactive for search, they keep the status as Active, but require you to raise the bid to get on the first page of search results. They also changed the way they display your quality score. Instead of displaying it as a required bid, they now show it as a fraction between 1/10 (poor) to 10/10 (perfect). Don’t worry if you’re not understanding any of this right now, because you will shortly. To make things easier, I’m going to refer to keywords which are of “Poor Quality” as either “Inactive” keywords or “Poor Quality” keywords. Because if your keywords are “Poor Quality” they are usually pretty much inactive within your account.

Things to Remember

Please remember these two things before you start your account. Although there are things that are more important, these things can severely hurt beginner advertisers.

Obey Google’s Rules

Google’s advertising policies are very strict. They will notify you via email and/or by a message in your account whenever there is something wrong with your account or your advertisements. If you do not fix what they notify you about, then you may become banned by Google. Don’t expect this to be a temporary ban either. If Google decides to ban your account they will not accept any of your payments from any credit card you enter. Each time you use a different credit card in a banned account, that credit card will also be declined by Google AdWords. If you ever use that credit card to pay for another AdWords bill, even if it is in an active account, that AdWords account will also become banned. If you ever do become banned, you will not be able to receive traffic to your advertisements, and you will need to call Google to get it fixed.

Don’t Ever Completely Change Your Target URL (Destination URL)

If you are a beginner, or even an expert with Google AdWords, you should know that occasionally the website you are advertising for will temporarily go down. The absolute worst thing you can do when this happens is to quickly change your Text Ad’s Destination URL to another website which sells a similar product.

Why shouldn’t you do this? Even though switching websites will prevent you from having to pause your Account, it will make your Quality Score go to 0.0. Basically, your quality score is what Google uses to decide what you pay for each keyword, it keeps your keyword(s) activated, it ranks your advertisements, and it determines how often your text ad is displayed in Google Searches. Your Quality Score in Google is similar to your Credit Score in real life. You want it to be as good as possible because it saves you money.

By changing your destination URL, this will reset your quality score, causing your traffic to go way way down. If you absolutely have to change the URL, I would recommend pausing the campaign you don’t want, and then create a new campaign. Then using Google’s AdWords Editor (I’ll talk about this later), copy all of your keywords to the new campaign you just created. It may take 5 minutes longer than changing your URL, but your Quality Score will be the exact same for your new Campaign as it would have been if you changed the URL in your old Campaign, PLUS your old text ad’s Quality Score will not be affected, so you can later unpause that campaign to receive the same amount as traffic as before. (I’m sorry if some of the terms in this paragraph were confusing to you. I realize that I haven’t talked about the Quality Score yet, but it is important that you know what not to do).

The only time(s) when you should change your Destination URL is when you have created a brand new campaign or AdGroup and you are testing new merchants and advertising new products.

3. Quality Score Introduction

What is the “Quality Score”?

First off, Google is all about accuracy and relevancy. Google wouldn’t be nearly as popular if it brought up inaccurate results. However, when Google started, AdWords ads did not have to be extremely relevant because after all, you were paying Google to display your text ads. But since 2006 Yahoo and Microsoft improved their search engines to bring up more accurate search results and Google saw this as a potential threat to losing long term searchers. So in order to out perform Yahoo and Microsoft, Google decided to dramatically increase the relevancy rules of AdWords advertisements and thus created the “Quality Score” system.

Basically, the Quality Score is a Google formula that determines the similarity of your advertisement towards the web surfers search query. If your advertisement is completely different from the web surfer’s search query, you will be given a “Poor” quality score and you will be required to pay more money to have your advertisement displayed. But, if your advertisement is extremely relevant and similar to the web surfer’s search query, you will a have “Great” quality score and you will be able to pay much less money to have your advertisement displayed.

Benefits of Quality Score AdWords ranking system:

Although the Quality Score system may sound like a pain, it does have its advantages. Here are some of the advantages the Quality Score system has for you.

• 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 very expensive. 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 with Google.

Don’t worry though, because I will explain exactly what to do so you can avoid any trouble with the Quality Score.

How to Get A High Quality Score

There are several things that Google looks at to determine the quality score. Since this is an introduction to the Quality Score I will describe the main basic things that affect your quality score. I will explain the quality score in much more detail later in the guide.

What helps your quality score

• Having your advertisement as similar to the search query as possible
• Making sure the website you’re advertising is similar to the search query as well as the text advertisement you created

What hurts your Quality Score

Most of the following sites are considered undesirable webpages that will hurt your Quality Score:

• Websites that contain a lot of AdSense advertisements (if you don’t know what these are, they are text ads that say “Ads by Google” on websites).
• Websites whose main purpose was to collect email addresses
• Websites that are filled with advertisements
• Websites with unclear purposes
• Confusing websites
• Inaccurate websites

The following can also hurt your Quality Score:

• Creating advertisements that are not related to the search results
• Using keywords that don’t describe the website or product you’re advertising

Now that you know the basics about the quality score, it’s time for you to move on and start making money!

How to View Your Quality Score

You can view your quality score by logging into your AdWords account, going to an AdGroup, clicking on the “Keywords” tab and add it as a new column by doing the following:

1. Click on the “Filter and Views” button near the top right of the page
2. Select “Customize Columns”
3. Check “Quality Score”

How to Find the Perfect Website to Promote

This is probably the most common question I get from people purchasing Google Money Pro, so I am going to go over this section very thoroughly.

Don’t worry, there are certain things that all good and profitable websites have, so if a website meets the criteria then there is a good chance it will be profitable. The more problems you find with the website, the higher the chances are that the website will be unprofitable, so below I will tell you exactly what to do to find a profitable website. Don’t forget, we are not choosing a website just yet. Right now I’m going over a list of things you should look for in websites you’re thinking about promoting.

I recommend watching the following video that shows how I find profitable websites to promote.

Filter 1 – Ignore the Impossible Websites

You might be wondering what an impossible website is and how to ignore it. Well an impossible website is a website that is nearly impossible to make money online with (well make money by advertising on Google AdWords). Here is a list of the impossible websites that you should not promote:

• Paid Survey Paid survey websites are way too popular with other affiliates, they have very high refund rates, and they are usually region specific (meaning they only sell well in certain countries).
• Download Unlimited Music, Games, Videos, Movies These websites offer a one time fee or a subscription fee so people can download unlimited songs, movies, software, videos, games, etc. These websites are illegal (well, they are using loopholes to avoid being 100% illegal), but they are illegal enough that Google will not let anyone advertise for these websites.
• Auction Websites This includes websites that mention government auctions, seized auctions, or car auctions. These websites are hard to advertise for and don’t usually convert very well.
• Dieting Websites Dieting websites are very over advertised and have too much competition, which means that your advertising costs will be very high. These websites also have higher refund rates.

Besides the websites above you should also avoid promoting very popular websites. Why should you do this? One simple reason. You’re a beginner at this and the more popular the website/product you promote the more advertising competition you’re going to have to compete against. Some of the advertiser’s who promote popular products are very serious about what they do and have years of experience and unlimited advertising budgets. And while Google Money Pro will get you to their level, it’s best not to start off competing directly against the big dogs.

So what type of websites should you go for? This is the tricky part, because this is something you need to learn on your own. But I will tell you how to find the websites through the following filters. Don’t worry, because I know you need as much help as you can get, so I’ll give you examples below. It’s best if you start off small and work your way up. There are billions of people searching the internet every day so it will be close to mathematically impossible for you to find a product which receives near zero traffic. Still, you want to promote a product which receives enough traffic for you to get steady sales, but not so much traffic that you’ll have to compete against the big dogs (just yet).

Filter 2 – Avoid Poor Websites

Many people still lack faith in internet security and even the search engines look for certain things in websites (SPAM filters) which can affect your overall online success. That’s why you will want the website you’re promoting to have the best chance possible to look safe not only to the customer, but also to the search engines.

The following is a list of things that can possibly hurt your advertising success with Google and your sales rates with potential customers. You will want to avoid websites that do the following.

Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them AdSense advertisements look like the screenshot below this paragraph. Google doesn’t consider a website in AdWords high quality if it contains several AdSense advertisements. You should also avoid advertising for websites which display Yahoo’s advertisements. They look almost identical to Google’s, but say Yahoo instead.

Websites that are already being heavily advertised Don’t promote websites with tons of affiliates already promoting them. Chances are that these affiliates are already advertising on Google or have already tried to advertise on Google. This is easy to find in ClickBank because ClickBank tells you how many affiliates are currently selling products for the merchant by giving them a Gravity rating. If the word “Gravity” sounds familiar, it’s because I talked about it in the ClickBank signup section. I personally avoid advertising websites with a gravity higher than 30.

Websites with duplicate content on each page Don’t promote websites that have very few pages or have duplicate content on each page. This means websites that have links to other pages that instead of going to a different page, re-direct you to the same page you are on. For example, if you went to a website and clicked on the link to visit their Contact Info, but it instead took you to their home page. Also, try to find WebPages with more than just 1 page. Google will give the webpage a higher quality score if it has several pages.

Websites that force you to sign up for something This includes websites that force their visitors to give their email address before they can continue to another page. You can promote websites that ask the user to sign up for a mailing list, but don’t promote the websites that require it before continuing.

Websites without a Privacy Policy Google favors websites that have a Privacy Policy (or a Terms of Service). This link is usually near the bottom of the page and is a small text link. This isn’t too common for most WebPages, so if the webpage doesn’t have this, don’t worry too much. But you should still look for it and favor websites that contain it.

Websites that are confusing or tricky If the website is confusing to you, then don’t promote it. Make sure the website has clear information and contains an easy way for you to navigate the website. This can either be by a site map, or if the website is small enough it can have links to each of the pages at the bottom of every page. Try to avoid WebPages where the only way you can get to the previous page is to click the back button.

Websites that have pop-up windows You don’t want to promote websites that have popup windows. Google doesn’t allow people to advertise for websites that have popup windows. If it is a dynamic popup window, it’s okay. Dynamic popup windows kind of float around the webpage and if you minimize the webpage the popup window is also minimized.

Websites that you wouldn’t buy something from If you wouldn’t buy something from the website you’re promoting (for any reason other than you’re not interested in it) then you shouldn’t promote it.

Websites that have a low commission rate Commission is the amount of money you will get paid each time you sell a product for the website. If the commission rate is too low, it will be near impossible to make a good amount of money online. I don’t promote anything lower than 50% commission rate.

Other factors you want to avoid This includes misspelled words, pictures that don’t appear, websites contradicting themselves, etc. Also, try to avoid websites that rely very heavily on Flash presentations. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it because most affiliate pages don’t use heavy amounts of it.

Filter 3 – Find the Best Designed Websites

Soyou know what design issues can hurt a website’s profitability now you just need to know what features increase conversions and sales, as well as favor with the search engines.

Here’s what well built, highly profitable, websites all have in common:

Contact Us Page The webpage will need to have a contact us page. This isn’t just an email address at the bottom of the webpage. A contact us page is a page that has an actual email form that you can quickly use to contact the support. It’s also a bonus if the website offers a telephone number, fax number, or a mailing address, but don’t expect this because many websites don’t offer telephone numbers for privacy issues.

Website Security Everyone wants to be certain that they are not going to fall into an online scam or become a victim of identity theft. Websites that go out of their way to ensure online security sell a lot better than websites that don’t have certificates that display their protection. Please note that if you’re a website owner and you want one of these certificates, you can’t simply take a picture of it and display it on your website, these security images cost an upwards of $1,000 per year apiece. All websites with valid security certificates have a picture showing that their site is secure with a valid link that gives more information about their site’s security.

Money Back Guarantee Websites with money back guarantees sell many times better than websites that don’t offer money back guarantees. All ClickBank products have money back guarantee and ClickBank websites that don’t display this are missing out on a lot of sales.

Privacy Policy or Terms of Service This one isn’t required but it does help if the website you’re promoting contains a privacy policy or a terms of service page. Most visitors don’t read these, but it looks more professional if the site you’re advertising has one or both of these.

Filter 4 – Choosing the Profitable Website

This section will tell you how to find the absolute best website to promote online.

Now that you know what to look for in your websites it’s time to choose 4 websites that you are interested in promoting. I recommend you get a piece of paper and write down either the title or web address for each of the four websites you choose to promote.

Here’s what you should do step-by-step:

1. Choose a professional looking website.
2. On a piece of paper write down the website’s title or web address, the type of product they’re selling, and their current gravity level (if you’re on ClickBank).
3. Do this for 4 completely different websites (don’t choose four websites that sell the same type product either).

How to Choose 4 Websites in ClickBank

Browsing through and choosing 4 ClickBank websites to promote is very easy to do. (If you don’t know how to find the websites in ClickBank to promote Go to the previous section titled “Signing Up with ClickBank” and then read the article titled “How to Find A Website to Promote on ClickBank”) Here are the steps to follow:

1. Go to ClickBank’s Marketplace by going to their website or by clicking on the following link: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
2. Towards the bottom of the page you will see a box titled “List of Categories”. Inside that box are nine different categories that you can choose from. Select a category that interests you.
3. When you click on a category a page will load displaying the first 10 website results for that category. Each one of these results is a different product that you can promote and sell and make money with.
4. Open and look at all the different websites by clicking on the blue titles until you find one you want to promote.
5. When you find a website you want to promote, write down the information on the piece of paper and continue searching until you find another website.
6. Keep doing this until you have 4 different websites written down. Don’t forget to look in some of the other ClickBank categories.

How to Choose 4 Websites in PayDotCom

Below are the steps you need to follow to find 4 different websites to promote in PayDotCom:

1. Go to PayDotCom’s market place by going to their website or by clicking on the following link: http://paydotcom.com/marketplace.php
2. On their marketplace page you will see 10 different product categories. Click on a category that interests you.
3. Each category will display 10 different website results related to that category. Each result is a different website with a different product you can sell.
4. Open and look at the different websites by clicking on the blue “Visit Site” link beneath the website(s) description. Keep doing this until you find a website you would like to promote.
5. When you find a website you would like to promote, write down the information on a piece of paper and continue searching until you find another website.
6. Keep doing this until you have 4 different websites written down. Don’t forget to look in some of the other PayDotCom categories.

How to Choose 4 Websites in Commission Junction

Commission Junction is set up much differently than ClickBank and PayDotCom and they also have a much higher standard of accepted websites. Because of this it is much easier to browse the websites from Commission Junction and simply choose from there since most of their products are usually high traffic and good quality.

Filter 5 Choosing only Websites That Get Visitors

Now that you have the information recorded on a piece of paper you will want to narrow down the list to just one perfect website. First off, we are going to find out if the website will receive visitors or not, because let’s face ityou can find the best website in the world, but if no one is searching for it you’re not going to become a millionaire. You want something that is regularly searched because it will generate sales day after day.

There are two different ways that you can find the traffic levels for the website. The first way is the best, but I know that Google’s Keyword Tool sometimes isn’t always available to all countries, so if you can’t use the first way, use the second way.

The First way (the best way) Using Google’s Traffic Estimator

1. Go to Google’s Keyword Tool and type in the main theme for the first website’s product. For example, if the website sold Trout Fishing Tips, then you would search for “Trout Fishing”.

2. Look at the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column to see how much traffic Google receives on average per month.

The Second way Using WordTracker’s Keyword Tool (Skip this section if you’re using Google’s Keyword Tool to find traffic).

1. Go to WordTracker’s Keyword Tool and type in the main theme for the first website’s product. For example if the website sold guitar lessons then you should type in guitar lessons.
   
2. On the next page you will see a large list of words (keywords) similar to the word “Guitar Lesson”. You will see a number next to each word. This number is the estimated number of people who search using those words in a day. Find the keyword that has the highest number next to it and multiply that number by 30 (30 days) to get monthly performance information. Write this on the piece of paper next to the website you’re researching. For example at the time of writing this the keyword “Guitar Lessons” was searched 29,220 times. So I would write down 29,220 next to the website on my list that sold guitar lessons.
   
3. Now repeat this for all of the websites on your list until each website has a number next to it.

How to Finish Determining if the Website Receives Enough Traffic

When each website has a number next to it you will have a general idea of how popular the product is. Here’s a list of how to determine how popular your product is:

So you want to find a product that receives at least 8,500 searches per month, but not more than 150,000 searches a month.

Profitable Website Checklist

Many of you have requested a “Profitable Website Checklist” so you can see a quick summary of everything mentioned above. Try to choose a website with no more than three points missing from this list.

• Website is not a paid survey, music/movie/game download, seized auction, or dieting website.
• Website doesn’t have AdSense or Yahoo advertisements on it.
• Website has a gravity level of below 40 (if you’re advertising using your own website or review site, you can ignore this).
• Website doesn’t have duplicate content on each page
• Website doesn’t force you to sign up for something before continuing to the next page.
• Website has a privacy policy and/or terms of service.
• Website is clear and straight forward (not confusing).
• Website doesn’t have a popup window that opens outside of the website.
• You would feel safe purchasing a product from this website.
• You would purchase a product from this website based on its sales letter.
• Website has a commission rate of 50% or more (if it’s a digital product).
• Website has very few or no misspelled words, contradictions, and doesn’t rely heavily on Flash presentations.
• Website takes you back one page when you click on the “back button” and it closes immediately upon clicking on the “Close” button without any windows or automated chat sessions opening up.
• Website has a contact us page or an about us page.
• Website offers a money back guarantee.
• Website’s topic/product receives 12,500 150,000 searches per month.
• Website is Google Good

Here’s A Hint from Me

I have found time and time again that the best websites to start promoting (as a beginner and even as an expert) are websites that sell unique products that only a handful of people are interested in. These websites may not produce hundreds of sales every day, but they don’t have a lot of competition, they have high conversion rates, and they are inexpensive to advertise.

You’re probably wondering “what type of websites are these?”. These are websites that just sell one product (usually a guide or manual on how to do something) and only a handful of people would be interested in purchasing.

Here are some examples:

• How to bass fish
• How to build (anything)
• How to grow vegetables
• How to train your cat
• How to train your horse
• How to fix (anything)
• How to excel at a certain sport

I know some of those products may sound a bit weird, but you would be surprised at some of the unique products that sell like crazy.

Finally You’re Done Choosing A Website

I know these steps can be a huge pain to do, but one of the things most people have trouble with is finding a profitable website. If you do all of these steps you will easily increase your chances of finding a profitable website every single time by more than 50-80%.

If one of the websites you’ve chosen meets all the criteria above, then congratulations you have found a potential gold mine online. The only thing between you and wealth is getting people to see this website.

If two or more of the websites meet the criteria then you will need to choose one of the websites to advertise. Do not start off online by advertising two or more different websites at once. This is something you will do later on when you have more experience. So for now just choose one website.

If none of the websites you’ve found meets all of the criteria above, then don’t worry keep on searching. I would much rather spend 10-20 more minutes searching for websites then miss out on the chance of finding a website that could make me hundreds of dollars profit per day.

Question Asked: Should I focus on finding many products that generate a small amount of profit each, or only a small select range and then squeeze as much profits from these as possible?

First off, you should find one website that sells well. Then from there you should keep finding more and more websites that sell well until you have multiple sales coming in daily. I favor both the websites that generate small profits and the websites that generate large profits. Usually though people prefer fewer websites with larger profits. This way there is less hassle and upkeep of your Google Accounts, but websites with smaller profits sell faster. So in the end they are about the same.

Your Affiliate URL

Introduction

Now that you’ve chosen the website you’re going to advertise, it’s time to get your affiliate URL for the website so you can get credit for the sales you’ll make.

Getting Your Affiliate URL with ClickBank

Once you find a company you want to promote, all you have left to do is to click on the link that says “Create Hoplink” (number 9 above).

You will see a window open that looks like the picture below. Simply enter your ClickBank nickname (I used my nickname “stevenhold” below) in the appropriate text box and click on the “Submit” button. Don’t worry about entering anything in the Tracking ID box.

After you click on the “Submit” button you will be taken to a page that looks like the following picture.

The web address with the red rectangle around it is the address you will use to advertise with, this is called your affiliate hoplink. You will want to save this address. You can do this by highlighting it with your mouse and by hitting Ctrl+C (control & C keys on your keyboard). Then you can paste it into Notepad or any other text program in your computer by hitting Ctrl+V. Or you can just write it down on a piece of paper. I would recommend testing your affiliate hoplink by typing it into your web browser. Make sure that it goes to the right webpage you’re wanting to advertise.

Now that you have the company you want to advertise for, and you have the web URL to advertise with (this is your Affiliate Hoplink), the next steps are to create a keyword list and advertise it on Google AdWords. Sounds easy right? Well let me put it this wayit is extremely easy to dothe wrong way. But if you do it the right way, you will highly profit off of each and every webpage you promote.

The rest of this guide explains how to perfectly advertise the company/website you’re promoting and will show you how to display that advertisement to millions (millions not thousands) of people every day. If you follow this guide correctly and don’t skip over sections, you will be able use Google to your advantage, which will allow you to make an absolute fortune online.

Getting Your Affiliate URL with PayDotCom

Getting your affiliate URL for PayDotCom products is very similar to getting your affiliate URL with ClickBank. Here’s what to do:

Step 1) Go to the PayDotCom product marketplace and find the website you chose to promote.

Step 2) Click on the “Promote” link for the website you’re planning to promote. (you will need to be logged into your PayDotCom account).

Step 3) You will then be re-directed to the merchant’s promotional page. On this page you will see various ways to promote the product, but most importantly you will see your affiliate link. Copy this link and either paste it into notepad or write it down, because you will need to be able to access it again. Don’t forget to test this link by putting it into your web browser and making sure it goes to the right website/product.

Getting Your Affiliate URL with Commission Junction

Before I tell you how to get an affiliate URL with Commission Junction, you should know that they prefer people to advertise their merchant’s websites through a personal website by using text links, banner ads, and pop-up windows. But, some merchants offer “Keyword Links” which are promotional links to use in Search Engine Marketing. I’ve had people email me saying that “Commission Junction” said they don’t give links for advertising on search engines such as Google AdWords, I don’t know why they would say this since they offer links to do this.

Step 1) First off, you will need to activate Search Engine Marketing (search engine advertising) in your Commission Junction account. To do this, login to your Commission Junction account and click on the “Account” button and then click on “Web site Settings”.

Step 2) Then click on the “Edit” button in the Account Settings section of the page you’re currently on. When you click on the button, a window will pop-up. In this window select “Search Engine Marketing” and click on the “Save” button.

Now that you have Search Engine Marketing enabled within your Commission Junction account, you just need to find a website and start advertising it. Here’s how to do this:

Step 1) Click on the “General Categories” button or the “Advertiser List” button in the “Get Links” section of your Commission Junction account. Once there, click on the “Additional Search Options” beneath the search tool and in the “Link Type” drop-down menu, select “Keyword Link”. When you’ve finished this click on the “Find” button (don’t worry, you don’t need to enter any text into the search bar). After you click “Find”, Commission Junction will display all of the websites that allow “Keyword Links” or advertising on search engines.

Step 2) After you click on the “Find” button, Commission Junction will display all of the websites that support search engine advertising (Keyword Links). Once you find a website you want to promote, click on the “View Links” button and look through their links until you see “Keyword Link”. When you see the “Keyword Link” section, click on it and will tell you about their keyword rules. To get your affiliate link (the website address you’re going to advertise with) click on the “Get HTML” button. The page will change and at the bottom of the page you will see a section titled “Code” this is your Affiliate URL / Destination URL. You will use this to advertise with.

*Note: You must be accepted by the merchant before you can advertise their products. Most merchants on CJ automatically accept everyone, others review you before they accept. You must be accepted or have a relationship with the merchant before you can advertise with them.

Affiliate URL Destination & Display URL’s

When you create a text advertisement there are two different types of URL’s, and they are a Destination URL and a Display URL.

In Google the display URL must be the domain for the display URL. If this confuses you, think of it this way. The domain is the address that your destination URL takes you to. So if your destination URL is www.1293skdfljwe9sf.com, but the page you end up on is www.reviewsolution.com, your display URL will be www.reviewsolution.com. Sometimes your destination URL looks completely different from your Display URL, and that’s perfectly normal. Just make sure that your display URL is the exact same as or a shortened version of the website address your destination URL takes you to.

4. Getting Keywords

Finally, you’ve got a website to advertise with. This next section is equally as important because you’re going to find keywords to advertise your website.

Introduction

A 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 relevant 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”. But 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 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 to find new tips and already have a campaign created, go to the paragraph titled “Now You Have Your Campaign Created”.

Creating Your Keyword List

Now it’s time to focus on creating your keyword list. Before you do this, make sure you have the following:

• The website chosen that you’re going to advertise with
• The main website address (URL) of the website you’ve chosen (not your destination URL/affiliate address).

Below are the steps to creating a huge and relevant keyword list for your advertisement.

*Note I will be creating a keyword list for GoogleMoneyPro.com in the examples below.

Step 1) Go to Google’s Keyword Tool by clicking on the following link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Once there, select the “Website Content” option.

Enter the website address for the product you’ve chosen into the text area and click on the “Get Keyword Ideas” button.

Step 2) Grouping Your Keywords Together

Grouping keywords together isn’t just important for Google, it also helps increase click through rates and conversions. Each keyword group will eventually become its own AdGroup, this way you can have very specific text ads (I explain this more later). In this section I am going to show you how to create your keyword list and group you keyword together at the same time (this will make it much easier and quicker than doing both individually).

After you click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button Google will search the webpage to find the keywords which are the most related to that website. The page will change and will list several columns of keywords when Google is finished searching the website

If you look near the top of the results you will see something that says “Showing keywords grouped by these terms:”. In my particular search, the following keyword groups were shown:

Google may show more or less keyword Groups for your webpage, so don’t worry if your results look different from mine.

Look at each of the keyword groups that Google has created for your keywords. You should make a mental note about the most relevant keyword groups because these will be your first AdGroups. Remember, the most relevant keyword groups are the ones that best describe the product you’re going to sell. It’s not necessary to look at all of the keywords within the keyword groups, all you need to look at are the names of the keyword groups as these will be descriptive enough.

So go ahead and decide which keyword group is the most relevant for the website you’re advertising. For GoogleMoneyPro.com, the most relevant keyword group would be “adword” which has 27 keywords.

The keyword group you have just chosen will shortly become your first AdGroup.

Step 3) Now scroll down and look at all of the keywords within the keyword group you’ve just chosen as the most relevant.

Look through the list of keywords and click on the blue “Add” link next to each keyword that you feel accurately describes the website or product. Try not to add any keywords that aren’t relevant to the website. You will notice that each time you click on the “Add” link, Google will add the keyword to the keyword list on the right side of the page.

Step 4) After you’ve added all the relevant keywords to your keyword list, it’s time for you to download the keyword list to your computer.

To do this, simply click on the “text” link at the bottom of your keyword list where it says “Download these keywords”.

If you want, you can also download your keyword in .CSV format. Be sure to remember where you saved your keyword list.

The Next Step with Your Keyword List

Ok, you’ve probably noticed that your keyword list is no where near 40,000+ keywords. In fact, your keyword list right now is probably anywhere from 3 100 keywords. So how do you get all the rest of the keywords? I will get to that later in this guide, because you are doing a more important thing right now.

Since your account with Google is brand new, you don’t have an advertising history with them. If you had an advertising history with Google they would know whether or not you are a good advertiser or a bad advertiser. The way Google determines this is by looking at your account performance record. If you have relevant keywords, great text ads, and good account organization then you will have a good account history with Google. Likewise, if you have poor keyword lists, bad text ads, and horrible organization Google will view your account as poor.

So what’s the difference between Good account history and Poor account history?
One of the ways Google determines your minimum bid (Quality Score) for your keywords is by looking at the other advertisements for that same keyword. If the keyword has no other advertisers, Google has no data to use to determine an accurate Quality Score for you for that keyword. So Google will rely on your account history to help them determine your minimum bid for that keyword. If you have a good account history Google will assume that you will do a good job advertising the new keywords, and will give you a good quality score for those keywords with a low minimum bid. On the other hand, if you have a bad account history, Google will assume you will do a bad job advertising the keywords and will give them poor quality scores with high minimum bids.

By starting off with a small, relevant keyword list you will begin your Google Advertising on the right foot and will quickly develop a great advertising history with them. This means that later when you add the rest of your keywords that may not be as relevant to your website, Google will give them a low minimum bid and a great quality score based on your account history.

Creating A Keyword Targeted AdWords Campaign

Now that you have the website you want to advertise and the first group of keywords you’re going to use, it’s time to start advertising the website and making money. But before you start a campaign, please read over the following things which are very important for you to know.

General Info

Keyword targeted advertising is the most common type of advertising with Google AdWords. This is the type of advertising you see most often on Google, it is what most people think of when they hear about AdWords. When you are searching Google, the AdWords advertisements are displayed on the top and/or right of each Google search page.

Setting up a new Keyword-Targeted Campaign

Here are the Step by Step instructions on how to create the perfect Google AdWords Campaign. If you already have a campaign running, I suggest you read over this, because you will find things you will want to improve. If you are thinking about starting a new campaign, simply read over these steps as you create your campaign because these steps are in chronological order and will significantly help you. If you set up the dummy campaign, I would recommend starting a new campaign from scratch (just keep your dummy campaigned paused for now).

Starting Off

First you will need to login to your Google account and to create a new keyword campaign, click the button “New Campaign”.

Naming Your Campaign

You will be prompted to name your campaign. Your campaign name is what will be displayed on the first screen when you log into your Google AdWords account.

You will most likely have several campaigns. When you name your campaign you will want to make sure it is a unique name that will let you know exactly what you are advertising in that campaign. I do not recommend advertising for several different products within one campaign. If you plan to advertise for two different products or websites, make two different campaigns; one campaign for each product/website. If I were advertising for G Money Pro I would name my campaign “G Money Pro” or “GMoneyPro.com”.

Selecting Your Audience

Now you will need to select your Audience (select the locations where you want your ad to be shown). I recommend selecting “Country” and advertising in the countries and regions where people will be interested in purchasing the product you’re promoting.

When you are deciding where to advertise your product, remember that if it’s only available in certain countries (like Paid Surveys, Seized Auctions, Sports Guides, etc.) you should only advertise in the countries where it’s available. Otherwise you’re wasting your advertising budget.

Don’t ever advertise any product world-wide or in any countries that don’t speak the same language the webpage is written in. If you do this you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

In my opinion the best countries to choose for advertising English advertisements and products are in the following list. Remember, you don’t have to choose these countries. These are the countries I’ve had the most success with.

Australia Bahamas Bermuda Canada

Guam Ireland New Zealand Singapore

South Africa United Kingdom United States United States Minor Outlaying Islands

Zimbabwe Virgin Islands (US) Virgin Islands (British)

Choosing Your Advertising Language

This is where you will choose the language your advertisements are going to be written in. This is also the language your advertisements will be displayed in.

I recommend watching the following video from Google that gives you more information about choosing your advertising language and locations:

Networks, Devices, and Extensions

I recommend selecting “All available sites and devices”. This way your advertisements will be shown to everyone. If you want to prevent people from viewing your advertisements with cell phones or iPhones, you can set that option here.

Bidding and Budget

In this section I recommend selecting “Manual Bidding for Clicks” and set and amount anywhere from $8-$10 for your daily budget.

Remember you can change all of these settings later. After you’ve made these changes, click on the button titled “Save and Continue”. The page will load and will show you the new campaign you created and it will contain zero AdGroups.

Adding Your AdGroup

To add a new AdGroup to your campaign, click on the “New Ad Group” button. When the page loads you will need to name your AdGroup. Name your first AdGroup the same name as the keyword group you chose to use (for example, I would name my first AdGroup “AdWord” because that was the most relevant keyword group Google’s keyword tool generated).

Remember, you will have several different AdGroups within one Campaign, so name it something that will help you know exactly what keywords are in that AdGroup (don’t name it something like “AdGroup 1″, “AdGroup 2″, etc). Proper naming will help make your advertising within that campaign even more organized. For example, if I was about to generate a list of keywords for dog training, I would name my AdGroup “Dog Training”.

Writing Text Advertisements

Introduction

Now you should be to the point where you will need to create your text advertisement for the website you’re going to be advertising on Google.

I recommend watching the following video by Google which explains text advertisements:

Terms

There are 4 different parts to a text advertisement:

Title/Headline The title is the first line of the text advertisement. Its job is to attract attention to the text advertisement so the web surfer will read the rest of the text ad.

Description The description is the second and third line of the text advertisement. The description’s job is to convince the user to click on your text advertisement in order to visit the webpage you’re advertising.

Display URL The display URL is the fourth line of the text advertisement. This is the web address that the visitors will see when they look at your text ad. You don’t want this web address to look strange (don’t use weird numbers or letters in your web address), instead you want it to look easy to remember and short. If you were an affiliate for Google Money Pro, then you would make your display URL www.GoogleMoneyPro.com. Your visitors will not be going to the Display URL address, so don’t enter your affiliate hoplink here. Instead enter the main address of the website you’re advertising.

Destination URL The destination URL is the web address that the web surfer will go to when they click on your text advertisement. The destination URL will not be visible by the web surfer so it can be long and contain weird letters and numbers. The destination URL is where you will enter your affiliate hoplink.

Relevancy

Just like with every other part of Google, relevancy is extremely important with text ads. Basically, Google just wants your text ad to be similar to the website you’re promoting as well as the keywords you’re using. If you follow the instructions in the articles below, you will have no trouble with this at all. You may want to read through all of the articles below before you actually write your first text advertisement. This way you will have a clear understanding of what to do and what to expect.

Do’s and Don’ts with Text Advertisements

Successful Text Ads do the following:

1. They get to the point with the title. They quickly tell what the product does.
2. They attract attention.
3. The text ad description assures the user that the product will do what they want it to. They answer the most common questions to convince the web surfer to click on your ad.
4. They are clear, well written, specific, and compelling.

Things You Should Know:

1. You are not required to have “http:” or “www” in your display URL.
2. Google will not let you capitalize all the letters in all your words, but they will let you capitalize the first letter of every word.
3. The website must not require additional software to load (example: your landing page cannot be a .PDF).
4. Back button must be able to go back from your destination URL to Google with one click.
5. You can’t have websites that mirror other websites that are advertised for the same keyword (example: having the same pictures and text but using a different web address).
6. The website you are advertising cannot have a pop up or pop under ad (unless it’s a dynamic ad, which means it hovers over the webpage and when you close the webpage the ad disappears).

Some Do’s and Don’ts for Text Advertisements.

1. Don’t insult the web surfer. No one is going to click on your advertisement if it makes them angry.
2. Don’t give away too much information. For example if you are selling Printers for $40 and your competition is selling Printers for $35, do not mention your price in your ad.
3. Use exclamation points carefully, Google only allows you to use one, so if you use one make it count.
4. Don’t mention things twice in your Ad. You have limited space and you will want to use as much of it as you can.
5. Don’t use a business name or webpage name in the Ad, unless it is well known with the subject and will help to increase your Click Through Rate.

Some Things You Should Do:

1. Do whatever it takes to make the web surfer interested in your advertisement, unless it is one of the things I mentioned NOT to do.
2. Capitalize the first letter of each word in your text ad’s Title (except for articles and prepositions) and capitalize the first letter of important words in your text ad’s Description.
3. Look at the other advertiser’s ads on Google who are selling the same product as you. See which advertisements you would most likely click on and try to reproduce the parts of their Ad that you like.
4. Ask the web surfer a question, tell them what you have, do whatever it takes to get their attention.
5. You will want to have “Call to Action Phrases”. These are phrases which make the user want to click on your ad. Example: “Try Our Online Program Today”.
6. You will always want your ad to be clear, well written, specific, and compelling.
7. Use as much text space as possible. You don’t want your advertisement to look empty.
8. Google limits the amount of space in your text ad, but you can add more space by adding short abbreviations for your words like “&”, “w/”, “w/o”, “+”, “-”, etc.

Writing Your Title/Headline Your title should attract attention from the other ads to your ad. One of the best ways to do this is to include keywords in your title.

Why would including a keyword in your title attract attention to your text ad? Because Google bolds any keywords in your text advertisement. You may be thinking, I’m sure my keyword list will contain tons of different keywordshow can I possibly get all of those keywords to fit into my title? Well here’s the answeryou don’t need to contain every single keyword in your title, you just need your title to contain the main word or phrase that every keyword in your list contains.

It’s a good thing that you grouped your keywords together with Google, because since all your keywords in each keyword group contain the same words you’re just going to need to put the most common words that appear in all of your keywords in your text ad’s title.

Look at some of the keyword groups Google recommends for one of my websites. If I were to look at all of the keywords in the group titled “money maker” I would notice that every single keyword contains the words “money” and “maker” in it. This means that if I were to add the words “money maker” into my text ad’s title, the phrase “money maker” will always be bold when my Advertisement is seen on Google. This is because every keyword in my AdGroup has the words money maker in it.

So what should you do? You should add this word (or words) somewhere in the title of your text ad. Most of the time this word is the same as the title of the keyword group Google created.

So for my “Money Maker” AdGroup I will want to use the words “Money Maker” in the title of my text ad so Google will bold those words which will attract more attention to my advertisement.

So here’s what my title will look like:

Online Money Maker Job

Now I just need to know what words to include in my description. Since my title talks about a job that makes money and is online, I will need to include more information about this so people will click on my advertisement. If I don’t address or give more information than the title, then my ad will appear uninteresting. So here’s what my title and description will look like:

Notice how I talk about making money online without using the same words as the title. This will seem more attractive to the web surfer because it will not seem repetitive. Also look at how I added the words “Limited Time”. This let’s the web surfer know that this may be the only time they will see this advertisement and they should click on this ad to view the offer before it expires.

Understanding the Click Through Rate

One important thing you will read and hear about a lot is your ad’s Click Through Rate (also called CTR). Your CTR is basically the number of people who click on your ad out of 100. So if 100 people see your advertisement (this is called 100 impressions) and two people click on your ad your CTR will be 2%.

Text Ads with a high CTR will increase your Quality Score. I will talk about your Quality Score later, but basically it is the formula Google uses which determines your keyword’s minimum bid and your text advertisement’s position/rank in the search results. So basically a high CTR will increase your overall position. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be very difficult to increase your CTR.

Remember, your Content Network CTR doesn’t affect your Search Network CTR. To view your Search Network CTR go to the AdGroup and click on the “Keyword Tab”. To view your Content Network CTR, go to the AdGroup and click on the “Summary” tab.

Basic Techniques That Help Boost CTR:

• Start your ad’s title with words like “How to” or “Here’s”. Example: “How to Sell Your House” or “Here’s Discount Laptops”. If you try hard enough you can start any title this way.
• If possible, try to start your title with a verb to help make a statement. Example: “Download Unlimited Music” instead of “Unlimited Music Downloads”.
• Ask a question in your title. Example: “Does Your Dog Disobey You?”
• Increase your ad’s position by raising your Max CPC
• Include keywords in your Advertisements title or description
• Always test new text ads to help find which advertisements generate the highest CTR.

Now that you know about Click Through Rates, you should get some basic information on how to create an overall very effective text advertisement.

How to Attract Attention

Here are some examples of text advertisements which will most likely get a majority of the attention from web surfers.

Here are some examples of my real life Text Advertisements:

Notice that all of the text advertisements have the first letter of almost every word in the title capitalized to attract more attention to the text ad. These text ads are nearly two years old, but today these text ads would also have the first letter of almost every word in the description capitalized.

After you finish writing your ads you will want to make sure that Google automatically optimizes your text ads so the ads with the highest CTR receive the most impressions.

In case you haven’t already done this (I mentioned how to do it earlier in the guide), you can do it now by going into your Campaign, clicking the “Settings” tab and in the Advanced Settings section, turn Ad Delivery: Ad Rotation to “Optimize: Show Better Performing Ads More Often”.

You may hear that having this option checked can hurt your overall CTR. The reason being that since your advertisements are each displayed equally at first, there is a chance that an advertisement which usually performs poorly can receive a random click. If this is the case then Google will think that advertisement is performing better than the other ad’s, and Google will display that ad more often. Even though this may be true in some cases, it doesn’t usually happen. In my experience Google has done a very good job in determining which advertisement to show the most.

Unless you are strictly testing two separate advertisements against each other and you want to run each ad exactly 50% of the time, then I would recommend having the “Automatically optimize ad serving for my ads” checked.

You will need at least 2-3 different text-advertisements per AdGroup, make sure that they are each different. After three days (it may need to be more or less time depending on the amount of traffic you are receiving) compare your results between the text ads and delete the poor performing ones and replace them with newer text advertisements. Keep doing this until you are satisfied with your CTR results.

Making Text Ads More Profitable

Most of the time people think that you can just create an AdGroup and check on it one or two times to see if it’s profitable or not. If it’s profitable people leave it and don’t mess with it, and if it’s not profitable people will either pause it or delete it. In this section you will learn how to make all of your AdGroups more profitable, even if they are already profitable or far from being profitable by just adjusting a few settings in your campaign.

Before you can start to use and implement these techniques you will need to have conversion tracking enabled and working in your Google AdWords account. If you don’t have conversion tracking enabled you will just be adjusting these settings in your AdGroups at random because you will not know which AdGroups need it or not and there would be a good chance that you could be editing a profitable AdGroup making it less profitable. So before you continue, make sure you have conversion tracking enabled and working in your AdWords account.

Little Tricks of the Trade

Of course you can’t be an online advertiser for as long as I have been without learning tricks and techniques that allow you to make any AdGroup, Campaign, or Account profitableso here they are:

Adding Certain Words in Your Text Advertisements:

As you should and probably know by now, the words in your text advertisements are very important. They can cause your Ad’s CTR to drastically increase or decrease, they can increase your sales or refunds, and they can even cause your account to get banned by Google.

If you have the right words in your text advertisement they can make your ad extremely profitableand of course this is what I’m going to show you how to do.

Making All Text Ads More Profitable

Let’s face it, the reason text ads are unprofitable is because you’re spending too much money in advertising to get a sale. The only way you can spend too much in advertising is either because your keywords bids are too high (we talked about this earlier) or because you’re receiving too much traffic that’s not buying your product.

There are two types of people who click on text advertisements in Google. One type are those who are looking to buy something and the other type are those who are just browsing or want to get something for free. You only want the first type of people to click on your text ads, which are the people who are looking to buy something. So how do you only get people who want to buy your product to click on your text ads?

Here’s what you can do:

1. Remove all words in your text ad that cause people to click on it. These words include: Download, Free, Warning, Try, Sale, Wholesale, etc. Using these words will cause a lot more people to click on your text advertisement who are not looking to buy your product.
2. Don’t use Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
3. If your text advertisement is just a little unprofitable then add words like: Buy, Order, Purchase, etc. These words tell people that they are not going to get anything for free and it will cause less people to click on your advertisement who don’t plan to buy anything.
4. If your text advertisement is really unprofitable then you will need to add your price in the advertisement. Be sure to include your currency sign (in the US this is the $). Including the actual price in your advertisement will do two things. First, it will tell people not to expect to get any free information off of your page, so it will stop people from clicking your advertisement who don’t plan on buying anything. Second, it will stop people from clicking on your advertisement who want to see what your price is. This means that everyone who clicks on your advertisement will know you’re not giving away freebies and they know what your price is, so that means they are actually interested in purchasing your product.

What If Your Text Ad Has A Very Good Conversion Rate

If you’re lucky enough to have a text advertisement that is converting very well (I usually consider this over 2-3% conversion ratethat’s a sale for every 30-50 clicks), then I recommend you take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts.

This means you should try to get more traffic to your text advertisement.
Here’s What You Should Do:

1. Make sure all of your keywords are displaying on the first results page. The first results page is rankings 1.0 8.0. Don’t aim for the #1-3 positions, these are very expensive and don’t offer that much more traffic (In My Experience).

Be A Smart Advertiser

Here’s a QuestionWould you rather:

1. Sell $100,000 online each week and spend $89,392.83 in advertising
2. Sell $22,000 online each week and spend $10,192.96 in advertising

Becoming successful online isn’t about how much money you can sell each day, it’s about how much profit you can make. By the way, the correct answer to the question above was B. If you chose the letter A, you would make $10,607.17 profit each week, and if you chose the letter B you would make $11,807.04 each week. That’s a $50,000 per year difference.

That may have not been a difficult decision to make right now, but if you were having $100,000 deposited into your bank account every single week, just the thought of having that number dropped to $22,000 would worry you even if you knew you would make a little more profit.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Google also has an uncommon feature that may be useful for writing text ads. This feature is called “Dynamic Keyword” insertion. This is where you can put a piece of code into your text ad (either in the title or the description), and whenever someone types in a keyword, the keyword they entered would be displayed where that code is.

Here is the code:

{keyword: default title} Put this into your text advertisement to make the keyword the searcher types in appear in your ad in all lower case. The “default title” I have entered next to the code is what will be displayed if the web surfer’s keyword is too long to fit into the title.

If you want for the keyword to appear in all capitals then use the following code: {KeyWord: Default Title}.

Here is an example of this in action.

Lets say you are selling Cheese and you specify the following for your title to display “Free {KeyWord: Cheese}”

Web Surfers Search Phrase	Your New Title
swiss cheese	Free Swiss Cheese
Cheese coupons	Free Cheese Coupons
Cheese tastes good to me	Free Cheese

Sometimes people have a little bit of confusion with dynamic keywords. For example:

{KeyWord: example}

When you insert this into your advertisement, you do not change the “{KeyWord:” part at all. You keep it this way. The only part you change is the text which comes after the “{KeyWord:” part. This text is not the keyword you want to the dynamic setting to be applied to, because it will be applied to all of the settings in your AdGroup. Instead it is what will be displayed if the users search term is too long to fit into the title/description of your advertisement.

Don’t forget, you can put text before and after the brackets “{ }”.

Benefits

The best thing about Dynamic Keyword Insertion is that you will display the search phrase in your title, and if you can do this properly it can significantly help to increase your CTR. If done correctly you can achieve CTRs of 3% or higher.

It can also allow you to advertise for trademarked terms (sometimes Google doesn’t allow this). If you do use dynamic keyword insertion to get around some of Google’s policies or rules, then you may get in trouble by Google.

Here’s how to get around trademarked terms. One common trademarked term is the word “iPod”.

So let’s say you have the following dynamic keyword code: {Keyword:MP3 Music Sale} inside your title. Here’s how your title will appear if someone searches the following keywords:

Disadvantages

If the user enters a search phrase that is longer than your title, then the advantages of Dynamic Keyword Insertion is useless, because it will not apply.

Sometimes confusing results can appear, which deters potential customers from your webpages.

It’s rare to see dynamic keyword insertion receiving high CTRs on contextual advertising.

Unfortunately, these reasons are why I do not recommend using this. If you have a product which this will benefit you, then I suggest trying this technique. If you use this technique, I would recommend using it very carefully.

If you’re interested in learning more information about Dynamic Keyword Insertion then I recommend watching the following video:

When you have finished writing your Text Advertisement click the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page. Google will check your text advertisement to make sure it isn’t breaking any of their guidelines. If it does they will tell you before the next page and will tell you how to fix it. If your advertisement doesn’t break any guidelines, then you will go on to the next step.

How to Write Killer Text Ads

Text Ads are extremely important, as you probably already know. The goal of your text ad is to attract everyone who wants to purchase your product and repel anyone who is browsing around clicking on text ads to kill their boredom. This can be a little bit tricky because you’re essentially trying to use the same words to attract and repel different people.

So here’s what to do.

First off, I recommend including the price of the product you’re selling in your text ads as often as possible. This is the main way to keep uninterested people from clicking on your advertisement, because if they see it costs money they aren’t going to waste their time on it.

Now, you need to focus on getting as much attention from those interested in your product as possible. Here are some facts for you to know before we continue this section:

Fact 1) – On average 25% of the clicks on Google.com are the AdWords Advertisements, meaning the 75% of the remaining clicks go to Google’s organic search results.

Fact 2) The highest two ranking advertisements in Google’s searches receive the highest click through rates. It’s estimated that the first and second positions can receive 10% or more CTR, while the last position on the first page can receive as high as 3% CTR.

So using the information in the facts above you should know that a CTR from 3% – 10% on the first page of search results is very good and will boost your quality score. The best way to find an accurate representation of your CTR is to look at the past week/months history for that keyword. Google doesn’t just look at today’s CTR’s to determine your quality score (although more emphasis is put on the most current history). So if you have a keyword with a 100% CTR today only, it won’t help you much.

Just in case you were curious, here’s a “heat map” of a regular Google search. For those who don’t know, a “heat map” is a map showing where people look at the screen. The sections in red are where people look the most and the sections in light blue/purple are where people look the least.

Heat Map is from Marketing Sherpa

So now it’s time to get started writing killer text advertisements. I’m going to explain how to do this in a Step-by-Step fashion because that’s usually the easiest way to explain it and to understand it.

Step 1) Make sure you already have all the information you need. This includes the website you are going to advertise, the destination URL you’re going to use, and the keywords for your AdGroup. Once you have all of this information, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2) Check Out Your Competition Before you even start writing your text advertisement, you will need to take a look at the advertisers you will be competing against. I mean, you wouldn’t open a restaurant without looking at the other restaurants in the area would you?

To do this go the Google’s Ad Preview Tool by clicking on the link below. (Google’s Ad Preview Tool is great tool to use when searching for your own text advertisements. Searching for your own ads in Google can hurt your campaign’s performance because you’re adding impressions without any clicks. So to get around this, use the Ad Preview Tool. It allows you to search for your advertisements as much as you want and it won’t affect your or your advertiser’s accounts in any way.)

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Now that you’re at the Ad Preview Tool, go to the Google AdGroup you’re going to create the text ad(s) for. Each of your AdGroups should have a common keyword theme, so each of your keywords should be fairly similar. Start off by entering one of the keywords in the Google Ad Preview Tool and search for the results. When you’ve done this look at the text ads other advertisers are using. Make notes on the text ads that catch your attention.

Step 3) Beat Your Competition Ok, you’ve seen your competition. Now you just need to figure out what you need to do to beat them. This shouldn’t be too difficult since most online advertisers are novice at best with writing text ads. In the following examples I’m going to write a killer text ad for the keyword “dog barking”.

First off, you should know that whatever words the web surfer types into Google’s search bar is bolded in your text advertisement. So you want your text ad to have as many similar words as the web surfers search query as possible. You will want to take advantage of this as much as possible, without going overboard. Bolded words will draw attention to your advertisement. You should also know that Google will bold different versions of the same word. For example, if someone searched for “stop dog bark” here are the words that would be bolded in the text ad:

If you look at the example above, you should realize that the words “Stopping” and “Barking” will be bolded if the web surfer searches for “Bark” or “Stop”. “So, what’s the big deal” you might ask? Well, “stopping” is 4 characters longer than “stop”, which is four more bolded letters in your text ad.

What else can you get bolded in your text ad? Another thing 80% of all advertisers overlook is putting a keyword in your display URL. How do you do this? Well if the display URL is PetsMart.com, change it to PetsMart.com/barking. Google isn’t too picky on this, they just say “make sure the display URL is valid and goes to the same domain as the destination URL”. If you’re concerned about doing this, most websites will have a default error page, which means if a page doesn’t exist it will redirect the user to a live page of the website. As long as it doesn’t go to a 404 Error page, you’ll be okay.

Now that you know how to beat your competitors by having more bolded words in your text advertisement, it’s time to learn how to beat them at writing catchy, attractive, and unavoidable text ads.

The second best thing you can have to bolded words are attention getting words, phrases, and sentences.

Here’s a list of words that attract attention just by themselves. Use these words in any of your text ads and you will see an improvement in click through rates. The number at the top of each group of words is the number of characters in that word.

3		6		7		8		9		11
Big		Action		Amazing		Approved		Amazingly		Astonishing
new		Better		amazing		Colorful		Authentic		Fascinating
now		Direct		at last		Colossal		Beautiful		HighVoltage
Odd		Easily		Bargain		Complete		buy today		Immediately
YOU		Expert		Booming		Critical		Delivered		Informative
		Famous		Crammed		Discount		effective		Instructive
4		How-to		enhance		discover		Essential		Interesting
easy		Latest		Extreme		Discover		Excellent		littleknown
fact		Lowest		Fortune		Endorsed		Exclusive		Outstanding
fast		Proven		Genuine		Enhanced		Explosive		Sensational
free		Scarce		Helpful		Enormous		Ingenious		Spectacular
Free		secret		Highest		Exciting		instantly		Unsurpassed
Full		Secret		Immense		Gigantic		Practical		You need to
Gift		Secure		improve		Greatest		Profusely
Huge		Strong		Instant		Improved		Revealing		12
Love		Sturdy		Intense		In-Depth		Startling		breakthrough
Mega		Tested		Largest		Lavishly		Unlimited		Confidential
Rare		Tricks		Liberal		Lifetime		Wonderful		dramatically
sale		Unique		Limited		powerful				Electrifying
save		Urgent		lowcost		Powerful		10		Irresistible
tips		Useful		Mammoth		Reliable		Absolutely		Personalized
Warm		Wealth		Miracle		revealed		Affordable		Professional
				Popular		save 50%		Appetizing		Step-By-Step
5				Quality		Security		Attractive		Trailblazing
Bonus				Quickly		Selected		Guaranteed
cheap				Reduced		Shocking		Guaranteed		13
First				Secrets		Sizeable		Highprofit		Controversial
learn				Special		Superior		Incredible		Extraordinary
Lucky				Strange		Terrific		Innovative		free shipping
Magic				unknown				Invaluable		Noholdsbarred
Noted				unleash				Phenomenal		revolutionary
Novel				Unusual				Pioneering		special offer
Sense								Profitable		Super Tactics
Suave								Refundable		TimeSensitive
Weird								Remarkable		Unconditional
								Simplified		Unforgettable
								Successful
								Surprising		14
								Tremendous		Download today
								Unbeatable
								Undeniably		17
								Unparalleled		Proven Techniques

The above is my private list of words, I didn’t get them from anywhere else, so please don’t share them.

Extra Tips and Tricks Before you start writing killer text ads, here are a few extra tips and tricks you should know before writing your advertisements.

Tip 1) Telling your customer what to do. Sometimes text ads will tell the customers what to do, like they will say something like “you need this if”. A lot of times text ads that do this have a lower click through rate, but they usually receive a higher conversion rate.

Tip 2) Using unique characters can help. Ads that use characters that aren’t usually send on Google’s search results will get extra attention. Be careful not to overuse this tip because too many characters can be a bad thing. Here are some good characters to use: ” ” – ? & /

Tip 3) Google doesn’t mention this, but they favor AdGroups that have 3-4 different text ads running.

Tip 4) Try using a call to action phrase if you have enough space. A call to action phrase is something like “Download Now”, “Buy Today”, etc.

Tip 5) Be unbelievable. Make near unbelievable claims in your text ad (keep it legal and realistic) to attract major attention. For example, you could say “Make $5,000 In One Hour”.

Tip 6) Repetitive is not always good. Unless you’re wanting the bolded words, don’t repeat text. Look at the example below and decide which ad looks better:

The best thing to do to write awesome text ads every time is to practice creating a different text ad each time you make a new AdGroup. Don’t get lazy and use the same words and phrases over and over again in all your new AdGroups. Instead make each text ad completely different from every other text ad within that AdGroup (and don’t overuse the same ads within your campaign). If you do this you will quickly find what works.

Finishing Up

Remember, when creating your text advertisements you want to make sure that your affiliate URL is working and it is entered correctly in the destination URL of your advertisement. Even I’ve had times where I’ve accidentally entered the wrong destination URL in the advertisement.

After you’ve checked over your text advertisement and it’s the way you want it, click on the button to continue.

Entering Your Keywords

Now you will be at a page that asks you to enter the keywords you’re going to advertise with. This should be easy for you to do since you already have the keyword list you’re going to use saved on your computer. But before you copy and paste those keywords into your AdGroup you will need to learn about keyword match 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 99% of the time only be displayed 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 matchingit 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.

Wrapping Your Keywords

When you wrap your keywords (so each keyword is broad, phrase, and exact match) you’re not going to need to type out each keyword and add quotations and brackets around each keyword. Instead there is a much easier way by using 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.

Finally, Adding the Keywords to your AdGroup

When you’ve wrapped the keywords in your keyword list (remember negative keyword wrapping isn’t necessary) it’s time for you to add the keywords to your AdGroup. This is probably the easiest part, because all you need to do is highlight all the keywords, copy them, and then paste them into the keyword area in your AdGroup setup page.

Finishing the AdGroup Setup

When you’ve added the keywords to your account, you’re pretty much done with your AdGroup setup. All you have left to do is to set your advertising budget and then save your AdGroup.

Setting Your AdGroup Budget

After you’ve submitted your keywords, you will be at a page that asks you what your Max CPC is as well as your max daily advertising budget. I usually enter anywhere from $0.05 – $0.15 per click for my max keyword bid and I recommend starting off with a max daily advertising budget of $8-$10 per day. This way you don’t need to worry about spending more money than you’re making because the most amount of money a mistake can cost you is $10.

Make sure you enter your max CPC bid correctly. For example, in the USA we separate our dollars and cents by a period (ex $100.00), but sometimes other countries separate their dollars and cents by commas (ex 34,94). If you enter your currency incorrectly Google will remove it from your bid. So if you live in the USA and you accidentally enter a bid of $0,20 rather than $0.20, Google will remove the comma making your bid $20! This has actually happened to me once when I was multi-tasking and in three days a campaign I wanted to spend maybe $20-40 on ended up costing me $6,000. If this happens to you, contact Google immediately and they will issue you a credit. In my case they gave me back $3,000. But by setting a maximum daily advertising budget of $10 per day, you will avoid a simple mistake costing you as much money as it did me.

Creating Additional Text Ads

Hopefully your AdGroup setup went flawlessly and you now have low minimum bids for your keywords (low bids in my opinion are minimum bids $0.15 or less) and they are all active for search. If just a few of your keywords have low quality scores, either pause the keywords or delete them. I don’t want you to start raising bids on low quality keywords just yet because you don’t know if that will help or damage your account.

I know some of you may have hit a wall and more than a few (or all) of your keywords are now showing a low quality score. If this is you, don’t worry because I will tell you what to do. If your keywords have a low quality score go to the section titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”, this section is later in the guide so you may need to go to the table of contents to find it.

If your keyword quality scores are good then it’s time for you to create some more text ads for your AdGroup. To do this, just go to your AdGroup and click on the “Text Ads” tab. This will take you to a page where you can click on a link to “Create a new text advertisement”. I recommend having at least 3-4 different text advertisements in each of your AdGroups (I usually have one text advertisement that uses dynamic keyword insertion), because this is what Google recommends. You should know how to create awesome text ads by now, if you need a little help, just review the section titled “How to write killer text ads”.

5. Increasing Your Advertising

Ok, so now you have an AdGroup that’s active and running but that’s all you have. So what do you do next?

Simple, now we are going to create more AdGroups to cover more keywords and get more traffic. This will bring you more visitors and more sales, resulting in more profits!

Getting More AdGroups

First off, to create more AdGroups you will need to actually create a new AdGroup. To do this, go to the campaign you’re advertising in and click on the link titled “Create new AdGroup”. This will take you down a familiar path where you should now easily be able to successfully create a new AdGroup.

Getting More Keywords

One of the things you will still need help with at this point is generating a larger keywords list and grouping your keywords. This way you can get more traffic to your advertisements. I will explain how to create additional keyword lists and how to easily group your keywords in the sections below.

Getting Started

Since you already have your campaign and AdGroup setup, we are going to use a much faster and easier approach to generate larger keywords lists and relevant keyword groups. To do this we are first going to create the keyword list and then we are going to group the keywords.

To generate the keyword lists, we are going to use a combination of “Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool” and “WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool”.

Google’s Keyword Tool / WordTracker’s Keyword Tool

There are two ways you can access Google’s Keyword Tool. The first way is by clicking or using the link below:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The second way is to login to your Google Account. Once inside your Google account click on the “Tools” link near the top of the page, then click on the “Keyword Tool” link. This keyword tool is excellent to use. Its one of the best keyword tools I have seen, and it is free. I would highly recommend this tool for everyone advertising with Google AdWords.

Step 1) Start off in Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool by entering the address of the website you’re promoting in the “Website Content” section of your AdWords keyword tool and search for related keywords.

Step 2) Google will now display a list of keywords that are relevant to the website you’ve entered.

Step 3) Once you’ve added all of the relevant keywords to the list, click on the “Descriptive Words or Phrases” option on the keyword tool.

Now, look at the first keyword in your keyword list on the right side of the page. Type this keyword into the text area in the “Descriptive words or phrases” section and click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button. Google will then search for additional keywords related to the keyword you’ve entered.

When the new keyword results appear, do as you did previously and add all of the relevant keywords to the same keyword list on the right side of the page by clicking on the blue “Add” link.

Step 4) When you’ve added all of the relevant keywords to your keyword list, look at the second keyword in the list and search for additional keyword related to this keyword. Remember not to search for two different keywords at the same time in the keyword research tool. Although Google allows doing this, it doesn’t give you as many keyword results.

Keep on searching and adding relevant keywords to your keyword list until you can’t find anymore keywords.

Note: After you search 20-40 different times using the keyword tool, Google will give you an error saying that an error has occurred and their engineers have been notified. This error means that Google has noticed you over-using the keyword tool and they aren’t going to allow you to use it for the next 10-15 minutes. Don’t worry, this happens to me all the time. If this happens, just download your keyword list to your computer (instructions this are found in the Keywords section of this site, step 4) and finish your keyword list in 20 minutes or so.

If this happens or if you run out of keywords to search for, it’s time for you to shift over to use WordTracker’s Keyword Tool. To use WordTracker’s keyword tool go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and on the main page, enter a keyword that describes the product you’re advertising. When the results appear write down all of the keywords that you feel are relevant and you haven’t already searched for on Google’s keyword tool. After you write down all of the keywords you feel are relevant, search for another keyword on WordTracker and do the same.

Step 5) After you’ve added keywords from WordTracker for 10-15 minutes, try Google’s keyword tool again. This time copy and paste the first keyword from the list you generated with WordTracker into Google’s Keyword Tool and find similar keywords. Once again continue adding all the keywords you’ve found to be relevant. Keep doing this until you’ve found all the keywords possible for the website you’re advertising.

Only Getting Traffic Generating Keywords

You don’t have to do this step, but it’s something I do every time. We need to make sure that you only add keywords that will generate traffic first. Why? Because your account is new, Google won’t have an advertising history for you. If you don’t have an advertising history, Google won’t know what to ask you to bid for keywords that receive very little traffic and these keywords may get low quality scores. But, by starting off with only advertising traffic generating keywords at first, and then adding the keywords that receive very little traffic, you will ensure that you will be getting the lowest cost per click and the best positions for those keywords possible.

Step 1) Go to Google’s traffic estimator tool by going to the following website address: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Step 2) Copy and paste all the keywords from your keyword list (if you have more than 1,000 Just copy and paste 1,000 at a time). Then select your available countries as “All Countries and Territories” and don’t enter a max daily budget. When you’ve done this click on the continue button.

Step 3) Google will now display all of the keywords that will generate traffic. Google will also display the keywords that will receive zero traffic. So to filter out the traffic generating keywords from the non-traffic generating keywords you will need to download/export the results to a file. In that file just copy and paste the keywords that generate traffic and save it in the same file as the keyword list you created with Google’s Keyword Tool, except name it something like “Keywords with Traffic”. Don’t expect all of the keywords in your keyword list to be traffic generating keywords. Usually 30% or less are.

After you’ve done this continue to the next step to group your traffic generating keywords. After you are successfully advertising the traffic generating keywords for a week or so, I would then add the non-traffic generating keywords to your account. This will help increase your traffic in the content network and possibly the search network.

Grouping Your Keywords

Now comes another important part. You will now need to sort your keyword list into smaller keyword lists by theme. This means if you were selling laptop computers you would put all of the “Dell” keywords into their own keyword list, all of the “Apple” keywords into their own keyword list, etc.

Don’t worry though because there is no way I would have you sort all of these keywords into smaller AdGroups yourself. That would take forever! Instead, you will use a free tool that Google offers called “AdWords Editor”.

Here’s what to do step by step:

Step 1) Download AdWords Editor (it’s free) by going to the following website: http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/. You can also find the download link within your AdWords account.

After you’ve downloaded AdWords Editor, install it on your computer.

Step 2) Open AdWords Editor and it will ask you to enter your account information for your AdWords account. After you enter your information, AdWords Editor will download your entire account so you can view it through the AdWords Editor software.

Step 3) Using the drop down menus at the top of AdWords Editor go to “Data > AdGroups > Add New AdGroup.

This will cause AdWords Editor to create a new AdGroup. Don’t worry, nothing you do in AdWords Editor effects your Google Account until you post the changes.

Name this new AdGroup DELETE because you will eventually delete this AdGroup (you will see why shortly).

Step 4) Now go to the DELETE AdGroup you just created (it should still be selected since you just named it) and click on the “Keywords” tab, because we are going to add your keyword list.

Once you’re at the “Keywords” tab click on the “Make Multiple Changes” button and select “Add/Update Multiple Keywords”.

A window will open up and in this window you will see a large blank area where you can insert the keywords. Now, open the file that contains the keyword list you created on Google and copy and paste all of the keywords from that file into the window that’s open in AdWords Editor. When you’ve done this, click on the “Next” button for AdWords Editor to review the keywords. After AdWords Editor has reviewed the keywords click on the “Finish” button to add the keywords to your account.

Step 5) When the keywords are added to your AdGroup, Go to the “Tools” menu and select “Keyword Grouper”, this will open the Keyword Grouper tool.

Before you click on the “Generate common terms” button to start grouping your keywords you will want to tell AdWords Editor to ignore certain common words. To do this enter the following words into the “Ignore these words” section of the keyword grouper:

After you’ve told AdWords editor to ignore these words, click on the “Generate common terms” button. This will display the AdGroup names that Google will group the keywords into. Then click on the “Next” button for AdWords Editor to sort the keywords into those AdGroups (note: AdWords Editor will create the AdGroups for you, you don’t have to create them).

Step 6) Now AdWords Editor will display the title of the AdGroups as well as the keywords within those AdGroups. Make sure that you don’t copy your text advertisements to each new AdGroup by checking “No, don’t create any text ads in the new ad groups”. When you’ve finished reviewing the changes, click on the “Finish” button for AdWords Editor to sort and group all the keywords within that AdGroup.

Removing Duplicate Keywords

Now that you have all the keywords you’ve added into AdWords Editor, you need to remove any duplicate keywords you may have. This is very easy to do, and all you have to do is to select the campaign you want to search for duplicate keywords by clicking it on the left side of AdWords Editor. Then simply go to the “Tools” menu and select “Find Duplicate Keywords”.

A window will pop-up and in this window select “Strict word order”, “In the same campaign” and “duplicates must have the same match type”. Then click on the “Find Duplicate Keywords” button.

Google will now display a list of the keywords within your account. If you look through the list you will see keywords highlighted in purple. These keywords are duplicate keywords and you should delete these from your account. You can delete them by selecting the keyword with your mouse and then click on the delete button.

Getting Keywords to Your AdWords Account

Since you’re more familiar with your AdWords account than AdWords Editor, it will be much easier to just copy the work that AdWords editor has done into your account. If you’re experienced with AdWords Editor or if you feel you can update your account with AdWords Editor feel free to do it that way.

Step 1) Decide which keyword group you’re going to make into an AdGroup first by looking through all of the keyword groups AdWords Editor has created. Remember to choose relevant keywords.

Step 2) In your Google account (not AdWords Editor) open the AdGroup you’re wanting to add keywords to or create the AdGroup you’re going to use.

Step 2) Create a text ad for the AdGroup, make sure it’s similar to the keywords you’re going to put in this AdGroup.

Step 3) Copy the keywords from AdWords Editor into your AdGroup. You can do this by selecting the keyword group in AdWords Editor, clicking on the keywords tab, and exporting the keywords to your computer by clicking “File -> Export to CSV -> Export Current View”. Then open the file AdWords Editor created and copy and paste the keywords into your account.

Step 4) Wrap the keywords you’ve selected to add into your new AdGroup.

Step 5) Finish and save your new AdGroup.

After you’ve finished and saved your new AdGroup you should add more text ads to the AdGroup you created. When you’ve finished adding text ads, you should add another AdGroup to your account. Keep doing this until you have several AdGroups in your account. I realize that this can take a while, so if you need a break, you can continue reading and pick up on adding more AdGroups to your account when you’re done with your break.

Campaign Management

If you ever need to go back and change some of the settings you’ve applied to your campaign, please read below.

Editing Your Campaign

You can always add or remove the countries you’re advertising in. If you ever do want to edit the countries you advertise in or any other campaign information, just do the following:

1. Go to the campaign you want to adjust the settings for.
2. Click on the “Settings” tab to go to the Campaign Settings page.
3. The edit campaign settings page will look something like this. Here you can re-name your campaign, change your daily budget, decide where you want your ads to be displayed, choose which language you want, and pick which countries/cities/etc. you want your ads to be displayed in.

Campaign Settings:

You will want the following settings to be applied to your account, so in the “Campaign Settings” page of your account do the following:

Delivery Method Make sure your delivery method is set to “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible.”

Ad Serving Make sure “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” is checked.

Now click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of your Campaign Settings page to save these changes.

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 has a low quality score and isn’t showing on the first search results page. 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, 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 where you need 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 you can fix this. The first is the easiest, and 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.

Campaign Settings

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.

In case 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.

Google’s Not Displaying My Ads on the 1st Page

Everyone has some keywords in their account that aren’t being displayed on the first results page (if they have several keywords). The biggest determining factor which makes Google decide not to display your keyword on the first results page is your Quality Score. If your Quality Score is low and your bid isn’t high, then that keyword will not display ads on the first results page on Google. When keywords are not being displayed on the first results page, they are still being displayed in the contextual network. This means that these keywords are still generating traffic in the Content Search. You should be careful with keywords with lower quality scores, because an AdGroup with a large amount of poor quality keywords can affect the performance of your high quality keywords.

Getting Clues

I’ve spent countless very frustrating hours researching poor quality keywords and I have finally gotten to the point where I can understand why a keyword is poor quality based on certain information.

First off, in order for me to be able to tell you why a keyword has a quality score you will need to know what Google is saying about that keyword by using the Ad Diagnostics tool. To do this, go to your AdGroup, click on the Keywords Tab, and then hold your mouse over the button of the magnifying glass next to your keywords. A window will pop-up displaying what the Ad Diagnostics tool says about that keyword. If you click on the “Details and Recommendations” link on the Ad Diagnostics window, it will take you to a page that gives you even more information about the keyword.

Decrypting Google’s Confusing Diagnostic Messages

Now I’m going to give you information that no other guide or source has online. I’m going to tell you exactly how to decode Google’s diagnostic messages to find out exactly why your keyword has a low quality score. Please note the keywords in the pictures I’m showing you below are from my accounts and they will differ from keywords in your accounts, I’m just using the messages Google’s giving me to determine the problem.

The Best Message

This message means your advertisement is being displayed and your quality score is the best it can be. You will receive the most amount of traffic possible.

The Second Best Message

This is the second best message you can receive. It means that everything looks good and is running ok. You will receive full traffic amounts.

Message 1)

This means you’re viewing the diagnostics for a keyword that’s not currently being displayed because of another similar keyword in your account. To view diagnostics, click on the keyword in the account it’s telling you to choose, in this example the keyword was [adwords keyword tools].

Message 2)

This message means your bid is too low for your advertisement to be displayed on the first results page. Increase your bid to have your advertisement displayed.

Message 3)

This means that your bid is high enough to display your text advertisement, but your quality is low for this keyword. Click on the details and recommendations link to further understand why.

This means that your bid is below what Google’s minimum bid is. Click on the “Details and Recommendations” link to get more information and to understand why your keyword isn’t being displayed.

If you received either of the two quality score messages above (with Poor Quality Scores), use the following information found on your “Details and Recommendations” page to determine why your keywords have low quality scores.

Message 3 – Type 1

If these are the details for message 3, here’s what to do to increase your Quality Score.

This means that although everything is good with your website and your account organization, it’s not as good as your competitor’s advertisements. If you catch this early enough (within 24-48 hours of it receiving a low quality score) you can quickly fix it by increasing your bid to 50% more than what the keyword recommends bidding. So if I increase the keyword bid for a $0.30 advertisement to $0.45, within one-three days my bid quality score will improve and my minimum bid will decrease. When this happens I would lower my bid back down to an acceptable level. If you’ve waited for more than 48 hours, then you will need to increase your CTR to increase your quality score.

This is the most common type of quality score message I receive myself. Here’s a real example of this working in my account. The keywords that are marked as a $0.40 max bid were marked with a low quality score 3 days ago with a minimum required bid of $0.30 to get the keywords to be displayed. I usually write compelling text ads that receive high CTR’s so I knew that Google just needed a quick boost in bid cost to get a better quality score status. 3 days later my minimum required bid is at $0.05 per click and my quality score status is “Great”.

Message 3 – Type 2

This is a potentially bad message to be receiving. It means that Google feels this keyword is bad in your account. If you get this message, don’t increase your bid, instead immediately delete the keyword. If you don’t delete the keyword within 24-48 hours Google will look for other keywords in your account that are similar to this keyword and will mark them as poor quality as well. Delete every keyword in your account no matter what its past performance is if Google says the keyword isn’t highly relevant. If you don’t delete these keywords quickly enough, you may risk not ever being able to use these keywords again in the future without them having a low quality score People who keep these keywords in their account will quickly notice that just about every keyword in their account is receiving a low quality score without explanation.

Here’s an example of what will happen. Let’s say John has the keyword “Golden Retriever House Training” and Google says it’s not highly relevant. But John disagrees and keeps the keyword in his account. Three days later John notices that Google has marked all the keywords that contain the words “Golden Retriever” as low quality. John doesn’t understand why, but still just increases the bid and ignores the message. Two days later John sees that his account received only 1,340 impressions when usually he receives 50,000+ impressions a day. He looks through his account and is shocked to find that every keyword with the word “golden”, “retriever”, “house”, and “training” are marked low quality.

If you didn’t delete this keyword soon enough and you’re finding that many of the keywords in your account are low quality, here’s how to fix it. First off, if your account is receiving zero traffic and you don’t really want to spend the time of fixing it, you can immediately start over by creating a new Google Account. If your account has value to you and you want to fix it, you can do so by deleting all the keywords in your account that have this message. Remember to find the phrase or word that Google is using to link the keywords to each other. In the example above, the phrase started off as “Golden Retriever”. You will want to find all of the keywords that are active for search and contain the phrase Google was linking to the low quality keyword(s). Make all of those keywords highly relevant and increase their CTR and bids to make their quality score increase. Keep those keywords well managed for a week or so and slowly begin to add some of the deleted keywords that Google had previously marked low quality because of irrelevant keywords. Make sure the keywords you’re adding stay good quality and relevant. If the keywords you’re adding are immediately marked low quality, you will need to work harder to improve your account history for those keywords.

Message 3 – Type 3

If you receive this message, it simply means that Google doesn’t like the website you’re advertising. Usually it is recommended to find another website to advertise if you’re receiving this message. If you own the website that’s receiving this message it can be a bit of work to get it back up and running, but it’s definitely possible to get the status back up. I would recommend reading the section titled “Quality Score In-Depth” to understand how to fix this if you own the website. If you don’t own the website, then there’s no way you can fix this error message as Google probably won’t even let you advertise the keywords they recommend using cheaply.

Message 3 – Type 4

This message means that you probably won’t be able to advertise that type of product anymore in this account. You definitely won’t be able to advertise the website you were already promoting (unless you want all your keywords to be low quality) but any future websites that sell the same type of product will most likely automatically have low quality keywords as well. Usually when a majority of your keywords receive messages like this, you will want to start a new account. If only a few of your keywords receive this message, then delete those keywords immediately and there’s a chance your other keywords in your account will pull your account through so you won’t have any keyword issues. If you notice that every keyword you add is marked low quality, regardless of the website you’re advertising it means it’s probably time for you to open a new Google account because when that happens it is way too much effort to get your account back running normally.

Message 4)

This message means that the keyword has no past history in your account and Google hasn’t started displaying it yet. Usually you will see this message on new keywords you add in your account. (ignore the quality score part of this message because this message means the same thing if your quality score is Great, OK, or Poor)

Message 5)

This message means that the keyword doesn’t receive enough traffic for Google’s Ad Diagnostics tool to know if your advertisement’s being displayed or not.

If you have low quality score keywords that are too expensive to increase the bid to get better CTRs at a higher position and nothing else works, 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 and try to re-add them at a later time.

Causes for Poor Quality Keywords

There is no way to know if a certain keyword is going to be poor quality, but if one of your keywords becomes poor quality, it is either because it is completely irrelevant or it is not targeted enough. I used to think that there was no pattern and Google just over judged some accounts, but after spending several months determining this I have found that there is a reason why every keyword is poor quality. There is hardly any chance at all that Google did it by accident.

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 poor quality 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 poor quality keyword is to move it to a new AdGroup where the text in the advertisement is more related to the keyword.

What’s An Acceptable Bid?

An acceptable bid varies from person to person and depends on your conversion rate and what you can afford. In Google’s opinion an acceptable bid is where your keyword is on first page results and your quality score is either Ok or Great. I usually never bid more than $0.20 per click (unless I need to briefly do it to increase my keywords quality score). The only times I intend to receive traffic at costs more than $0.20 per click, it’s because I am promoting a more expensive product. If you want to know the absolute most you should bid, there’s a helpful tool that you can use at this website that will tell you the minimum and maximum you should bid for your keywords:

How to Know When You Need A New Google Account

Sometimes it’s much easier and time efficient to open a new Google account rather than fixing your current account. When you open a new Google account it’s a new slate meaning that your new account will not be affected by your old account at all.

Here’s how I would determine if it would be better to open a new Google account or not. If you’ve tried to advertise multiple websites, and all of the new campaigns and AdGroups you create have Poor Quality scores and nearly all the keywords require you to bid over $0.50 to get a first page result, then it might make more sense to just open a new account.

A new Google AdWords account costs $5 to open and Google will allow you to open as many AdWords accounts as you need.

Additional Quality Score Information

Here are some Quality Score facts to help give you more information about how to take advantage of Google’s Quality Score:

• Google knows that the first three ads on each page receive more clicks and a higher CTR and they have put this information into their quality score system. So if you have an advertisement in a top three position you should be getting a high CTR. If you’re not getting a high CTR then you need to increase it. The same goes for advertisements in the last positions of a page.
• After you make changes to keywords within your account don’t expect an immediate change in quality score. If you’re adjusting the keywords/bids in your account by deleting keywords or raising bids you will see changes within 3 days. If you’re having to re-design a website or change text ads then it can take up to 20 days to see changes in your quality score.

6. Ranking & Advertisement Placement

Ranking & Advertisement Placement

You should have your campaign set up with appropriate text ads, AdGroups, and a huge list of keywords (by a huge list I mean tons of AdGroups each containing 10-100 keywords each). 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. Don’t worry, if you’re confused, I explain more information about this later.

What is the Best Way to See if My Advertisements Being Displayed?

If you don’t trust the Google ad diagnostics tool and you want to make sure your advertisements being displayed do not search for it on Google.com.

Google realizes that people get excited and want to see their advertisement, but if you search for it on Google.com you can potentially hurt your advertisement’s performance. Here are two ways you can hurt your ad’s performance by searching for it on Google:

If you search for your advertisement and click on it, it is seen by Google as click fraud. People will try to click on their own advertisement to increase their CTR’s and Google knows when you do this. If you do this you can risk having your account banned.

• If you search for your advertisement you’re adding impressions to your ad and since you’re not going to click on it, you’re potentially hurting your quality score.

SoWhat’s the Best Way to Search for My Advertisements?

Good news! Google has a tool (or a website address) that lets you search for your advertisements. This is even better than searching for your advertisement on Google.com because this tool lets you choose the region where you want to search for your ads. Like if I only advertised in “New York City” I can specify that and it will tell Google to display the ads specified for “New York City” only. Likewise, I could see if my ads were being displayed in Australia, Ireland, France, USA, etc. Even better, this tool doesn’t hurt your account in anyway! If you accidentally click on your ad, nothing will happen and the impressions don’t count against you. To access this tool, simply go to the website listed below:

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Google’s Quality Score

Google’s New Advertising Policy

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 “Required First Page Bids” for 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 displayed on the first results page or not

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 account’s CTR history + Your accounts performance in the geographical region where your ads are displayed

_________________________
= Your Quality Score
Here are some of the factors that determine your overall Quality Score explained in a little bit more detail:

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 as low quality.
• 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.

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 Columns”. 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 low quality scores (anything below 5/10) are most likely irrelevant.
• 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 (if you’re a current AdWords advertiser) 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.

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:

Online Plasma TV Sale Name Brand Plasma TVs for Sale Limited Quantity – Free Shipping

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.

How to Beat Google’s New Policy Change

Most people didn’t know what to do about the policy change, and several advertisers profits fell dramatically. Here are four things advertisers did to fix their problem:

• 1. Wanting a “Quick Fix” most advertisers simply changed their URL, which activated their ads for a day or two until Google caught on (if you keep on doing this, you will agitate Google enough to where they will ban you from AdWords).
  2. Other advertisers increased their bids to what Google recommended (this isn’t a good decision either, because if Google didn’t think your site was desirable enough to start with, then they certainly aren’t going to suddenly think it’s going to be desirable when you increase your bid. Keep doing this and Google will keep increasing your required bid).
  3. Some people simply left Google AdWords completely.
  4. Those remaining were either unaffected by the policy change or knew exactly what to do to fix it.

So…How Do You Fix the Policy Change?

You can fix the policy change and completely reverse the negative results by giving Google exactly what they want out of a website. You give them both Quality and Content.

One Thing Everyone Needs to Remember

Although the new policy change makes it look like your account is not performing well at all by inactivating a large majority of your keywords, you can still receive massive amounts of traffic. Even though your keywords are Poor Quality, you will still receive traffic through Google’s Content (Contextual) Network. Remember, you can specify different bids for the content network and the search network, so if you’re having to increase your bids to $0.20 per click in the search network, you can still keep your bids at $0.10 per click for the contextual network. You can access this feature by going into your campaign settings and click on the check box that says “Specify Different Bids for Contextual Network”.

Easier Said Then Done…

You may think that doesn’t sound difficult to do, which if you think about it, it’s really not. But your idea of a content full and high quality website is probably very different from Google’s idea. Since this book is read by both Affiliates and Website owners, I’m going to tell each exactly what to do to begin receiving the highest amount of high converting traffic possible. The first section is for Affiliates only, and the second section is for Website owners (this include those of you who create your own landing page).

What Affiliates Need to Do to Beat Google’s New Policy

First off, you’re going to need to stop promoting the websites that Google hates. That means you should try to avoid the following:

• Websites with little or irrelevant text on their home page
• Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them
• Websites that are already being heavily advertised
• Websites with duplicate content on each page
• Websites that force you to sign up for an email news letter
• Websites without a privacy policy
• Websites that are confusing or tricky
• Websites that are borderline illegal
• Other factors you may want to avoid

Websites with little or irrelevant text on their homepage Don’t advertise for websites which have little text or irrelevant text on their landing page. This includes websites which place a large amount of text in their pictures. Here’s an easy way to figure out how much text is on a website: If you can’t highlight it, it means Google cannot read it. WebPages should have at least 150-250 words on their home page.

Below I show you how to use the following tool to tell you how many words are on the webpage, and how find how relevant the words on the page are to their product.

How to Use the Keyword Density Tool

Click on the following link to access this tool:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml

Below is a screenshot of the keyword density tool (mentioned above). Be sure to have the following settings applied:

Page URL Enter the website that you are planning to advertise here (include www).
Include page TITLE Should be checked
Include DESCRIPTION Meta tag Should be checked
Include KEYWORDS Meta tag Should be checked
ALT Contents “Include Always” should be selected

Now click the “Calculate keyword density” button to run this tool.

Here is what the results look like when I run this tool on www.GoogleMoneyPro.com:

Some things you should notice:

1. Look at the word count in the top left corner of the results. You will see something that says “Words: ###, Count: ###”. You will want the “Count” to be at least 150 250. In the example above, the count is 634 words.

1. Look at the phrase results. You will want the webpage to have at least 2-5% keyword density. To find this out, think of two words and three words that best describe the website. For GoogleMoneyPro.com, the main thing I offer is advertising with Google AdWords. Now I look for the phrases which closely match the short description I just came up with and look for their density. In the results I see the phrase “Advertising with Google” has a 4.84% density, and the phrase “Google AdWords” has a 2.94% density. These are both very good percentages and means that googlemoneypro.com contains relevant keywords (which Google rewards by increasing the quality score).

Websites that have AdSense advertisements on them AdSense advertisements look like the screenshot below this paragraph. Google doesn’t consider a website in AdWords high quality if it contains several AdSense advertisements. You should also avoid advertising for websites which display Yahoo’s advertisements. They look almost identical to Google’s, but say Yahoo instead.

Websites that are already being heavily advertised Don’t promote websites with tons of affiliates already promoting them. Chances are that these affiliates are already advertising on Google or have already tried to Advertise on Google. I personally avoid advertising websites with a gravity higher than 40.

Websites with duplicate content on each page Don’t promote websites that have very few pages or have duplicate content on each page. This means websites that have links to other pages and instead of going to a different page, re-direct you to the same page you are on. Also, try to find webpages with more than just 1 page. Google will give the webpage a higher content score if it has several pages.

Websites that force you to sign up for something This includes websites that force their visitors to give their email address before they can continue to another page. You can promote websites that ask the user to sign up for a mailing list, but don’t promote the websites that require it before continuing.

Websites without a Privacy Policy Google favors websites that have a Privacy Policy (or a Terms of Service). This link is usually near the bottom of the page and is a small text link. This isn’t too common for most webpages, so if the webpage doesn’t have this, don’t worry too much. But you should still look for it and favor websites that contain it.

Websites that are confusing or tricky If the website is confusing to you, then don’t promote it. Make sure the website has clear information and contains an easy way for you to navigate the website. This can either be by a site map, or if the website is small enough it can have links to each of the pages at the bottom of every page. Try to avoid webpages where the only way you can get to the previous page is to click the back button.

Websites that are Borderline Illegal
Don’t advertise for websites where you find yourself asking “Is this product legal?”. Some of these sites include cable descramblers, P2P sites or programs, and products that are rip offs. You will also want to avoid websites that allow you to download unlimited music, songs, videos, movies, games, etc. These sites are very popular, but Google doesn’t allow anyone to advertise these sites on AdWords.

Other factors you want to avoid This includes misspelled words, pictures that don’t appear, websites contradicting themselves, etc. Also, try to avoid websites that rely very heavily on Flash presentations. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it because most affiliate pages don’t use heavy amounts of it.

Website Owners and Advertisers with Landing Pages

If you want your website to receive the highest amount of traffic, with the lowest possible keyword bids, you need to apply as much information in following list to your webpage as possible. All of the information in this list will increase the Content and Quality score of your website. If your website does all of the following then Google will recognize your site as being very important and informative and will not require you to increase your bids to a ridiculous amount.

Your Website Should:

Have at least 150-250 keywords on your landing page Have at least this amount, it is okay if you have more. If your website contains a large amount of keywords, make sure your keywords are relevant by using the keyword density tool.

Have a Privacy Policy Try to add a Privacy Policy or a Terms of Service page to your website. They don’t have to be extremely specific and detailed, just create a basic one. If you don’t know what a Privacy Policy is or if you don’t know how to create one, just do a search on Google for “Privacy Policy Example” and model yours after the example.

Don’t duplicate other websites Don’t simply copy the merchants HTML and put it on a different domain name. This will give you a low content and quality score. Instead try to make a unique landing page or review site linking to your affiliate hoplink.

Provide information without requiring people to register Don’t force people to give their name and email address before continuing to another page. Instead make the email sign up an option, and give a link to the other page.

Give examples and demos of what you offer Google really likes it and thinks your website is professional if you show the visitors exactly what you offer in a proof or in an example.

Openly describe your business On the contact us page or on an About Us page, describe what your business is and what it does. List the goals and contact information of your business.

Tell your visitors how they can contact you Some people don’t list any form of contact at all. If you don’t want to offer your phone number and address, you should at lest tell them your name and give them an email address to contact you by.

Make your site easy to navigate You do not want to have a website that only has one link to get to each page. If you have a large website, add a site map to your webpage. If you have a small website, add the links to each webpage at the bottom of each page.

Watch out for Sponsored links Don’t put any sponsored links such as Google AdSense or Yahoo related advertisements on your landing page. If you do have sponsored links on your landing page make sure they are clearly marked as “Sponsored Links”.

Don’t display important information in images Use text instead of images to display important information. Google can’t read the text in images.

Make sure your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive Don’t use the same title for each page on your website. Make each title unique to the webpage. Also, make sure your important images (such as buttons, logos, etc) contain an ALT tag which further describes the image.

Avoid poor HTML and broken links This can quickly lower the quality of your site, so make sure your HTML is properly written and be certain that there are no broken links on your website.

Try not to use dynamic pages Dynamic pages are webpages that use the “?”or the “&id=” in the URL. Spiders have trouble following these pages, so try to only use Static pages.

Don’t put too many links on one page Don’t put more than 90 links on one page. If you have that many links, make a site map page and break it up into categories.

Search Spider viewing problems Remember that not all search spiders can view JavaScript, Cookies, DHTML, or Flash. Also, don’t try to track or block spiders on your webpage.

Make your webpage people friendly, not Spider friendly Don’t use cloaking techniques or other tricks that make spiders think your webpage is perfect. Remember, Google uses both Spiders and people to review websites.

Don’t participate with link programs Don’t use services from websites that will increase the number of links coming to your website.

Avoid Google management programs Don’t use computer programs that automatically submit your website(s) to Google search, and don’t use programs that find your position in Google. These violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Don’t hide text or links Don’t make your text the same color as your background color or hide it behind pictures. Do this and Google may think you are spamming. Also, don’t hide links behind pictures or tables.

Don’t re-direct visitors Don’t redirect people from your destination URL to a different landing page. If you must redirect information, use a 301 redirect.

Don’t mention irrelevant things on your landing page This can confuse the Search Spider, which lowers your content and quality rating. An example of this would be people who use personal stories to sell their product.

Make your images unique Don’t name your pictures confusing things like “img903848023_b.gif”. Instead name the image “download_button_large.gif”.

Use ALT tags for images Make an ALT tag for your important images to further help the Spider to understand the meaning of the image.

Make the text in your website descriptive Use descriptive words and phrases in your webpage. Don’t use the same words over and over. If a keyword has too high of a density level, then Google may think you are trying to spam.

Use the keyword density tool Try to get your important keywords or key phrases to have a density level of 2-5% in your landing page.

If you want to go all out, and have the best possible quality score and content rating for your website then I recommend that you do the following, as both will increase the importance of your webpage to Google.

Make unique landing pages that contain the keyword in the URL In this guide I mention how you should put similar keywords into different AdGroups, so that you can include the keyword(s) in your text advertisement to receive the highest CTR possible. For this you will first need to go to one of your AdGroups (or think of a new AdGroup) and get a common keyword that fits almost every keyword in the AdGroup. Lets say the AdGroup is HP Printer Cartridges. If that’s the case, then do the following:

Make a unique landing page that contains that phrase in the URL. So if your original landing page was “index.htm” make your new landing page “hp-printer-cartridges-index.htm”.

Now, you can either use that URL for the AdGroup “HP Printer Cartridges” or you can make your URL even more targeted.

To make your URL even more targeted, make a new directory (new folder) and name it the phrase you came up with above. So for the example, I will name this folder “hp-printer-cartridges”. Now, you should move your new landing page and any images associated with your landing page into this folder. When you are done, you should upload the whole folder and its contents to your web host. Now your new destination URL should look like “http://www.examplewebpage.com/hp-printer-cartridges/hp-printer-cartridges-index.htm”.

Why should you do this?

If you do this, then Google will look and see that “HP Printer Cartridges” is mentioned twice in the URL, and that the phrase “hp printer cartridges” is included in many of the keywords in your AdGroup. So Google will look at both of these factors and will think that your website is dealing strictly with HP Printer Cartridges. This will give your website a very high quality score and content rating.

Including the keyword in your title So now to take it one step further, you will completely convince Google that your website is relevant. You can do this by adding that phrase into the title of your landing page. So if your title was “Cheap online printing ink”, you should now make it “HP Printer Cartridges Printing Ink”.

This is as far as you can go when you are increasing the content of your webpage. If you do what I mentioned above, then you will have zero keywords that are marked “Not Being Displayed on First Search Results Page”.

Wow, that’s a lot of things I need to do
I am sure that is what almost all of you are thinking. In fact you were probably thinking “He just wants us to create a perfect webpage”, which is exactly what Google is looking for. If you follow even 80-90% of what I mentioned above, you will have 80-90% less poor quality keywords and your bids will be dropped dramatically.

I recommend watching the following video from Google that explains how to optimize your website for Google AdWords.

Selecting Keywords

Some of you may be wondering “is there a shortcut to find keywords that are going to be active for search without me forcing them to have a high relevancy?”. If you have asked yourself that, then I have some good news because there is an easy way for you to find relevant keywords for your website without having to change your website at all. This technique is great for website owners but it is perfect for affiliates that don’t own a webpage of their own.

We all know that Google has a certain way that they determine what keywords are relevant or not relevant for your website, so why not just have Google tell you what keywords to use.

You may have not realized it, but Google will tell you what keywords to use and those keywords will not be Poor Quality for search. Here’s how you find these keywords.

1. Go to Google’s Keyword Research Tool and click on the “Website Content” section.
2. Now enter the main address of the website you’re advertising for (this would be the address you have in your display URL in your advertisements).
3. Click on the “Get Keywords” button
4. All of the keywords listed below are keywords Google has found to be extremely relevant to your website and these keywords will have a lower bid and almost all of these keywords will be active for search.

Want more keywords because this list was too small? No problem! Just do the following:

Take the first keyword that was in the list Google gave you and click on the link titled “Keyword Variation” in Google’s Keyword Tool. Enter this keyword into the text box titled “Enter one keyword or phrase per line” and then hit the “Get More Keywords” button. Add all of the relevant keywords to your keyword list on the right side of the page. Repeat this with the second keyword in your keyword list, then your third keyword, and so on until you have a very large keyword list.

Want even more keywords? Just do the following:

Do the exact same thing mentioned above, but this time only enter the keywords you haven’t researched yet (use the keyword you found in the step before this one). Then add these keywords to your list and keep doing this until you’re satisfied with the number of keywords you have.

So why should you find keywords this way? Well since Google is looking for relevant keywords for your website, it is best that you start your keyword list by using only keywords Google thinks are relevant to your website. Then to find more relevant keywords, do keyword research on the already relevant keywords to find similar keywords for your list.

When you are done simply download the list and save it to your computer before you add these keywords to your AdGroups. Remember to try to group these keywords as well as possible.

Writing a Well Targeted Text Ad

Yes, Google also wants you to have a well targeted and relevant text ad. If you have this then Google will raise your quality score. Here’s how to get a relevant text ad:

1. Google looks at three things to determine relevance and these three things are your keyword, text ad, and landing page. If all of these are relevant to each other then you will have a good relevancy score, which increases your quality score.
2. To get your keyword and your text ad relevant to each other, simply include the keyword in your text advertisement.
3. To get your keyword and your landing page relevant to each other, see if the keyword appears in the landing page’s text. If it does then your keyword will be relevant to your landing page and since your text ad also contains the keyword your text ad will be relevant to your landing page.

If your keyword is not found in your landing page you will need to have some type of connection between your landing page and your text ad. To do this, do the following:

1. Use the keyword density tool mentioned earlier in this guide to find and list all of the keywords that are found on the landing page.
2. Find a keyword or keyphrase that has a high density and put this somewhere in the description of your text ad.

Doing this will allow Google to find a connection between your landing page and your text ad.

Fixing Poor Quality Keywords

How exactly do you use the information in this guide to fix your poor quality keywords?

Fixing Low Quality Keywords if You’re an Affiliate

If you’re an affiliate without a webpage it will be a little bit more difficult for you to have a perfect keyword list where none of the keywords are marked Low Quality. But here’s what to do to make sure a large majority of your keywords have good quality scores.

• Use the Finding Keyword’s techniques I mentioned above to find the keywords that will most likely be active for search.
• Make sure you don’t over bid on your keywords. I never bid more than $0.20 per click 95% of the time. I set all of my bids to $0.05 per click and then I gradually raise them until I reach the most I’m willing to pay which is usually $0.15-$0.20 per click.
• Try to have a high CTR. If you’re having trouble, then I recommend using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
• If you do find that you’re having to use high bids for your search network keywords, then change your Campaign Settings to allow different bids for content network and the search network. This way you can lower your bids on the Content Network so you’re not begin charged large bid prices for both the search and content networks.
• Don’t forget to read the section in this guide titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”.

Fixing Low Quality Keywords if You Own A Website or if You’re an Affiliate that Owns a Website

If you own the website you’re advertising on then you have a little bit more of an advantage because you can simply create new landing pages for each AdGroup that is relevant to that AdGroup. This lets you choose the keywords you want because you can simply make them relevant. To do this use the techniques in the section of the guide titled “What Website Owners & Landing Pages Need to Do”.

Don’t forget to also use these same techniques:

• Use the Finding Keyword’s techniques I mentioned above to find the keywords that will most likely be active for search.
• Make sure you don’t over bid on your keywords. I never bid more than $0.20 per click 95% of the time. I set all of my bids to $0.05 per click and then I gradually raise them until I reach the most I’m willing to pay which is usually $0.15-$0.20 per click.
• Try to have a high CTR. If you’re having trouble, then I recommend using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
• If you do find that you’re having to use high bids for your search network keywords, then change your Campaign Settings to allow different bids for content network and the search network. This way you can lower your bids on the Content Network so you’re not begin charged large bid prices for both the search and content networks.
• Again, don’t forget to look at the section in this guide titled “My Keywords Are Inactive for Search”.

Quality Score Types

There are three different types of quality scores that affect your advertising, positioning, min bid, and generally your overall return on investment. These three different types of quality scores are Account, AdGroup, and Keyword Quality scores.

Account Quality Score

Your account quality score is basically an average quality score based on everything that happens within your account. Your account quality score is determined by your account’s average click through rate on the search network, your account’s performance history (more importance is placed on most recent history), your advertisement’s relevance, and other relevancy factors which include things that you don’t control like average stay on site, IP targeting, etc. The other relevancy factors have very little effect on your quality score so don’t worry about them.

Your account quality score is used to determine the minimum bids for the keywords you add to your account that receive very little traffic. This is why I recommend adding keywords that receive traffic first and then add the keywords that don’t receive much traffic a week later because your Account Quality Score will be higher. So a good Account Quality Score will help keep you new keyword minimum bids lower.

AdGroup Quality Score

Your AdGroup Quality Score is based on the average performance of each of your AdGroups and each AdGroup has its own unique quality score. Your AdGroup quality score is based on your AdGroup’s sponsored search click through rate, landing page(s), account quality score, advertisement’s relevance, AdGroup history (more importance placed on most recent history), and of course other relevancy factors.

Your AdGroup Quality Score is used to determine your Content Advertising ranking, placement, and bid. If you have a high AdGroup Quality Score you will receive more quality traffic on the content network at a lower cost.

Keyword Quality Score

Your keyword quality score is more advanced and each keyword has its own unique quality score. Your keyword quality score is determined by the historical CTR of that keyword on the search network, keyword’s relevance to your text ads, your landing page quality, account history (measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account), historical CTR of the display URL’s in the AdGroup, and other relevancy factors.

Your Keyword Quality Score determines the minimum bid, position, and ranking for your keyword on the search network (Google.com).

How your Advertisements Rank is Determined

Here’s the current formula Google uses to find your advertisement’s rank.

Ad Rank = (Your Max Bid) x (Quality Score)

Here’s an example of this in the table below:

Please keep in mind that this is a crude example, I’m just using it to help illustrate how it works.

7. Content Advertising

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 moneyI 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 can find the exact websites that Google is displaying your ads on by going to any of your AdGroups (which has Content Advertising enabled) and click on the “Networks” tab. Here you can exclude and include websites which you want to have your websites displayed on.

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).

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 Advertisingyou 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.

1. 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 user’s first click will cause the video ad to play and then the user’s 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.

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 forward. 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.

How to Get Clicks for Less than $0.01 Per Click

First off, let me just say that it is extremely difficult to get a lot of clicks for $0.01 per click. It is possible to get clicks for less than $0.01 per click, but it’s not very likely.

Obviously you can’t get less than $0.01 per click in Google’s Search, because Google will only allow the minimum bid to be $0.01. Soif the least amount of money you can bid on a single click is $0.01, how do you get your average cost per click lower than that?

Here’s what you have to do. You can’t do this in any regular campaign because it won’t work. So you have to create a new “Placement Targeted” campaign. Why placement targeted? Simple. In placement targeted advertising you have the option of paying per thousand impressions (CPM). Here’s the idea. If you bid something like $0.25 for every thousand impressions and 25 people click on your advertisement, you’ve paid $0.01 per click. If you pay $0.25 for 1,000 impressions and you get more than 25 clicks, you’ve just gotten traffic on Google for less than $0.01 per click!

8. Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Below is a list of ways that you can increase the amount of traffic you can receive to your website.

• Always add new or unused keywords.
• Search your website for unadvertised items. For example: if you sell printers then you may have forgotten the keywords computer paper, computer ink, ink jet, etc.
• Include more specific keywords. For example: ink jet printers, laser jet printers, bubble printers, Circuit City printers, Best Buy printers, etc.
• Google recommends that you should separate all your high-traffic keywords from the poor performing keywords and put your best performing ones into a separate campaign. This way you can set a high daily budget for the best performing keywords without losing money on the poor performing keywords. I would not do this unless the high performing keywords are less than one week old.
• Increase your daily budgets. Like I said earlier, you never want to reach your daily budget, so double whatever Google says it should be set at. This way you will always receive 100% of search traffic.
• Increase your Max CPC for your higher performing keywords.
• Increase your quality score through optimization; I mentioned how to do this earlier.
• Broaden your Geographically targeting settings. You can do this by selecting more countries to advertise in. You can also do this by creating another webpage in a different language and advertise in countries which speak that language.

Google has a video which tells you how to optimize your AdWords account to receive more traffic.

Good Google Advertising Rules to Follow

Below is a list of good advertising rules to follow. Follow these rules to give you the best performance and the most amount of profit from your advertising.

• Top positions don’t always mean the best performance. Sometimes 6th, 7th, 8th positions bring in larger profit margins.
• Don’t pay a higher CPC just to get in the top 3 positions.
• Receiving a high number of clicks doesn’t always mean the website will be profitable.
• Traffic and sales change daily; don’t expect your traffic and sales to be the same every day.
• When a new campaign is created, establishing a good history is vital for this campaign’s success. Having a high CTR is the best way to do this.
• Always try to be more targeted and specific than more general.
• Send the customer to the most appropriate page on the website.
• Try thinking like your customer. See if your ad appeals to you if you were looking for the product you’re selling.
• Manage your account as often as possible. Don’t expect your account to be able to manage itself.
• Group keywords together and put the keyword groups into individual AdGroups.
• Put your best performing keywords into the text of your advertisement.
• Always keep on testing different advertisements.
• Keep on adding keywords to your keyword list(s).
• Include call to action phrases.
• Don’t ever bid more than you can afford.

I also recommend watching this video from Google which tells you how to increase your conversions.

How to Manage Your Account

You will want to manage your account as much as possible, but for many beginners they are not sure how this is done. 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 and 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 are set higher then Google recommends, because Google rarely updates its recommended budget. So if you are spending more than your recommended budget and you think this 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 did wrong that 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.

Google Features

Google has several features (free features) that are extremely useful in helping anyone optimize their AdWords campaign(s). Theses features should not be overlooked by anyone and a lot of times other guides recommend you purchase tools that do the exact same thing as Google’s free features.

Reports

I recommend watching the following video by Google that tells you how to create a report in Google AdWords:

Benefits of Google’s Reports

Everyone knows that the more information they know about something, the better. So why wouldn’t anyone want to know as much information about their advertising accounts as possible? This is why you use Google Reports. They will give you all of the information you need to know about your account, and you can even set the report to create itself and email it to you every few days without you having to do anything. Here are a few things you can set your report to do.

• List your most profitable keywords
• Tell you which campaigns are performing the best
• Help you find your quality score
• Inform you of invalid clicks
• Help you find unprofitable keywords in your account
• Compare your traffic/sales/cost reports over any time frame in graph form
• Tell you how many clicks you received
• List the number of sales you received from certain keywords/campaigns/AdGroups

How to Create A Report

Click on the reports tab Number 10. On the Google AdWords Campaign Summary map found in the Glossary section of this guide. From there you select “create a report”. You can choose how you want to see the report, which campaigns or AdGroups you want to view, and then you can view all of the information about the report either in text format, graph format, or both (I would recommend both).

Once you create the report, be prepared to wait a few minutes, the more information you’re researching the longer it will take to create the report.

There’s no limit of information that a Google report can display. I know this because I actually ran a one year report for all of my Google Accounts, which took about 15-20 minutes to complete. Google told me my report was over 250 Megabytes in size and it was only available for download.

I recommend watching this video by Google about additional AdWords report features:

Fast Report Tip

Unfortunately, most people don’t take advantage of reports within their account. So below I will mention a good way to use Google reports to your advantag,e so you can better manage your Google AdWords account.

Quickly Finding Keywords to Delete An important way to keep your account’s overall quality score history as high as possible is to remove/delete all of the keywords hurting your account. You should know which keywords these are, because I mentioned them in the Quality Score section. Here’s a quick way to find these keywords:

• Create a new keyword report for “Placement / Keyword Performance”
• Set your report range to “Yesterday”
• Select “All campaigns and all their AdGroups”
• In the “Filter Your Results” section, check “Include Placements / Keywords with zero impressions”
• Run the report

The report above will display all of your keywords within your account. Once the report is completed, click on the column titled “Minimum CPC” to sort your keywords by their minimum bids displaying the highest bidded keywords first. Look through the keywords and make note of any new keywords that may have had their minimum bids raised by Google.

I usually run this type of report each day for the first three days or so when I create a new campaign. This way I know if I need to delete keywords that have the potential to hurt my account’s history. In case you didn’t already know, your Minimum CPC bid is the same thing as your Quality Score.

Google Conversion Tracking

Tracking Google Sales

Google offers its advertisers a free service which will allow you to actually track the number of sales you receive per keyword for any time period specified. I would highly recommend this tool to anyone, because knowing this information is very valuable. If you know that a certain keyword is generating above average sales, you would want to raise the bid of that keyword so you can receive a higher rank, thus getting more traffic which leads to more sales. I have bids for some keywords where I pay about $0.25 to $0.55 per click. But I don’t lose money on those keywords because they generate above average sales.

Unfortunately, this tool requires two things that keep many people from using it. These two things are:
1. That you must own (or have the owners of the webpage put a Source Code on their webpage for you, [many online companies do this]) the webpage you want to have conversion tracking on.
2. You must enter the Google Conversion Tracking code into the HTML of your webpage.

Some web pages with online affiliates advertise that they have Google Tracking available for all of their affiliates, but I have never tried this so I don’t know how accurate theirs are.

Surprisingly this tool is extremely accurate, especially when compared with other “free” sales tracking tools offered by other search engines. Usually when Google reports a sale, a sale has been made. Again, I would highly recommend this tool for anyone.

For more information about Google’s conversion tracking, I recommend watching the following video from Google.

Cross Channel Tracking

Tracking Other Search Engine Sales Using Google Tracking

Google also offers the same tracking feature for use on other search engines. This is called Cross-Channel Tracking. Basically, when you sign up for this Google will give you a small piece of HTML to put on the sales page (also called a Thank You Page). They will also give you a new URL for each keyword you want to add to Cross-Channel Tracking. Once you have the individual URL(s) for your keywords, you will need to go to the other Search Engine and replace that keyword’s destination URL with the new URL Google gave you.

This is also a very accurate tool, although it is a bit of a pain to do this in search engines where you have large keyword lists. I would only recommend adding this feature to keywords that you spend a lot of money on.

For more information about Cross-Channel conversion tracking, I recommend watching the following video from Google:

Google Tools

Like many of the other major pay per click search engines, Google offers its advertisers free tools to use. But unlike other pay per click search engines, these tools are very helpful, accurate, and will help you to make more money online. In fact, I prefer Google’s tools to the tools you pay for.

Google’s Ad Diagnostics Tool

Google’s Ad Diagnostics tool will tell you which of your Text Ads are showing for a particular search, without you having to type that keyword into Google to see if your advertisement is appearing yourself. It will also tell you why your ads are not running or why they are not on the first page of the search results. I would recommend using this tool until you get your text ads running profitably.

Google also displays this tool next to each keyword in your keyword list. If you look next to your keywords you should see a button that looks like a magnifying glass. If you put your curser over this (you don’t have to click on it). When the curser appears it will tell you how your text advertisements are performing for that keyword. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is 100% accurate.

For more information about Google’s Ad Diagnostics tool, I recommend watching the following video from Google.

Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool

First off, to find the traffic estimator tool click on the Tools link and then click on the link titled “Traffic Estimator”.

The traffic estimator tool does what it says. That is, it tells you how many clicks and impressions you should expect to receive as well as your ad’s position and estimated cost per day.

Although this is a pretty handy tool, I don’t recommend using it a lot. This is mainly because Google’s traffic estimates are far from accurate.

For more information about Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool, I recommend watching the following video from Google.

Google AdWords Editor Tool

If you’ve been following this guide chronologically, you should already know what AdWords Editor is and what it does. But since this is a complete guide to Google AdWords I’m going to describe in more detail exactly what Google’s AdWords Editor tool is and does.

Google offers its advertisers free use of a tool which allows you to download your AdWords account to your computer and manage it without being logged in to Google AdWords.

I recommend watching this introduction video by Google about the AdWords Editor Tool:

What does this tool do?

This tool was designed to help AdWords account holders manage their Google accounts and campaigns. Google recommends this tool as a good aid for advertisers with large accounts. This tool will allow you to manage your entire account offline, but you must download your account first. Its best features include sorting through keywords, text ads, and accounts with ease, but if you have a large account, be prepared to wait because it can take a while to load.

Should you use this tool?

I used to not recommend using this tool, but Google has changed some account features that make it almost necessary to download and use this tool. The feature that Google removed from managing your account online is the ability to find and edit all of your low quality keywords at once. Luckily AdWords Editor has this feature that allows you to edit your low quality keywords (so you don’t have to go and manually edit each keyword bid one at a time for your inactive keywords).

Here are some problems I found with this tool:

• It’s recommended for large accounts, yet the larger your account the longer it takes to load.
• You can use it offline, but you must be online to download your account and online to upload your account’s changes.
• Its user interface is different from your AdWords account user interface, meaning you will have to take time to learn how to use this tool before it will benefit you.
• It doesn’t do a good job of telling you when your keywords may have low quality scores. In order to get an accurate idea of your keyword’s quality you either have to login to your AdWords account online, or you have to remove your AdWords account from AdWords Editor and then re-add it again to AdWords Editor.

This tool wasn’t all bad though, here are the good things:

• Can filter through your results to find poor performing keywords, change them, and then upload them to your account.
• You can save your account onto a file on your computer for back-up purposes or you can send it to someone for help or review.

How to Use AdWords Editor

Like I said above, AdWords Editor is now the only way you can edit all of your low quality keywords at once. Trust me, there’s nothing more annoying than having to go change the bid for thousands of keywords one at a time. Here’s what you need to do to get AdWords Editor.

Downloading AdWords Editor

Downloading AdWords Editor is very easy to do, and, yes, they do have AdWords Editor for both Windows and Mac computers.

To download AdWords Editor click on the link below which will take you to the download page:

http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/

Setting Up AdWords Editor

Make sure you are not logged into your AdWords account when you are using AdWords Editor (downloading or uploading information), because in my experience this has caused AdWords Editor to do partial download and uploads. Setting up Google’s AdWords Editor tool is fairly easy to do. Make sure you are on the internet when you begin this process. Basically, it will prompt you for two things.

1. The email address you use to login to your AdWords account.
2. The password you use for your AdWords account.

After you enter this information AdWords Editor will download your account to your computer.

Basic Information about AdWords Editor

• AdWords Editor will not change any information in your account (AdWords account) unless you click on the “Post Changes” button.
• You can manage multiple accounts using AdWords editor.
• AdWords Editor uses colors to symbolize AdWords rules. If there’s a red symbol next to the AdGroup, Keyword, Campaign, or Text Ad it means there’s an error with that particular AdGroup, Keyword, Campaign, or Text Ad and it will not upload.

Adjusting the Bids for all the Inactive Keywords in your Account / How to Activate Thousands of Inactive Keywords in Seconds

This is by far the best way to change/edit the status or bid for all of the low quality keywords in your AdGroup, Campaign, or entire account.

Why would you want to do this? Well, chances are that you will see keywords that are marked low quality and in order to fix this you will need to increase bids, delete them, or re-group them.

For this example I will show you how to edit all the low quality keywords within your entire account. If you want to edit the low quality keywords within a specific AdGroup or campaign simply click on that campaign or AdGroup when choosing what you want to edit.

First off you will need to tell AdWords Editor that you’re going to edit your entire account. To do this login to AdWords Editor and on the left side of AdWords Editor click on the name of your account. This will select your entire account including all keywords, text ads, AdGroups, and campaigns.

Now you will want to tell it that you’re going to edit only the keywords. To do this simply click on the “Keywords” tab in AdWords Editor. Your screen will change and it will display all the keywords within your account.

Next you will need to tell AdWords Editor that you only want to edit the low quality keywords within your account. To do this click on the dropdown box titled “View” near the top of AdWords Editor. In this drop down box you will need to select “Create or Set Custom View”.

This will open a new window and on this window you should ignore everything except for the section titled “Search for items that match these criteria”. Look for the “Settings” section and click on the drop down menu that by default says “Any Text Field” and select “Quality Score”. Then in the drop down box directly to the right of this, select “is less than” and then enter 6 into the text box to the right. When you’ve done this click on the “Search” button at the bottom of this window.

This will now display all of the low quality keywords within your AdWords account. Usually to make it easier and faster for me I click on the “First Page Estimated Bid” column button (it may not look like a button, but if you click on the text “First Page” you will see that it is a button) which sorts the keywords by your minimum required cost per click to be displayed on Google’s first page (A.K.A. your Quality Score). You can also just as easily click on the “Quality Score” column to sort your quality scores.

Now to select the keywords you want to edit, click on the first keyword you want to edit and hold the “Shift” key on your keyboard. While you’re still holding the “Shift” key, click on the last keyword you want to edit. This should select all the keywords in between the first and last keyword you selected. To select specific keywords, do the same thing but instead of holding the Shift key hold the “Ctrl” (control) key.

To delete the keywords, click the delete button.

To increase bids for the keywords look towards the bottom of AdWords editor and enter the new bid in the box titled “Maximum CPC Bid” (this may say “<default>” or “<varies>”).

To move the keywords to another AdGroup or Campaign click on the “Edit” menu at the very top of AdWords Editor and select “Cut”. The open the AdGroup/Campaign you want to put the keywords, click on the “Keywords” tab, and then go to the “Edit” menu and select “Paste”.

When you’re done and want to post these changes to your AdWords account, click on the “Post Changes” button.

Sorting & Grouping Keywords Using AdWords Editor

Another unique and useful feature that AdWords editor has is that it will sort and group keywords from an AdGroup, Campaign, or your entire account and it will create and insert these keywords into new AdGroups.

Unfortunately, I don’t recommend using this tool 100% of the time because it will simply create massive numbers of AdGroups (it’s not uncommon for it to create an AdGroup for just one keyword). The best time(s) to use this tool is when Google has made some of your keywords low quality and you need to regroup them to try to improve your Quality Score.

To use this tool simply select the AdGroup or Campaign you want to regroup the keywords in.

Before you click on the “Generate common terms” button, to start grouping your keywords, you will want to tell AdWords Editor to ignore certain common words. To do this enter the following words into the “Ignore these words” section of the keyword grouper:

After you’ve told AdWords editor to ignore these words, click on the “Generate common terms” button. This will display the AdGroup names that Google will group the keywords into. Then click on the “Next” button for AdWords Editor to sort the keywords into those AdGroups (note: AdWords Editor will create the AdGroups for you, you don’t have to create them).

AdWords Editor will now display the new AdGroups in Bold and the keywords within those AdGroups. If you want to copy text advertisements over to the new AdGroups (I recommend doing this), select the AdGroup that contains the Text Ads you want to use and click on the finish button.

Now AdWords Editor will have sorted and grouped all the keywords. Before you can post the changes to your AdWords account you will need to specify a minimum bid for the new AdGroups that were created. To do this click on the “AdGroups” tab and select all of the new AdGroups that were created. Then at the bottom of AdWords Editor enter a new max bid in the text area titled “Maximum CPC Bid”.

When you’re finished click on the “Post Changes” button.

Google Analytics

I recommend watching this introduction video by Google about AdWords Analytics:

Google Analytics is a free service that Google offers that allows website owners to track very detailed visitor information about their website. You can view the Google Analytics section by clicking on the “Analytics” tab near the top of your Google Account.

In order to use Google Analytics, you are required to place a small code on each webpage you want tracked.

This is a great tool to use for optimizing my website. Unfortunately, this tool is only available for website owners.

Analytics has so many features that it’s hard to mention them all. Here are some of the best features (in my opinion):

• Tells the location of your visitors
• What screen resolution, browser, color, and processors your visitors are using
• Number of returning visitors
• Webpages the visitors came from
• Conversion summaries
• Campaign performance
• Cost Per Click Analysis

For more information, you can always visit the Analytics webpage:
http://www.google.com/analytics/.

I recommend watching this video by Google that tells you how to set up your AdWords analytics for your account:

Unfortunately, this tool has not been extremely useful in targeting my accounts. It has only been handy one or two times for optimizing your website. If your website offers products where it would be nice to know locations and other visitor information, then I recommend this tool. I also recommend this tool to the website owners who don’t have tracking information from their web hosts. Otherwise I recommend staying with Google’s current Conversion Tracker tool.

Keyword Selection Tool

What makes this tool so great? This tool uses Google’s Quality Score and displays your best performing keywords based on their Quality Score. If you were to select a certain keyword, Google will search for other key phrases that are related to that keyword and then Google allows you to add them to your campaign. Even if you think there is no possible way that you could be missing a keyword I would still highly recommend that you use this tool. You will be amazed at how many keywords you have overlooked.

This tool also allows you to type in keywords that Google didn’t find on your website. This way you will be able to find thousands of extra relevant keywords that you didn’t even think of.

Have you ever wondered how many advertisers were advertising for a certain key phrase or how many people were searching for a keyword? We all have, but now thanks to Google’s new Keyword Tool we can finally find this valuable information.

Google will display two different types of keyword lists.

1. More Specific Keywords: This list is the list where you will find the largest amount of keywords that are most related to your campaign. You will probably select most if not all of these keywords to add to your AdGroup.

1. Additional Keywords to Consider: This is the list that will contain more broad keywords. I would recommend reading over this keyword list, but you will probably not select as many keywords as you did in the More Specific Keywords list.

Keyword Tool Selection Options

Currently Google offers many different selection options for the keyword tool. These options are all very important to take advantage of because they will give you valuable information which can help you to generate more profit.

You can access the keyword selection options by clicking on the keyword tool button, entering a keyword or phrase (in the examples below I used the keyword “laptop”), and then click on the “Get More Keywords” button.

Keywords Only / Default Selection

This is the default keyword selection. It allows you to:

• View the keywords in alphabetical order
• Add the keyword to your list
• Remove the keyword from the list
• Notifies you if you already have the keyword in the same AdGroup or Campaign.
• Displays Search Volumes and Advertiser Competition levels.

I would only recommend using the “Keyword Only” selection if you are an absolute beginner and are feeling overwhelmed with the keyword selection process.

Cost / Ad Position Estimates Selection

The Cost and Ad Position Estimates selection gives you a rough estimate of your Average CPC and/or your Ad Position. Notice I said a rough estimate. Google’s ad cost and position estimates are usually very far from accurate. Look at the above screen shot for an example of what I mean. It would be very difficult to receive a first page ad position for the keyword laptop and notebook, while only paying $0.05 per click.

I would only recommend using this tool to find which keyword will be inactive for search before you add them to your list.

Global Search Volume Trends Selection

The “Global Search Volume Trends” selection is an extremely helpful selection. This tool allows you to view the popularity of a keyword and it shows you when that keyword is searched the most.

Why is this tool so great?

This keyword option allows you to know exactly when a product will sell the best. Look at the screenshot above. According to this data, people are more interested in purchasing laptops online from December to March. This means that I should focus on advertising for laptops more during those months. By giving you this information you can take full advantage of sales trends, by letting you know when and how long to advertise a product at its full potential.

I definitely recommend using this option, especially if you are advertising for seasonal products (sports, clothing, etc.).

Possible Negative Keywords Selection

The “Possible Negative Keywords” selection gives you the option to make the keywords listed a negative keyword match (-keyword). If you don’t know or remember what a negative keyword is, look in the “Keyword” section of this guide, under Matching Options’. I wouldn’t recommend using this tool unless you find a large amount of keywords in the Keyword Tool which are irrelevant to your product. An example of an irrelevant keyword for your product would be if you were advertising for Pepsi Cola and one of your keywords was “cola”. If this was the case then you would not expect many sales from people who searched for Coca-Cola, so to keep your advertisement from being viewed by anyone who was searching for Coca-Cola products, you would add the negative keyword coca to their keyword list. When you do this your advertisement will show anytime someone searched for Pepsi or Cola, but it will not show if anyone typed the word “coca” into their search phrase.

For more information about Google’s Keyword Tool, I recommend that you watch the following video from Google.

Google Accounts

Google currently offers three different account types for their AdWords Advertisers. These accounts range from letting you mange a single AdWords account to managing a thousand different accounts with one username and password. These accounts all have their benefits and disadvantages.

Google’s AdWords Account

This is the most common and most basic Google AdWords Account. It is the first account you sign up with and allows you to access at the most 25 different campaigns each containing up to 100 different AdGroups. This Account is ideal for people who manage advertisements for few webpages and allows a maximum of 50,000 to 60,000 keywords.

Benefits:

• Great for advertisers who have few advertisements.
• Easy user interface and easy to learn.
• Low cost $5 Sign up fee.

Google’s My Client Center Account

I recommend watching this video by Google about the My Client Center account:

Google offers AdWords Advertisers a different type of account setup called the My Client Center Account. This account allows advertisers to manage up to 1,000 different AdWords Accounts without having to sign out and sign in to each individual account to make changes. This account is perfect for those whose advertisements span over two or more different Google AdWords accounts and allows the account manager certain benefits.

Benefits:

• Great for advertisers who have more than one AdWords account, because it allows you to view two different accounts simultaneously without having to log in and log out.
• One login name and password can access up to 1,000 different Google Accounts.
• Can run reports over several different Google Accounts rather than just one account.
• Low cost $5 sign up fee.

Disadvantages:

• May be a little confusing for novice advertisers.
• Designed for advertisers who are interested in becoming a Google AdWords Professional.

Google’s Advertising Professionals Account

A Google Advertising Professionals Account is the most advanced account you can receive. Even though it is set up the same as a My Client Center account, it gives its advertisers more privileges than a My Client Center account. Advertising Professionals receive $6,000.00 in advertising vouchers from Google (60 vouchers worth $100 each). Advertising professionals are the only advertisers which can legally gain access to the Google Qualified Professionals logo, which can be used to advertise their professional status. Google requires advertisers to manage a My Client Center Account for 90 days, spend at least $1,000 in advertising during that period, and pass the Google Qualified Professionals Exam, before they will allow you to become a Qualified Google Advertising Professional.

Benefits:

• Great for advertisers who manage several different AdWords accounts. Allows you to view two different accounts simultaneously without having to log in and log out.
• One login name and password can access up to 1,000 different Google Accounts.
• Can run reports over several different Google Accounts rather than just one account.
• Google gives account holders $6,000.00 in advertising vouchers (60 vouchers worth $100 each). Can be used on any Google AdWords account less than two weeks old.
• Receive access to the Google Advertising Professionals Logo to display on your website, business card, etc. to help bring in more clients.

Disadvantages:

• Requires you to pass a Google Advertising exam, which is over 100 questions about all types of Google Paid Advertising. Exam costs $50 USD and you must make 75% or higher to pass.
• Must retake the exam every two years to keep your Professional Account and Status active.
• Less than 800 people world wide have become a Google Advertising Professional.