by John Rivers

Pay per click advertising (Google ads) must have caused more elation and sleepless nights than anything else on the web. The ‘blues’ are as the result of not organising a proper pay per click management strategy.

Market research,organising a list of relevant keywords, writing the ads and getting them uploaded to the web requires a lot of effort. Paying for clicks before organising a systematic program to determine how you should bid can lead to a very large hole being burnt into the credit card !

So your ads are on display, but in what position and are you paying too much per click ?

I should make it clear that the following pay per click strategy is my own and I follow it every day. It works for me but I cannot say for certain that it will work for you in your market or that other strategies promoted by other marketers are not as good or better.

I like to start my ppc campaign with around 100 to 200 ad groups, each containing two ads and just one keyword phrase (minimum two words) in it’s three forms. With two ads, you monitor the ‘click through rate’ of them both so that you can replace the poorest performing one. Your keyword must be the headline of your ad and where it is more than twenty five characters long it will be substituted with a suitable phrase you have ready. Keywords, as I mentioned, can be used in three formats, phrase - “keyword”, exact - [keyword] and broad, which has nothing around it.

My opening bid is 2% of the profit I will generate from a sale - what does that mean ? Lets take a situation where my profit on a sale is $30, two per cent of that is sixty cents - my first bid.

In your adwords account, locate and click on ‘edit campaign settings’. At the bottom of this page you have the option to chose the countries where you want your ad to appear. Switch off the ‘content’ option, put the ads on ‘rotate’ and set your daily budget. Only you can decide how much this will be but please remember to multiply the amount you choose by thirty and be certain that you can easily afford that per month.

For ads to appear ‘above the fold’ they need to be in positions 1 to 5 usually, but I advise you not to aim for the top two spots, you will pay less and still get plenty of clicks in 3rd, 4th and 5th place. The techniques I use to get my ads in the right positions and at the right cost will be the subject of my next article.

Making good money by advertising using Google Adwords ads is possible but only with the right per per click management strategy.

About the Author:
John Rivers has lots more inside secrets about pay per click management, including why you need to get a hold of the best adwords keyword tool out there..