I recieved this question recently.

I personally don't schedule ads to run at certain times of the day. Mine run all the time.

Using that feature correctly requires you to have lots of data on clicks and conversions. The idea is that you spot a particular point in the day where you are getting more conversions, then you target that time of day.

If you don't know a specific time to target based on data, then it likely won't help.

The only broad timing decision you could make is if your product or service is geared toward a particular geographic region. For example, suppose your website is geared toward North American consumers. You could elect to run your ads only between 8am EST and 9pm PST which are the prime hours for American consumers to use the internet.

This would prevent your ads from running during prime hours in Europe or India. It might also prevent robots running overnight clicking your ads.

I would recommend controlling your spending with the daily budget. Set your campaign to show ads as quickly as possible, and let them shut off when the daily limit is reached. You can collect data on the clicks you do get and split test to improve your sales copy and get a higher CTR. Eventually that will reduce the CPC and allow your ads to run longer.

In addition, you can also improve your ads and landing pages to increase quality as my guide recommends. That will also lower your CPC.

I was recently asked the following question.

Try using "position preference". You can set it to only allow ads in the #1 position, which should be the "green area". Adwords will manage the CPC so that your ads appear only in that position. You can limit the daily budget to control costs.

Read more about position preference from Google themselves

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36482

Google has not released any information regarding acceptable keyword density. But, the accepted theory is that your maximum keyword density is 5%. That means if you have 200 words on your landing page, no more than 10 of them should be the keyword. Five percent is a high density and it's difficult to exceed that mark.

I generally look for a keyword density anywhere between 2% and 5%. That range is assumed to be good for Google SEO and Google Adwords.

I tend to make sure my keyword appears...

1. in the page url
2. in the page title
3. in the meta description and meta keyword tags
4. in the h1 tags

If I've done all four of the those, I find that I can have naturally written content without concern for keyword density and still get good quality scores.

This is a video from Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google. It's a great in depth explanation of how the Adwords Ad Auction system works.

He explains how vital the Quality Score is to a Successful Adwords Campaign. The video explains the Quality Score is calculated. It also explains how it plus your CPC determines ad position. Quality score is the reason your Adwords Campaign will be a success, or the reason it will fail. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide show you how to improve your Quality Scores and Save Money. Request your copy of the Free guide.

You know I recommend a strategy of one adgroup per keyword. This strategy allows you to have a landing and ad tailored to your keyword. This creates relevancy between the keyword, the adgroup and the landing page. Relevancy translates into higher quality scores. Higher quality scores mean lower CPC, which saves you money. Higher quality also translates to higher ad positions, thus getting you more traffic.

We've gone over what it takes to create relevant landing pages. You optimize a page for Adwords relevance the same way you would optimize for Search Engines (SEO). You use the keyword in the page filename. You use the keyword in the page title and meta tags. You use the keyword in the heading tags. You use the keyword within the content of the page.

But do you know how to create a relevant ad? There is one technique. That technique is to use the keyword in the ad as much as possible. Adwords wants to see the keyword in the ad, plain and simple.

You might be thinking you'll just use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) and that will get your keyword in the ad. But it won't work. First DKI works with the consumers the search term, not your keyword. Unless you are using exact match, this two may not be the same thing. Second, DKI doesn't count toward quality. Adwords is doing the substitution; they know you are using DKI. Adwords has made it clear that DKI won't boost the quality of your ad.

On a side note, the beauty of the one ad group per keyword strategy is you know what the consumers search term is without DKI. If you sue phrase and exact matches, you know the search term is your keyword or at the very least contains it.

Regardless of that fact, when you work with one ad group per keyword, you can literally put the keyword in your ad. This is what will signal Adwords that you have highly relevant ad.

For example, imagine your keyword is "Rome Hotels". Your ad could then look something like this...

headline:       Rome Hotels
description 1:  Planning a trip to Rome?
description 2:  Find hotels now.
display url:    www.MyDomain.com/Rome-Hotels
dest. url:      http://www.MyDomain.com/Rome-Hotels.html

For our purposes here, you can ignore the description 1 and description 2 lines. You'll need good sales copy there. You refine that copy with split testing. But sales copy is a different topic.

For now, notice how many time the keyword Rome Hotels appears in the ad.

First, you see it in the headline. Were you to use DKI, you'd also put it in the headline. The idea is that the consumer is likely to click the ad when the headline matches the search term. With one adgroup per keyword you get the exact same benefit.

But, the ad above also gets a quality score boost from Adwords. Why? Because the keyword is literally appearing the ad itself. It is not sales copy or DKI.

Second, the keyword is the display url. The display url has to be a valid url, and spaces aren't valid. Therefore the spaces have been replaced with dashes. Both Adwords and a consumer can still identify the keywords with dashes. That means we again get a quality score boost from Adwords when it sees the keyword. Plus, we display the keyword to the consumer again, further compelling them to click.

Finally, the keyword is in the destination url. The consumer won't see the destination url but Adwords will. Both the ad and landing page will get a quality score boost for having the landing page filename the same as the keyword.

Every website about Adwords gives some opinion about what keyword matches to use. Some say never use the broad match and stick to phrase match. Most advise to qualify phrase or broad match Keywords with negative keywords. But you rarely have anyone talking about the exact match. Lets examine the benefits of the under used exact match.

First, you never have to worry about Negative Keywords with exact match. If you are after the keyword "quality score" you don't need to worry about eliminating "air" or "sound". If the consumer used those terms, it wouldn't trigger the exact match. It is already qualified, and it increases as you get more long tailed.

Second, you can skip all the Dynamic Keyword Insertion crap. Sure, DKI is awesome if you are lazy. Look at some of the big names using it, like Target. They just put the token in the headline and have a generic ad for Target. Remember that DKI does nothing for the quality score. What's the plus? You get to have the consumers search term right there in the ad text. That's good for generating a high CTR.

Guess what? Use exact match on a single keyword in a single ad group, and you'll know what the search term was. That's the beauty of exact match. You can put the search term in your ad because you know exactly what it will be. You'll get the same the CTR increase you would with DKI. Plus, you'll get the quality score increase of having your keyword in the ad text that DKI won't do. That gives exact match a leg up on DKI.

You'll also know exactly what search term hit your landing page. You can tailor your content for the exact search term. You can accomplish the same with DKI passing the search term as a parameter. However with DKI you'll never be able to anticipate what the search term would be. You wind up with grammatically poor content.

In a hot market you'll want both the quality score increase and the CTR increase. It'll allow you to bid on keywords that might well be beyond the scope of your budget with phrase or broad matches.

Give exact match a try with your best keywords. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

You may be thinking that exact match sounds great, but you don't want to have to create a new ad group for every keyword and write a tailored ad and landing page. If you want to automate ad group and ad creation, check out the campaign creator tool at adwords-marketing-tool.com

I recently launched a new website and Adwords campaign. My ad groups, keywords and landing pages have an 8 out of 10 quality score. This is a brand new website and a brand new campaign. Adwords calls this a "great" Quality Score. I'll describe the exact steps I took so you can duplicate them and get great quality scores as well.

First, the market is highly competitive. It's a market that all major news outlets said was hot and growing online in December 2008 despite the recession. I have over 500 keywords. I'll talk more about them in a minute, but I want to give you an idea of the scale of the campaign.

I started with the landing pages. I have unique, tailored landing page for each keyword. The whole key to a great quality score is having relevant ads and landing pages for your keywords. I recommend a strategy of having only one keyword per ad group. The entire strategy is freely available at adwords-marketing-tool.com. The strategy guide covers in detail all the concepts I'm about to summarize for creating a landing page. Get your free strategy guide at adwords-marketing-tool.com.

I'll briefly describe the steps to build a tailored landing page. You start with domain relevant to your market. Plus your domain should only be about your market. You don't want a domain, or a subdomain that covers many topics. Keep your domain targeted. Next, each page has the keyword as the landing page. For example, if the keyword is "college football", the page is named college-football.php. That puts the keyword in the url.

For each page, I have the keyword in the title tags, keywords meta tag, and description meta tag. I also have the keyword in the heading (h1) tags on the page. There is content tailored for the keyword on the landing page.

I have just said I have over 500 tailored landing pages. I did not write each by hand. Instead, I used the advanced strategy guide and the techniques described inside to automate this task. I spent about 25 hours over 5 days during Christmas to launch this website. It would have taken me weeks to create landing pages manually. Visit adwords-marketing-tool.com to get the advanced strategy guide and learn how you can automate website and campaign creation.

The last thing I did for each landing page was add a link to my sitemap, contact us and privacy policy pages. Google wants your website to look like more than a single page. It also wants you to be transparent and offer contact info and policies.

The next step was to tackle the keywords. I had about 20 high traffic keywords. These were not long tailed keywords. They were the top volume producers for the market. I wanted to append U.S. cities to the front of each keyword. This would turn high volume keywords into long tails, and simultaneously target geographic areas. This was the best way to attack this highly competitive market.

I used the free Adwords Bracket Tool at adwords-marketing-tool.com to generate my keywords. The free tool lets you combine a list of prefixes (or suffixes) to your keywords. I used the tool to append cities to front of my keywords. Imagine turning keyword x into "New York x, Los Angeles x, and Chicago x" automatically.

Finally, I need to create the Adwords campaign. Again, I used the campaign creator tool at adwords-marketing-tool.com. This generated the entire campaign in seconds, keywords, landing pages, ads and all.

That's it. That's how I generated a new campaign for a new website and got 8 out of 10 quality scores.

I still have some work to do. First, the market is so competitive, the expense is climbing rapidly. The good news is I have CTRs anywhere from 5% to 20%. I'm bidding a high CPC to get that high CTR for the first few weeks. Over the long haul, I will be able to lower the CPC and still have top placement due to the outstanding CTRs. Plus, I have is 8 out of 10 for 90% of the keywords, the others are 7. I do not have any 9 or 10 scores. I'm still chasing those.

The golden rule of Google Adwords is relevance. Google will grant you low minimum bids if you master the science of relevance. Without relevance you'll be paying too much per click and your competition will beat you in the market.

The google search engine is the undisputed search engine leader. Google beat out Yahoo, Altavista and MSN in the search engine market by building a better mousetrap. Google's search engine algorithm is a complex formula using many variables to return pages highly relevant to the search term used. The Google search engine is the best search for pages relevant to the search term. That's how they beat their competition. Relevance.

Google uses the same principal with Adwords. Advertisers with a message relevant to the search term are rewarded. Advertisers who are not relevant are allowed to compete, but they pay much higher rates per click.

Google determines relevance by two primary methods. The first is by examining each of you keywords and ads. Google checks the keyword, the ad headline and text, and the landing page to determine how relevant they are to each other. An automated program, or robot if you prefer, will crawl your landing page and determine if your page is relevant to the search term. A relevant page may only need to bid five or ten cents per click. A page not relevant will have to pay ten dollars in a competitive market.

The second method Google uses to measure relevance is the ads click through rate (CTR). Every time Adwords shows your ad to consumers, Google records that it gave our ad an impression. Every time a consumer click on the ad, Google records the clicks. The CTR is the number of clicks divided by the impressions. Adwords will assume that if consumers are clicking your ad frequently then the ad is relevant to the search term and will adjust the quality score upwards. Adwords will adjust the quality score down if the ad is not getting clicks. There will be more information on the CTR later.

You can verify the keyword, ad and landing page relevance for yourself with an experiment. Take a competitive keyword and create an Adwords ad for it. For example, try adwords marketing as your competitive keyword. Go and create an Adwords ad for it and set the landing page to some website that is not about adwords marketing. Any website will do, as long as it's not about internet marketing. What did Google set the first page bid at, five dollars, ten dollars or more?

Adwords will tell you why you got such a high first page bid. The magnifying glass icon next to you keyword will give you diagnostic information. Adwords will tell you your quality score on a scale of one to ten. The quality score is how Google has scored the relevance of you keyword, ad and landing page. In this experiment, and in the example on the right, you have a poor quality score.

Adwords will event provide details of your quality score. Click on the details and recommendation link. Google will tell you your landing page is not relevant, and perhaps identify other problems.

You have just created poor ad. Go ahead and delete the ad group and campaign. You are not about to pay that much per click.

Start another Adwords experiment. Create a new campaign and a new ad group for adwords marketing. Use only that keyword as a phrase match. You can also add an exact match for the same keyword. Do not use the broad match. Do not use any other keywords except the phrase and exact match.

This time, use the keyword adwords marketing in the ad headline, and only this keyword. As you'll see later, having the keyword in the ad itself boost the quality score.

Use the landing page http://www.adwords-marketing-tool.com/adwords-marketing/adwords-marketing.aspx as the destination URL. The URL is complex, and for a specific reason, but more on that later. This is a customized landing page on this website, tailored for the keywords adwords marketing.

The landing page is now highly relevant to the keyword. Adwords rewards you with a lower minimum bid. The same keyword went from ten dollars per click to much lower. Stop and pick your jaw off the floor.

You may not get the same low first page bid or a 7 out of 10 quality score as in the screenshot. First, you are probably not using all the proper techniques in your ad. You'll learn all of those techniques in just a moment. Second, the campaign in the screenshot has an established CTR, which assists the quality score. The ad you just created doesn't have any impressions or CTR.

You'll notice in the screen capture that you don't even have a good or great quality score. The quality score is just ok. The keyword adwords marketing is extremely competitive. There are many existing pages on the web about adwords marketing with established traffic and backlinks. These pages have good and great quality scores. You are not going to rise above these pages on day one. The keyword is simply too broad and too competitive. That's why the quality score is only ok. Build a solid Adwords click through rate (CTR), develop organic traffic and get some backinks and you can achieve a good or great quality score for competitive keywords. Alternatively, select a more specific and targeted keyword. You can become a good or great quality website for targeted keywords.

You are now spending much less than you were with a poor ad. A reduction from ten dollars to ten cents is like paying one dollar for what you used to pay a hundred dollars for. The savings are amazing.

There are three main components to any Google Adwords ad. You'll want to examine each part of the ad. The parts of the ad are listed below.

1. The keyword or phrase that triggers the ad to appear
2. The landing page the ad will send the consumer to
3. The actual text of the ad, or sales copy if you prefer

The key to the strategy is get all three parts of the ad working in harmony. A good keyword, a focused ad and a highly relevant landing page will get you a good or great quality score. A good quality score will allow you to bid very little for your keywords. You will be able to get traffic at a fraction of the cost for an uneducated advertiser.

You are now ready to proceed with the Free Adwords Strategy.

Websites thrive on traffic. Business websites need customers. Blogs need consumers to read them and subscribe.

As a website owner, you'll probably spending a large portion of your time driving traffic to you website. There are several ways to bring traffic. You can optimize pages for the search engines. You can write articles and submit them. You can use social networking to build relationships on the internet.

One very important method of driving traffic is Google Adwords. Adwords has one important difference from all the other methods mentioned. Adwords costs money. You design an ad for your website, and then Google places your ad on their search engine results, in the paid or sponsored links section. You pay Google every time someone clicks your ad.

However, Adwords has advantages that offset the costs. Why should you use Google Adwords to drive traffic? What are the arguments for Adwords?

1) Google Adwords will start sending your website traffic immediately.
It takes time for a website to rank high enough to appear on organic search results. It takes time to write articles and submit them. It takes time to build a social network. All the other methods of driving traffic require an investment of time. These alternatives require hours of work to establish, and then may take weeks or months to show results.

Adwords will start sending traffic to your website today. As soon as you create a campaign and an ad, you can begin getting traffic.

2) Google will help you every step of the way.
Google makes a significant portion of their revenue from Adwords ads. Google makes money by you participating in Adwords and wants you to succeed. Google publishes user guides, blogs and other information to make using Adwords as easy as possible.

3) Adwords provides the information about your campaign that you need to succeed.
Adwords provides keyword research tools so you know what consumers are searching for. Adwords helps you evaluate your campaign after it is created. Adwords supplies you with the impressions, click through rates and costs of you campaign. It informs you of the Quality Score for your ads, on a scale of 1 to 10. It offers advice on how to improve the Quality Score.

4) You can control the cost of Adwords with the proper strategy.
Knowing how to obtain a good Quality Score for your ad can reduce your cost per click. A well optimized campaign can deliver traffic for just a few cents per click. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide describes step by step how to optimize your ads.

5) Anyone can obtain the top ad positions.
Adwords values quality over price. Adwords doesn't simply award the highest ad position to the highest bidder. The ad quality score is the primary factor in ad positions. That means you can advertise in highly competitive markets, using a good Quality Score to beat out other advertisers who are simply spending more. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide reveals exactly how to get a good Quality Score.

Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in the later half of 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn What is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straight forward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will perform any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side rendering, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page on the client, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two request, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes to much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting
If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting
Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides at. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page
A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing whitespace. You can remove any unncessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size of the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation
Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page
Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page
As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, avoid the Content Network. A seasoned Adwords user may use it, but track your ROI closely. I'm willing to bet you aren't getting much. If you are beginner, stay away from the Content Network. Some other marketer will tell you to separate bids for Search and Content, but that just doesn't address the underlying problem.

The reason to avoid the Content Network is the poor quality of traffic. Content Network traffic is traffic from Adsense Publishers. Adsense Publishers are individual websites that have put up Adsense ads and are collecting revenue for every click.

The problem is that Adsense Publishers don't care about the quality of traffic they send. I'm speaking from experience, as I participate in Adsense. The prevailing school of Adsense thought is to make your Adsense ads blend into your content. As a publisher, you don't want visitors to recognize the links as ads. The goal here is to make it look just like a regular link, and not an ad to another website. In other words, you are tricking the consumer. This is a completely valid Adsense tactic and is in wide use. But, consider the visitor who got tricked into clicking the link. How motivated is that visitor? Do you think that confused visitor is likely to provide any ROI?

In addition, all kinds of less than valid tactics have been employed to get Adsense clicks. The most common a few years back was to place graphics over the ads, which makes the links look less like ads and further confuses visitors. Other tactics include make Adsense ads look like navigation links. I'm sure you've seen these that look like navigation tabs or a left navigation menu.

Next you have the Adsense farm or Made for Adsense websites. These are the websites that are nothing but Adsense ads. Here are a few examples...

• best3websites.com
• ToSeekA.com
• seekful.com

Are you seriously going to pay for traffic from these spam websites?

Finally there is the fraud issue. We've all heard of the fraud that occurs with Adsense. I've read that 30% of clicks may be fraudulent, but I have no evidence to support that number. But, I can guarantee that there is some fraud happening. You simply can't avoid it entirely.

Here is a quote from a comment by Michael Martinez on Matt Cutts blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/better-click-tracking-with-auto-tagging/

Just separate search bids from content bids. Every time someone recommends the Content Network, they acknowledge the above problems, but then they say just separate the bids like it is a cure all. That doesn't address the quality issues. The traffic is not going to convert. Sure, you can pay $0.05 per click versus $0.50 per click, but you are still getting low quality. Do you want to throw away even $0.05 per click or would you rather not participate?

Rick Strahl rants about his poor quality traffic on his blog http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/302826.aspx.

If your advice is to use the Content Network or simply separate the bids, you are going to have to produce the statistical evidence that you are getting an ROI from the Content Network.

Use a placement campaign instead. The alternative to the pure Content Network campaign is the placement campaign. Adwords allows you to hand pick the websites your ads will appear on. You can pick reputable websites that prominently display ads. Reputable websites do not engage in click fraud. You can weed out all of the Made for Adsense websites.

I recommend you just opt out of the content network. If you want Adsense traffic, use a placement campaign. If you simply must use the Content Network, track your ROI and watch it close. Make sure you are getting a return on your investment.

Google began determining a Quality Score per search for Adwords Ads in September of 2008. Prior to this time, a Quality Score was determined once and used across multiple searches. Determining Quality Score per search gave Google the opportunity to use geo-targeting. Learn what this means and how you can use it to your advantage.

Geo-targeting is when Google boosts an Ads Quality Score, thus giving it higher ad positions, traffic and CTR based on the geographic location of the advertisers. Google determines the geographic region of the consumer by checking his IP Address. Google must check the geographic region of the advertiser by the IP Address of the landing page. If both the consumer and advertiser are in the same geographic region, the advertisers ad will get a Quality Score boost.

Could geo-targeting hurt a nationwide or global campaign?

Potentially, yes. A nationwide or global campaign may face competition in metropolitan areas. If other advertisers in these metropolitan areas are deemed "local" merchants, they could get Quality Score boosts. This lowers the ad position of the nationwide or global advertiser. A lower position results in less clicks and less CTR. This damages the Quality Score further, resulting in lower positions and higher costs per click.

Is it good for the consumer?

One large appeal of the internet is to be able to view goods and service offered by merchants outside of a local area. If the internet offers no more diversification than driving around town, the internet is likely to some of it's appeal.

How can you use this to your advantage?

Adwords experts often recommend using a high cost per click for two or three weeks to get a high CTR. When a CTR becomes established, you can often lower the CPC bid with losing ad position because of the high CTR.

You could use a similar tactic with geo-targeting. You could limit your Adwords ad to run only in the geographic region where your hosting service is located. You would then get a Quality Score boost from the geo-targeting, result in higher ad positions. High ad positions translate to better CTR. Then after two or three weeks at a good CTR, you can allow you ad to running nationwide or globally while still reaping the benefits of a high CTR.

Also, you could have two identical or similar websites, one hosted on the East Coast of the United States and the other hosted on the West Coast. You could target your ads for specific regions, and send visitors to the correct website for their region. Perhaps more granularity is needed than just East Coast versus West Coast, but you get the idea.

You've read the Adwords Strategy Guide and Advanced Guide. You have implemented all the techniques to get to a Good Quality Score. But, Adwords has still assigned you a Poor Quality Score. What do you do? The following list of items are the things you want to check to raise that poor Quality Score.

(1) What is Adwords saying is wrong?

Adwords provides some diagnostic information when they assign a poor Quality Score. Take a look inside Adwords and see why Adwords gave you the poor score. When you know what Google thinks is wrong, you can attack the problem. Adwords reports on three categories of problems.

(a) Keyword relevance
Generally this means you have a poor CTR. More on how to fix it in a moment.

(b) Landing Page
This means your Landing Page is not tailored to your keyword. Create a unique landing page for your keyword and optimize the page for it.

(c) Landing Page Load Time
Your Landing Page was too slow. Start removing images, javascripts, stylesheets and any other elements not directly related to your message.

(2) How is the CTR of the ad?

Once you begin to get traffic (impressions) of your ads, the CTR becomes a major factor in the quality score. Google is letting the human consumers determine if your ad is relevant to their searches. If the ad is relevant, human consumers click your ad and the CTR goes up. If the human consumers don't click your ad, the CTR goes down. Google alters the quality score based on the CTR. It's a survival of the fittest ad when you begin to get impressions.

The rule is you must have a half percent CTR to maintain a Quality Score. But, I recommend shooting for a 2% or 3% CTR. If you don't have a CTR of at least 0.5% you should do one of the following...

(a) Improve the sales copy of the ad.
This is crucial if you want to keep the keyword. Your ad needs to be compelling enough to make consumer want to click it. If you don't have a 0.5% CTR your ad isn't doing it's job.

(b) Increase the max CPC bid.
You can increase the max CPC to get a higher ad position. A higher CPC bid means higher ad position, more traffic, and (hopefully) more CTR. After you have achieved a CTR of 2 or 3% for two weeks, you can start lowering you CPC bid because the CTR is likely boosting your Quality Score, and you can maintain the higher ad position without spending as much.

(c) Delete the keyword.
The Quality Score of your entire campaign can be damaged by poor performing keywords. Delete them if you can't keep the CTR above 0.5%.

(3) Revise your Landing Page.

Can you optimize the landing page more? I assume you have the keyword in the page title, meta tags and heading tags. Have you used it throughout your sales copy as well? Adwords likes to see the keyword in the content. Assuming you have read the Advanced Guide, you can still use PHP to dynamically insert the keyword just like you did for the page title and meta tags.

You know that tailoring your Adwords ad and landing page to your keyord is the way to achieve a good Quality Score. This is the major consideration when starting a new campaign. You also know that the CTR of your keyword is important to maintain a good Quality Score.

But, what else can you do to boost your Quality Score. Assuming you've done the above, what else can you do to get a leg up on the competition? Here you'll find several tactics designed to boost your Quality Score even further.

(1) Have a link to your sitemap on your landing page
Google has said "Develop an easily navigable site." This means you need your landing pages to link to a sitemap of your website.

Normally, you don't want to give a consumer an alternative to taking your desired action (sign-up for your mailing list, buy a product, etc.) by having some unrelated link on your landing page. But Google wants you to provide a way for the consumer to link to the rest of your website. In other words, Google wants you to have more than just a single landing page visible to the consumer.

You still don't want much navigation on your website. But you can put a single link to a sitemap on your landing page. This link should be below the fold (down to where you'd need to scroll down to see it), preferably past your sales copy as the last thing on the page. Don't be afraid to make the font smaller as most footer links tend to be of a small font.

(2) Have a link to a "Privacy Policy" page and "Contact Us" page.
Google states "Most internet users are concerned with understanding and controlling how websites use their personal information." Google wants you to be transparent, and inform your customers what you tend to do with their personal information.

Create a page named "privacy-policy.htm" on your website, this will help Google identify it. Copy an existing policy from some other website and modify it for your website. Link to this page from your landing page. Again, put the link below the fold and at the end of your sales copy. You can use a smaller font for the link.

Google also wants you to have contact page to make it easy for a customer to reach you. Name the page "contact-us.htm" to help Google recognize it. Include a mailing address, phone number and email address. Link to the page from your landing page.

If you want to take this tactic to the extreme, you might also try "Terms of Use", "Terms and Conditions", "About Us", "Shipping Policy" or "Return Policy" pages if applicable.

(3) Page Load time
Google now considers page load time as a factor in the Quality Score. Remove unneeded elements to keep your page lean, and therefore fast. Don't have too many images.

(4) Geographic targeting
Google now reevaluates the Quality Score on every search. Part of the Quality Score is the geographic location, and Google will boost local merchants. Google knows the consumers IP Address and is able to tell the location from it.

Appending city or state names to your keywords, and then tailoring ads and landing pages for your new keywords may increase you Quality Score.

Plus, you could limit your campaign to your local area. This would diminish traffic, but it could boost your Quality Score.

Starting off with a $1.00 cost per click sounds high doesn't it? It is, and that's the point.

You want to start your Adwords campaign with a high cost per click. For anyone on a marketing budget, that certainly sounds counter intuitive. But the simple truth is you are looking to save money in the long run.

Setting an initial high cost per click is one of the best kept secrets of the Adwords industry. Your quality score for any keyword is largely determined by the number of consumers who click your ad. Google allows the marketplace to determine the best ads in a Darwinian survival of fittest game. The more clicks your ad gets per impression, the more Google increase the quality score.

Let’s assume you've already optimized your Adwords ads and landing pages according to the Adwords Strategy Guide. When you do so, your ad starts with a high quality score. This is important so that you will get better ad positions and more traffic for a much lower cost.

But if you bid a low cost per click your ad is going to show at lower ad positions. That means your get impressions, but since you are not in the top 3 ad positions you are going to get fewer clicks. Impressions without clicks lowers the CTR. Lower CTR causes Google to think the ad is not relevant and lower the quality score. You need a CTR of at least a half percent.

Instead, you start with a high initial cost per click. You bid for the top three ad positions, or perhaps the top ad position. Keep in mind you'll still get the top spot cheaper with the Adwords Strategy Guide than without out. Now you are getting many clicks per impression and your CTR is on the rise. Your quality score goes up.

About two weeks after the launch of your campaign you can begin to slowly lower the click per click. Your high CTR will allow you maintain your top three position while the cost per click is dropping. As long as the CTR remains high, you can keep dropping the cost per click and still maintain your ad position.

You will have a few weeks of a high cost per click. However, in the long run you will be able to have cheaper costs per click because of the CTR you captured in those first few weeks.

Plus, you also know that Adwords is a Vickery Auction. That means you'll only pay what is need to beat the competition. So even if you bid a $1.00 CPC a long-tail keyword, odds are you'll never pay anywhere near $1.00 per click. Of course you'll have to keep an eye on it, because the competition can change at any time.

Save money and slash your Google Adwords costs while driving more traffic.

The golden rule of Google Adwords is relevance. Google will grant you low minimum bids if you master the science of relevance. Without relevance you'll be paying too much per click and your competition will beat you in the market.

The google search engine is the undisputed search engine leader. Google beat out Yahoo, Altavista and MSN in the search engine market by building a better mousetrap. Google's search engine algorithm is a complex formula using many variables to return pages highly relevant to the search term used. The Google search engine is the best search for pages relevant to the search term. That's how they beat their competition. Relevance.

Google uses the same principal with Adwords. Advertisers with a message relevant to the search term are rewarded. Advertisers who are not relevant are allowed to compete, but they pay much higher rates per click.

Google determines relevance by two primary methods. The first is by examining each of you keywords and ads. Google checks the keyword, the ad headline and text, and the landing page to determine how relevant they are to each other. An automated program, or robot if you prefer, will crawl your landing page and determine if your page is relevant to the search term. A relevant page may only need to bid five or ten cents per click. A page not relevant will have to pay ten dollars in a competitive market.

The second method Google uses to measure relevance is the ads click through rate (CTR). Every time Adwords shows your ad to consumers, Google records that it gave our ad an impression. Every time a consumer click on the ad, Google records the clicks. The CTR is the number of clicks divided by the impressions. Adwords will assume that if consumers are clicking your ad frequently then the ad is relevant to the search term and will adjust the quality score upwards. Adwords will adjust the quality score down if the ad is not getting clicks. There will be more information on the CTR later.

You can verify the keyword, ad and landing page relevance for yourself with an experiment. Take a competitive keyword and create an Adwords ad for it. For example, try adwords marketing as your competitive keyword. Go and create an Adwords ad for it and set the landing page to some website that is not about adwords marketing. Any website will do, as long as it's not about internet marketing. What did Google set the first page bid at, five dollars, ten dollars or more?

Adwords will tell you why you got such a high first page bid. The magnifying glass icon next to you keyword will give you diagnostic information. Adwords will tell you your quality score on a scale of one to ten. The quality score is how Google has scored the relevance of you keyword, ad and landing page. In this experiment, and in the example on the right, you have a poor quality score.

Adwords will event provide details of your quality score. Click on the details and recommendation link. Google will tell you your landing page is not relevant, and perhaps identify other problems.

You have just created poor ad. Go ahead and delete the ad group and campaign. You are not about to pay that much per click.

Start another Adwords experiment. Create a new campaign and a new ad group for adwords marketing. Use only that keyword as a phrase match. You can also add an exact match for the same keyword. Do not use the broad match. Do not use any other keywords except the phrase and exact match.

This time, use the keyword adwords marketing in the ad headline, and only this keyword. As you'll see later, having the keyword in the ad itself boost the quality score.

Use the landing page http://www.adwords-marketing-tool.com/adwords-marketing/adwords-marketing.aspx as the destination URL. The URL is complex, and for a specific reason, but more on that later. This is a customized landing page on this website, tailored for the keywords adwords marketing.

The landing page is now highly relevant to the keyword. Adwords rewards you with a lower minimum bid. The same keyword went from ten dollars per click to much lower. Stop and pick your jaw off the floor.

You may not get the same low first page bid or a 7 out of 10 quality score as in the screenshot. First, you are probably not using all the proper techniques in your ad. You'll learn all of those techniques in just a moment. Second, the campaign in the screenshot has an established CTR, which assists the quality score. The ad you just created doesn't have any impressions or CTR.

You'll notice in the screen capture that you don't even have a good or great quality score. The quality score is just ok. The keyword adwords marketing is extremely competitive. There are many existing pages on the web about adwords marketing with established traffic and backlinks. These pages have good and great quality scores. You are not going to rise above these pages on day one. The keyword is simply too broad and too competitive. That's why the quality score is only ok. Build a solid Adwords click through rate (CTR), develop organic traffic and get some backinks and you can achieve a good or great quality score for competitive keywords. Alternatively, select a more specific and targeted keyword. You can become a good or great quality website for targeted keywords.

You are now spending much less than you were with a poor ad. A reduction from ten dollars to ten cents is like paying one dollar for what you used to pay a hundred dollars for. The savings are amazing.

There are three main components to any Google Adwords ad. You'll want to examine each part of the ad. The parts of the ad are listed below.

1. The keyword or phrase that triggers the ad to appear
2. The landing page the ad will send the consumer to
3. The actual text of the ad, or sales copy if you prefer

The key to the strategy is get all three parts of the ad working in harmony. A good keyword, a focused ad and a highly relevant landing page will get you a good or great quality score. A good quality score will allow you to bid very little for your keywords. You will be able to get traffic at a fraction of the cost for an uneducated advertiser.

You are now ready to proceed with the Free Adwords Strategy.

Deleting poor performing keywords is essential to maintaining an Adwords campaign. Each month you need to check your keywords and remove the poor performing keywords. It's like pruning dead branches to make a healthier plant.

Do you delete the keywords, or move them around to alternate ad groups and campaigns? It's quite possible to move keywords using the Adwords Editor. It depends on how you want to maintain your campaign history.

Adwords makes decisions on the quality score based partly on past performance. By only moving poor keywords to a back burner ad group you help Adwords maintain your account history. Adwords rewards account that have been active longer and have a thorough history.

Moving keywords will not affect your performance history. Google's optimization will move keywords from one ad group to another.

Deleting a keyword can affect the performance history, and damage your account to the extent of removing that history.

But, deleting keywords performs other useful functions. First, it prevents new impressions of your ad. If the keyword was not performing well, impressions without clicks will be dragging down the CTR of your entire campaign. Second, erasing certain history data may be necessary for a clean, fresh start. But be warned, not all history is deleted. The Adwords help section says...

“If you delete a keyword and then add it back to your account in any other format or any other location (placing it in another ad group, for instance), our system will still take the keyword’s past account-wide performance into consideration. A poor performer can affect an entire ad group and/or campaign, if it is used multiple times.”

Dynamic keyword insertion is widely touted as the greatest thing to happen to Adwords in the last two years. The biggest benefit may be to your CTR. When a consumer sees the exact search term in your ad, it can be very compelling. CTRs will often rise when using dynamic keyword insertion.

However, dynamic keyword insertion is not for every situation. You must be careful not to over use or abuse it. The following problems can arise when using dynamic keyword insertion.

1) Dynamic Keyword Insertion doesn't increase the relevancy of your ad.

Adwords likes to see the keyword you are targeting in the headline or ad description. It will increase your quality score if the keyword is part of the ad. However, it doesn't consider dynamic keyword insertion to be the keyword. So you miss an opportunity to improve your quality score.

2) Dynamic Keyword Insertion can lead to poorly written ads.

You've seen ads that don't seem to make sense when you read them. You can be sure that such ads are using dynamic keyword insertion and that accounts for the poor sales copy. When you use a large keyword list, it's practically impossible to write a single ad that will make sense and be compelling.

3) Dynamic Keyword Insertion can't help your landing page.

You may have read that your landing page can benefit from dynamic keyword insertion. It can't. Your landing page is outside Adwords. Dynamic keyword insertion only occurs within Adwords. Want proof? Stick the token {KeyWord} on your landing page and view it a browser. The token will not be replaced.

4) Dynamic Keyword Insertion may make it difficult to track ad performance

Split testing your ads and sales copy is a proven method to improve your ads. However since you won't know exactly what you ad said at any given time, it makes if difficult to test changes to your sales copy.

You must be aware of the advantages and drawbacks before you use dynamic keyword insertion. You must then make an informed decision if it is right for your situation. You are generally better off without it if you customize your ads and landing pages.

Your domain name is virtual real estate. A relevant domain name will boost your Google quality score. Plus, using keywords in the destination url will also boost your quality score.

There is an old saying that the three most important things in selling real estate are location, location and location. This drives home the point that the one major concern of real estate is the location of the property. It's the number one rule of real estate.

On the internet, real estate is the domain name. If you want to receive traffic for a particular keyword or market, you must choose the proper real estate and location. That means you want a domain name related to your keywords and market. Ideally, your main keyword or phrase should be the domain name or part of it. This will put you in the right location for your market.

Both search engines and human consumers will respond to the proper domain name. Google Adwords will reward you with higher quality scores if it can match your domain name to the keywords. Plus, Google will also boost your organic search results for your keywords if the domain is relevant.

Human visitors will assume you are more of an authority with a relevant domain. Imagine an Adwords ad where the search term is part of the domain name. The consumer will recognize your domain as targeted for their search. That will increase the likelihood of a consumer clicking your ad.

One question with domain names is should you use dashes or underscores in your domain name. One school of thought is that the dashes or underscores will help search engines recognize individual keywords, and hopefully boost organic rankings and quality scores. The other argument is the human visitors are likely to forget dashes and underscores when typing a domain name in the browser address bar. The safest play is for you to buy both domain names, one with dashes and one without. You promote only the dashed domain name but you have the second domain in case someone types it without dashes. Domain names are less than $10 a year, so it's well worth the price.

In Google Adwords, the destination url and display url are important as well. A domain name cannot cover every keyword for your market. You must ultimately select one keyword or phrase as you domain name. But your destination url can include the keyword as part of the path. That way you have a relevant domain name plus a path that contains the keyword. If you give each keyword and separate destination page, then each keyword can be part of the path.

Similarly you can put the keyword in the display url. The display url is not used for anything other than display. It has no effect on the destination url. But, since it is displayed the consumer will see it. So, using the keyword as part of the display url will make your ad more appealing. The consumer will notice your url is targeted for their search term.

Dynamic keyword insertion can be used to place the search term in the display url. It can also be used in the destination url, but it should not be used there. Adwords will not give any benefit to a url that is using dynamic keyword insertion. It is not treated as the keyword itself when determining the quality score.

Abuse of adwords will lead consumers to regard Adwords as spam or worse. This could damage your campaigns and your bottom line. Discover how Adwords is being abused.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is encouraging poor Adwords use. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a relatively new feature of Google Adwords. Adwords will replace the token {keyword} in your ad headline, ad text or url with the consumer's search term.

But, this has lead to Adwords abuse. An advertiser can write a single ad in a single campaign or ad group, use dynamic keyword insertion and bid on every keyword imaginable. For example, have you noticed that ads for Target.com come up for just about anything you search for? Target is a large department store and will likely carry the products in question, so they aren't technically abusing Adwords. They are guilty of running a very poor campaign. Several ads read poorly when just using a template and ad. Plus the quality scores must be awful, unless Target.com has such a high CTR.

There are several websites abusing Adwords much worse. Many of these sites are just Adsense Arbitrage websites. That means they hope to pay very little for Google ads, and then display nothing but Adsense ads and hope to have an ROI. These websites have no content at all, and only display Adsense ads.

• all the automotive.com
• all the information.com
• best3websites.com
• ToSeekA.com
• seekful.com

Again, it is easy to assume the quality score should be low for sites with no content. You must assume that these websites are paying top dollars for clicks. Either that or the CTR is so high the relevance isn't a factor. Perhaps the keywords are such niche keywords that even a poor quality score has a low cost.

The main questions are will this weaken Adwords in the eyes of the normal consumer. Consumers that click on ads taking them websites with no content may become sick of ads and refuse to click any ad in the future.

Second, will Google do anything about it? As long as the Adsense arbitrage advertiser continues to pay, Google will remain happy. Plus Google also takes a percentage of the Adsense payment too. Thus there is incentive for Adwords to continue to support these poor quality websites.

Your Adwords Ad fell off the first page of results for one reason. The quality score was poor. You may have heard other factors caused it, but the quality score is the reason.

The initial quality score is determine by the revelance of your ad and landing page to your keyword. If you optimize both your ad and your landing page for the specific keyword, you should have a good initial quality score.

You optimize your ad by using the keyword in the ad. Put your keyword in the headline and/or the description. It's also a good idea to have the keyword in the url of your landing page, which puts it in the destination url. In addition, you can put the keyword somewhere in your display url, since it won't affect the destination url.

You optimize your landing page by applying the same techniques as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have you do.

• use the keyword in the page name or path path.
• use the keyword in the page title.
• use the keyword and related keywords in the keyword meta tag.
• use the keyword in the description meta tag.
• use the keyword inside "h1" html tags on the page.
• use the keyword throughout the content of your page.

The quality score is also affected by the ads CTR. As your ad gains impressions and clicks, Adwords computes your click through rate (CTR). Adwords draws conclusions about your ads relevancy from the CTR. Google assumes that if your CTR is high, above 0.5%, then your ad is relevant and your quality score goes up. Conversely, if your CTR is below 0.5% Adwords assumes it is not relevant and lowers your quality score.

An inactive ad has either an initial quality score that was poor that made it all but impossible to get a CTR and it went inactive. Or, the CTR for a good initial quality score is below 0.5% and it damaged the quality score to a point that the ad went inactive.

You have 3 options to fix the problem.

1) Delete the keyword. This is often a good solution because the poor quality of the keyword stops becoming a drag on the quality score of your entire campaign. Campaigns have a quality score based on all the keywords, so a poor keyword can damage the quality of other keywords.

2) Improve the quality score. This generally means improving the CTR by rewritting the ad sales copy to more persuasive. The more appealing the ad is to consumers, then more clicks you will get.

3) Increase your maximum CPC bid.

You've read the free guide and you know that the higher the quality score, the less expensive it is for you to buy traffic from Adwords. But what is at the heart of the quality score? How does Adwords assign a quality score?

* CTR within Adwords

The most important factor of your quality score is it's CTR. Google realizes that everything it's robots scan a page for can be manipulated. In fact, Google encourages this manipulation. Google tells you that the landing page must be relevant to the keyword. Therefore Google expects you to optimize your landing for a keyword.

But at the end of the day, the CTR is pretty much written in stone. The CTR is the clicks divided by the impression. If a human consumer find your ad relevant to the keyword / search term, they click your ad. Conversely, human consumers won't click on irrelevant ads. Google counts the CTR so heavily because it's based on the real human visitors to their search engine. Google is essentially letting the consumers drive the process. Google does this because the daily human consumers are a better judge of relevancy than any program.

Google assigns initial quality scores based on other factors. Nut once the impressions start, your ad will sink or swim based on it's CTR. It's a Darwinian game of survival of the fittest.

* Ad Copy and Ad text relevance to query

Google examines your ad copy when assigning a quality score. Google likes to see the keywords in the ad headline or text, and rewards you with a higher quality score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion tokens are not counted as keywords. So while Dynamic Keyword Insertion is likely to appeal to human consumers, Adwords will not boost your quality score. In fact DKI may damage your quality score id you remove the actual keyword from your ad in favor of the DKI tokens.

* Historical keyword performance

Google keeps your keyword historical data, primarily the CTR. That means deleting a keyword will not remove the already generated data. So, if you are deleting keywords and re-adding them to try to clean the slate, it's probably a waste of time.

Adwords considers the recent history to have more impact. This allows you to adjust poor performing keywords in the hopes of increasing their CTR. Without this consideration any keyword that performed badly historically would have a low quality score.

Deleting keywords is still an important task of campaign management. Like pruning plants, you must remove poor performing keywords to raise the overall quality of your campaign.

* Landing Page Relevance

A relevant landing page lowers your minimum bid and potentially increases your ad position. It doesn't directly affect quality score. However, an ad will get a higher position because of a targeted landing page and will generate a better CTR. A better CTR will raise the quality score.

In conclusion, Google has this to say about quality scores.

"There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved."

Negative keywords help qualify traffic and make it more targeted. They do limit your traffic, but the traffic you do get will be more focused. This will prequalify your traffic before it clicks your ad.

A negative keyword is a word that you have decided not to show your ad for. You have regular keywords and phrases, and adding negative keywords tells Adwords not to display your ad when a negative keyword appears in the search terms with you keyword.

The most basic example of a negative keyword is the word free. Imagine an online retailer selling running shoes. That retailer may have the keyword phrase "running shoes" as a phrase match in their Adwords campaign. But, the retailer is obviously selling shoes, not giving them away. So, the phrase "free running shoes" may be undesirable. The retailer uses the negative keyword free and choose not to show his "running shoes" ad for any search containing the word free.

Why do you want to eliminate traffic? If your goal is just pure traffic, you may not want to limit your traffic. But if you are looking for qualified leads, negative keywords help you screen out unwanted impressions and traffic. Screening out traffic means that a consumer who is unlikely to make a purchase with your website doesn't click on your ad. That can save you wasted clicks. But, negative keywords also stop the ad from appearing, which reduces the impressions of your ad. The CTR measures the clicks per impression, so if you limit the impressions of your ad to targeted traffic, your CTR should improve.

Continuing the running shoes example, a keyword search turns up the phrase "running shoes clipart". The retailer is not interest in consumer looking clipart. You would not wants impressions or clicks from someone looking for clipart. So, clipart is a good negative keyword.

You establish negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level. At the ad group level, you are eliminating impressions of you ads for all searches with the negative keyword. At the campaign level, you are applying the negative keywords to all ad groups, which filters down to all keywords.

Click fraud is a well know type of Adwords fraud. Impression fraud is a lesser known tactic your competition could employ against your Adwords campaign.

The most obvious method of Adwords fraud is for your competitor to click your ad repeatedly. This called click fraud. The hope is that this will exhaust your daily budget and cause your ads to stop running.

Click fraud has the unintended side effect of raising your CTR. A higher CTR is a higher quality score and then a lower CPC bid. This offsets the damage, and prevents this fraud from becoming more rampant

A second type of fraud is impression fraud. Here, your competitor disables his ads and then proceeds to search for your common keywords. The attack is designed to create a large number of impressions of your ad with clicking the ad. This lowers your CTR. Your ad could have it's position lowered, or become disabled due to the lower CTR. This allows the competitor to obtain higher ad position.

There is no side effect offsetting impression fraud. However, an advertiser is not likely to turn off his ads during prime business hours. The fraudster would likely wait until the early morning hours where there is little traffic. This would make a good time for him to disable his ads and inflate the impressions on his competition. A spike in impressions during normally low traffic periods could be an indication of impression fraud.

Google is quite capable of recognizing multiple identical searches from a single computer or network. Adwords should be able to identify a large number of any impression fraud attempts. But, there may be large, sophisticated networks that could appear to be from many different sources, thus fooling Google.

What is the difference between the actual CPC and the maximum CPC per bid? Knowing the answer can help corner that top position on Adwords and explode your traffic.

Every Adwords advertisers knows what the maximum CPC bid is. This is price you give Adwords as the absolute most you're willing to pay for a click.

The actual CPC is what you pay. These two numbers are almost never them same. You will almost always pay less in the actual CPC. The actual CPC is the cost to raise your ad above the next advertiser, based in part on your quality score.

For example, let's say your maximum CPC bid of $0.25 would get you the 3rd ad position. Adwords will charge you just what it costs to beat the 4th ad. This could be $0.10, $0.20 or the full $0.25.

This is known as a Vickrey Auction.

Another important point is that prior to 2007 Adwords based your ads position on the combination of the actual CPC and quality score. Since 2007, Google changed to base the position on the maximum CPC bid and the quality score.

The quality score component of this formula is closely related to your CTR. The better a CTR/ quality score, the cheaper it is for you to achieve top positions. For example, an ad with a 2% CTR and $0.25 max CPC bid is the same as an ad with a 1% CTR and a max $0.50 bid. If both bid $0.50, the ad with higher CTR wins.

You can use this to your advantage. You can set your maximum CPC bid much higher than you really want to pay. You know that the actual cost will be less. Plus, you can be assured of a higher ad position because Google will base the ad position on this inflated maximum CPC.

You could theoretically bid $100 per click. This would guarantee you the top ad position, because Google will base the ad position on the high bid. You would know that your actual CPC would be nowhere near $100, but instead just enough to beat out the second ad. A keyword with no competition would cost $0.05 or $0.10 assuming you had a good quality score.

Assuming you have a good CTR rate of 1% or better, it would impossible for any other advertiser to take the top position from you. Since google bases the top position on the maximum CPC, and you are at $100 per click with a good quality score and CTR, you would be unbeatable.

But there are some risks with inflating the maximum CPC. A competing advertiser could increase is maximum CPC. You would still have the top position, but it would more expensive to beat the number 2 ad. It's quite possible for the actual CPC to go beyond your budget or comfort level. You would need to be very vigilant to make sure you do not cross this threshold.

Adwords click manipulation could be taking money from your pocket. This type of Adwords fraud is advanced, sophisticated and quite mature. Learn what it is and what you can do about it.

Here is a wonderful description of how software exists that can click your ads and behave like a human visitor. The idea is that your competitor could use such techniques to exhaust your Adwords budget.

"(Click manipulation) technology was well developed before Google even existed. People were using it to manipulate click-through rates for banner ads, Web polls, hit counters, and other click counting services as far back as 1996."

"The more sophisticated operations use networks of servers scattered across multiple NOCs, employing software that spoofs user agents, identifies itself with multiple IP addresses across a wide variety of C-Blocks, and randomizing routines that are intended to simulate users clicking through links and spending anywhere from 3 seconds to several minutes on the pages."

"The technology was employed on the commercial side for the intentional manipulation of DirectHit results, Goto.com paid ads, affiliate programs (such as those operated by Amazon, Commission Junction, ClickBank, etc.) and large banner networks."

"Anything where someone felt they could gain an advantage, make some money, or deprive a competitive of an advantage or the ability to earn money has been targeted by click manipulators."

First, I have no doubt such software exists. But it seems that only the extreme case would become a target for such manipulation. The high level of sophisticated attack would only be worthwhile in a highly competitive and lucrative market.

Attacking mid-sized to small markets doesn't seem worth the effort. Perhaps a business model where someone attempted to sell the click manipulation technology might make it profitable. But simultaneously you can't advertise that you employ or sell such technology.

Second, click manipulation would increase your ad group or keyword CTR. A better CTR means a better quality score. A better quality score means you could lower your CPC bid. So while the prospect of exhausting competitors Adwords budget may be appealing, the knowledge that you are improving their quality score and lowering the CPC certainly offsets it.

Make sure you set a daily budget just in case.

Eliminate CTR penalties using Adwords placement campaigns. A placement campaign allows you to specify which websites will display your ad. This gives you an opportunity to improve the quality of content network traffic.

Assuming you are familiar with the proposed Adwords strategy, you'll recall that the key to getting low cost per clicks with Adwords is relevance. Relevance is determined by two means. First Adwords checks your keyword, ad and landing page to assign a quality score. The guide discussed in detail how to get a good or great initial quality score.

Second, Google reevaluates the relevance and quality score using the Click Through Rate or CTR. Adwords will assume that your landing page is relevant if consumers click on your ads. So, the more consumers that click on your ads, the higher the quality score you receive. On the other hand, if you have many impressions but a low CTR Adwords will penalize you and lower the quality score. The process is very much like Darwin's natural selection where strong ads are rewarded and weak ads penalized. A half percent CTR is required for maintaining a good quality score. A half percent CTR means one click per every 200 impressions.

There are a few options for an ad that has stopped showing due to a poor CTR.

1) Delete the keyword and ad. Generally this is a good idea because it will keep the poor performing ad from dragging down the entire campaign CTR.

2) Rewrite the sales copy to make it more compelling and increase the CTR. Your ad must still be showing for this to work.

3) Pay a higher cost per click to have the ad appear again.

There is an alternative to the keyword driven campaign that eliminates relevance, the CTR reevaluation and just about any other Adwords penalty you can think of. It's an Adwords placement campaign where you pay per impression. Adwords does not charge you per click. Instead you pay per impression or CPM, which is the number of times your ad is shown.

An Adwords pay per impression campaign doesn't need to track relevance, quality score or CTR. Adwords doesn't care how your ad performs. You will be paying for impressions, not performance. Adwords has shifted the burden of monitoring the performance to you.

You have to track your performance. You don't want to pay for thousands impressions of an ad that doesn't generate clicks. You must be sure you have a compelling ad that generates clicks.

In addition, you can choose which websites will display your ad. This allows you to target a specific audience and market. Generally speaking the content network traffic in Adwords is the lowest quality traffic. This is traffic that doesn't convert well after it has come to your landing page. The content network is Adsense publishers, so you have websites trying to get ad clicks by any means necessary, which results in lower quality traffic than Google Search traffic.

But with the pay per impression campaign, you can specify which websites to advertise on. For example, you can advertise on About,com, which is owned by the New York Times. You can be assured that the Adsense tactics used on About.com will lead to higher quality traffic.

Pay per impression is a viable alternative for getting into a competitive market. If you find that regular Adwords campaign is too competitive, try a placement targeted campaign, either CPM as discussed or a CPC campaign. Again, make sure you have a compelling ad first.

A very common mistake with Google Adwords campaigns can wind up costing you money. Discover what the mistake is and why it's a problem. Learn what you can do to protect yourself.

Beginners should stay away from the Content Network in Google Adwords. When you are just starting out, disable the content network in your PPC campaigns.

Why? The content network is all the websites that belong to Google's Adsense program. While Google is trustworthy, not all of it's Adsense participants are. Some Adsense websites attempt blatant fraud. Just do a search for those who got banned from Adsense. In most all cases folks were banned for cheating Adwords advertisers by clicking ads.

Many other Adsense participants make every attempt to trick visitors into clicking your ad. Google doesn't ban Adsense participants for just being sneaky, Google really only bans fraud. But, sneaky traffic is not going to get you any return for your Adwords spending. For example, two years ago, the hot thing to do on Adsense was place a graphic over the Adsense ad. The graphic was usually in no way related to ad. But, this made the visitor believe the graphic was related to the ad. When the visitor clicked the ad, he or she wound up on your website which had nothing to do with the graphic. In most cases, the visitor is immediately left your website, wasting your money.

Many website exist where Adsense participants make ads look like navigation, attempt to blend ads with content and other tactics to confuse or trick visitors into clicking ads. Adsense publishers are always looking for the next gimmick to increase their Adsense clicks. How motivated is a consumer going to be if they were tricked to your website? The traffic generated by Adsense publishers is of low value.

A basic level content network traffic is less targeted. Google search traffic consists of a consumer actively searching for keywords. Content network traffic consists of consumer browsing other websites and stumbling across your ads.

Unfortunately, as an Adwords advertiser this is all at your expense. Now you know why the content network traffic is low quality, so go turn it off.

At intermediate and advanced levels you can use the content network. Placement targeting allows you to display ads on specific websites. If you choose respectable website, you can get good quality traffic.

You can also choose use the content network as is. Adwords allows you to separate search network bids and content network bids. When you enable the content network, enable separate bids as well. Never pay more than 10 cents a click for the content network.

Did you know that when Google separated bids for the search and content networks it ended the Adsense gold rush? Back in 2005, Google allowed Adwords advertisers to separate bids. Previously, an Adwords advertiser got only one bid for both. Highly competitive markets forced higher bids. Adsense publishers would target high payout keyword in the hopes of making a dollar or two a click. Since the change, even highly competitive keywords pay much less on the content network.

Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in the later half of 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn What is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straight forward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will performing any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side rendering, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page n the client, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two request, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes to much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting
If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting
Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides at. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page
A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing whitespace. You can remove any unncessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size for the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation
Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page
Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page
As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.

Good performing ads are achieved through split testing. You should be testing and improving your ads to increase your traffic and ROI. This articles discusses how to perform split tests, including using a chi-squared calculation to know when the test is complete.

You need to know to what headlines, call to actions and sales copy work best for your Adwords ads. You can only learn what combination of factors results in the best ad through testing. Split testing is the most common way to test your Adwords ads.

Split testing is a simple principal. You have an ad running for your website or product. This ad has an established number of impressions and clicks. But, you want to know of a different headline or sales copy will result in a higher CTR. So you create an identical ad to the original, or baseline ad. Then you change one thing, or variable about the second ad. That variable can be anything you want to test.

• A different Ad Headline
• New sales copy
• A new call to action
• Synonyms for certain words
• Use of capital letters
• Word or sentence order and structure
• The landing page url

Anything you want to test can be variable. Just make sure you come up with distinct variables to test. For example, don't call a headline change and a landing page change a single variable. If you change both these items and obtain a higher CTR, you won't know if the new headline improved CTR, or if the new landing page scored a higher quality score which then improved CTR. Instead, treat these variables as two distinct variables and run a different test for each. For example, test the headline first. Then once that test is complete, test the landing page.

You now have the original baseline ad, and a new test ad. Add them both to your ad group and monitor the impressions and clicks. The trick to split testing is knowing how to compare the baseline ad with a high number of impressions (because it's been running) against a new ad with a low number of impressions. One may have a higher CTR, but how to you know if that trend will continue as the test ad gains more impressions?

A split test relies on statistics to determine when a test is complete. You can use the chi-squared calculation to determine if there is enough sample size to draw a statistically significant conclusion and declare a winner. The chi-squared calculation will return a confidence level percentage revealing how certain you can be that an observed trend will continue as impressions accumulate. For the chi-squared calculation, a percentage above 95% is considered probably significant. This is the confidence level you need to declare a winner. 99% is consider significant and 99.9% is high significant.

The chi-squared calculation and confidence level calculations are complicated formulas. Fortunately, adwords-marketing-tool,com offers a free calculator to do the work for you. The calculator is completely free and gives you a chance to enter your impressions and clicks for both ads and gives you a confidence level. If your confidence level is 95% or above, you can declare a winning ad. If below 95%, you must continue to allow both ads to run and try again when you have more impressions. The closer the CTRs of the two ads are, the more impressions it will take to reach a conclusion.

You simply check the CTR of both ads when the calculator says you reached a confidence level of 95%. The calculator will display the CTRs and the confidence level. If the baseline is the winner, discard your changes and keep the original ad. If the test ad is the winner, discard the original ad and use the test ad as your new baseline.

Continue to split test as many changes as you want. You will be improving your CTR with every test.

Google Adwords can quickly become expensive if it is used incorrectly. The following tips will show you how to correctly setup your campaigns. You'll discover what to do and what to avoid.

1) Use Google's Adwords Editor to manage your campaigns.
The Adwords Editor is free tool from Google that helps you manage your campaigns. It allows you to make bulk or multiple updates to your campaign. This saves you time and effort when compared to making manual changes online.

2) Disable the Content Network.
Beginners should stay away from the Content Network in Google Adwords. When you are just starting out, disable the content network in your PPC campaigns. Traffic from the content network is lower quality than Google search traffic, because it's coming from Google Adsense participants who don't care what quality of traffic they send your website. When you have proven ROI from your website, you can use placement campaigns or regular content network.

3) Set a reasonable daily budget.
You want to throttle your traffic and Adwords spending until you have a proven ROI. When you achieve a good ROI, you can increase the daily budget and increase your traffic. You don't want to throttle your campaign by bidding to low per click, because that can affect your CTR. You need a good CTR to maintain a good quality. Throttling your campaign with a daily budget stops showing your ads, so you won't get impressions and damage your CTR.

4) Don't set your CPC too low.
You don't want to throttle your campaign by bidding too low per click, because that can affect your CTR. You need a good CTR to maintain a good quality. You never want to damage your CTR by bidding to low. In fact, if you begin with a high bid, you can achieve a good CTR. After your achieve the high CTR, you can lower your CPC and still maintain a ad good position, saving money in the long run.

5) Don't hang on to poor performing keyword.
You probably have some keywords and ad groups that are not performing well. The half percent is a good goal for a well performing ad. Any ad group or keyword performing under a half percent with a high number of impressions needs to be altered. The poor performing ads can damage your overall campaign CTR and lower the quality score and position of your other ads. Remove the ad group or keyword. If you decide you simply must have this ad group or keyword, move it to it's own campaign and start split testing sales copy changes.

6) Evaluate your landing pages as if you were performing SEO.
Your landing page is examined and scored by Adwords just like your website is for inclusion on the Google search engine. Performing SEO on your landing pages will improve your quality score. The Google webmaster tools can provide free information on how Google scores your pages.