Sending Users to a Landing Page:

The conversion process works best when you remove unnecessary steps. By
sending a user to a focused landing page versus your home page you can improve
conversion rates.

Use Capital Letters:

Google will allow you to use capital letters at the beginning of words in the title and
in the description. Using capital letters at the beginning of each word in your ad title
and ad description can also help boost your clickthrough rate. Most people do not
capitalize short words like an, or, and a.

Split Testing:

Google will allow you to test multiple ads at any given time. Every week you should
try to make a new ad and place it up against the best ad from the week prior. If you
have an ad that is getting an exceptionally low click through rate and another
pulling decent you can usually get rid of the bad ad after a few clicks on it.

Perry Marshall created a free online Split Testing tool which will help guide you using
mathematics to determine if it is whether or not you have collected enough data do
stop testing. He said he usually recommends waiting until it is at least 90% to 95%
sure of the results (as determined by the software).

You can also make two copies of the same ad and send it to different URLs to test
different landing pages.

When split testing you will want to turn off the auto optimization tool and you may
want to limit the test only to Google so you can get the most accurate data.

More Advanced Ad Testing:

I do not work with large enough accounts to have put extreme effort into some of
my tracking, but a few other ad testing options are:

•
Split Testing: explained above, but you can keep doing split testing over
and over again, creating smarter and smarter ads
•
A/B/C testing: make two identical copies of one of the ads and compare
it to another. Run until the CTR of the same ads are nearly identical and
then compare that rate to the other ad.
•
Quadrents: use two title sets and two description sets which make 4 ads.
Leave them unoptimized and run the AdWords account until a clear
leading ad is found.
•
Taguchi Method: a bit complex for this guide, as I have not deeply
researched it and most people probably will not use it, but the Taguchi
Method allows you to set up a large matrix of variables and determine what
the best combinations are using advanced mathematics and minimal
testing.
If You Are Having Problems with a Word:

For your highest traffic and most expensive keywords you will usually want to make
custom ads specific to each one. If you have a word that is giving you problems in
an ad group, remove it from the ad group and set it out on its own.

Off the start you can try to exact match it for a while. If you try multiple exact
match specific targeted ads for that keyword and still can not get it to run then that
might not be a word worth running an ad for.

Cheap Traffic:

Some AOL users have type search term here in their search queries. Some of them
accidentally run the word here into their search term, such as hereViagra or
hereYourTerm. Some people search for stuff like NBA Basketball.com. There is a ton
of cheap targeted traffic if you are creative.

Affiliate Ads:

Google only allows one affiliate or merchant ad per keyword per URL. This means
that affiliates do not need to identify their relationships in the ads and whoever has
the ad with the highest effective click price between the merchant and all of their
affiliates gets their ad displayed.
Affiliates can still have their ads show up if they create white label affiliate sites with
information about the products.

Creative PPC Techniques:

Mikkel wrote a few good ppc tips in this article. A few pointers he offered were:

•
Think creatively.
•
Do not point PPC ads at landing pages.
•
You may be able to cloak pages that the ad editors see.
•
Do not use the budget function.
Someone at ThreadWatch also mentioned that some of your most creative
AdWords ad ideas might be best to try out on a Friday evening so that they may be
able to run a full weekend before being spotted by an editor.

If you have the top premium AdSense position and also rank well in the organic
listings you can help bump the #2 premium ad position down to the right rail if
you edit your copy. It may take up to 3 days for an editor to read your new ad and
raise both ads to the top of the results again.

Getting Quicker Business Feedback:

When starting a B2B account it is often a bad idea to start an account on a
weekend. Monday is usually the biggest spending day for most B2B purchases and
is the best day to start your ads.

Lead generation may be a smarter way to dive into Google AdWords than trying to
sell affiliate products. Since it is common to have a lead generation rate of 10-20%
the feedback loop is about 10 times as fast as selling a product that may convert at
1-2%.

Google AdWords Competitive Analysis Software:

Google does not give its users tons of information about competing sites. Recently
a couple software products hit the market which ping Google and determine the ad
display rate and average ad position for your ads and competing ads. You can use
this information to see which competitors are most sophisticated and what
positions have the most competition and perhaps profits.

AdArchiver is a cheaper lower end product. AdGooroo is a higher end more
sophisticated system. Google also released an API which allows people to build
interfacing software.

Bidding on Your Brand (Important):

If you rank at the top for your brand name should you also buy the associated ad?
My answer is usually yes for the following reasons: If you have affiliates make sure you are not getting in bidding wars with
them. Create a consistent affiliate marketing plan that makes sense.
Creating Ad Groups:

•
Your most competitive or most important terms should usually be in their
own ad groups so they are easy to monitor and so you can write ad copy
that is precisely targeted to those terms.
•
You may want to create a group for misspelled terms.
•
You may want to create a group for mistyped domain names.
•
You may want to create ad groups based on personality types.
•
You may want to create ad groups for your most important products.
•
You may want to create ad groups for seasonal or special promotions.
•
You may want to create ad groups based on personality types.
•
If you are bidding on contextual networks as well some people also use
different groups for contextual ads due to different ad value and the desire
to use different ad copy.
There are many ways you can split up your account. By creating and tracking
various ad groups it makes it easier to monitor your return on investment, and
adjust you’re your ad spend accordingly.

Deep Keyword Research:

Using deep keyword research is hugely important.

Yahoo! Search marketing places exact matches ahead of broad matches, so if your
competitor bids $2 for widgets and you bid 11 cents for buy widgets when people
search for buy widgets your ad will list above your competitors ads even though
your ad is a lower price. This allows you to get more targeted clicks at a lower price,
which logarithmically increases your advertising return on investment.
There is something to be said for simplicity and ease of management, but using
targeted permutations of your most important terms should drastically increase
your ROI.

With Google AdWords they allow dynamic keyword insertion (mentioned above),
that allows the search query to drive the ad copy. That increases your chances of
having a higher clickthrough rate and lowering your cost per click if you bid on
many variations of your most important Google AdWords keywords.

Below is a chart of some example term ideas (with the words slightly modified) and
the associated conversion data from an actual AdWords account. Notice how the
cost per conversion drops off when modifiers are added to the root term. By
bidding on these additional keyword phrases I am paying less for higher targeted
leads.