STEP 5: TEST YOUR KEYWORDS

This step provides you with more than just your keyword popularity check; it will give also give you the cost estimates for your Adword campaign. You can also use this tool to help gather information for estimating your competitor’s campaign costs.

Google Adword Ads

Google clearly denotes search listings that are paid placement by displaying them in a separate section down the left side of the screen.

As a tool to acquire customers, Adword works for almost any business. An e-commerce business can obviously benefit from the service, but so can consultants and other service providers by uncovering ways to improve your marketing that you would never have thought of.

Adword Ads provide advertisers with the ability to:

• Control their budget.
• Target their advertising based on keywords.
• Determine the ad content.
• Create immediate traffic, which can be turned on and off.
• Measure results providing information on what is successful, what isn't and change what needs to be changed.

How Adword Ads Work

Advertisers bid on keywords. The more an advertiser is willing to pay, the greater the likelihood the ad will appear higher in position in the list of ads served. Google, invariably wanting to make the most from advertisers, determines placement based on a combination of click-through rate, bid amount and budget.

Getting your Search Engine Advertising Started

Let's look at an example of Marcy’s Web site’s conversion rate, and its relation to the PPC advertising bids.

Calculating Marcy’s Cost Per Click (CPC)Budget

Marcy sells bikinis online at $199 each; assuming a 15 percent profit margin, she earns $30 per swimsuit. Marcy’s Web site's conversion rate is 2 percent for every 1,000 visitors; Marcy sells 20 swimsuits for $3,980. She earns $600 in profit from those sales.

By dividing the $600 profit by the 1,000 visitors, we know the break-even bid is $0.60. So Marcy’s average CPC AdWords must be $0.60 or less.

Calculating Marcy’s Cost Per Action (CPA)

Marcy paid $600.00 for a pay per click campaign to attract 1000 visitors of which she successfully converted twenty to satisfied customers her cost per action was 600/20=$30.00

Marcy’s overall PPC advertising campaign must be played under the $0.60 bid ceiling. The higher the bids get, the less of the audience the retailer can reach.

Trouble is, many important keywords already show bid prices over a dollar. Overture's bid price tool shows "bikini" sells for $1.53 in position one, and positions two through four cost more than a dollar each (at time of writing).

So far, on some rather obvious keyword targets, Marcy is out of the game before she even starts.

But this example is based on a 2 percent conversion rate. What would happen if Marcy could increase the conversion rate to 4 percent, or 10 percent? Obviously, she can increase her bids. At a 4 percent conversion rate, she can support a $1.20 bid and her CPA drops from $30 to $15. Suddenly, Marcy can compete for the top spots again.

Improving the site's conversion rate is the key to Marcy competitiveness in paid search advertising.

Note: It's common to spend $100 to $200 in a simple AdWords test.

Guide for Setting up your AdWord Campaign

1. Write your Title: This is the most important part of the ad, use a short phrase that grabs your audience attention

2. Design your Landing page: A focused landing page with related content using the same terminology as the actual search, will increase your sales conversion ratio.

3. Calculate your CPC and CPA break even points.

4. Open an account.

5. Target language and country - This is very important because if your product or service can not be exported you do not want to pay to advertise in those countries for which your product or service cannot be sold.

6. Create Ad Group - design an ad, select keywords, determine maximum cost-per-click that you are willing to spend and define bid amounts.

7. Define Max-Click - Google will suggest a cost-per-click, but the recommendation does not need to be adhered to. Arguments have been heard that #-1 position does not always mean increased sales; sometimes a second position will filter useless clicks and provide targeted traffic with a higher conversion ratio. The rule of thumb is positions 1-3 garner the most traffic and best results. Increasing either your maximum cost-per-click or the ad's click-through rate will generally improve the ad's position.

Clearly and accurately describe the website. This is to the advertiser and searchers benefit. Ultimately, the more qualified the visitor who clicks the ad, the higher the likelihood the clicker will convert into a sale. By providing clear and accurate information, searchers who click the ad are qualified leads, which tend to convert more consistently than unqualified leads. The most effective advertising communicates a clear message to a targeted audience.

Avoid excessive capitalization, superlatives and exclamation marks in the ad. By doing this you are filtering unwanted clicks from non-buyers. Due to space limitations your ad message will need to be concise. Select keywords from your list.

Note: Call to action phrases are not allowed (i.e. you cannot use phrases like "click here" in your ad copy.) We have now completed our primary research phase: By mining our data we can determine our best SEM strategies for a successful campaign.

We can learn the strengths and weakness of campaigns ran by complimentary service providers and competitors plus how to use them to our advantage. Most importantly though we know what our customers want and what it will take to convert clicks to cash.

The next phase is to design your site, content, and advertorial landing pages to maximize your organic search engine rankings plus convert clicks to acquisitions.

We will cover: Site design, usability, adding keyword optimized titles, meta tags, content, the importance of reciprocal links and specialized PPC Landing pages.

Google allows you to put a question mark in the title - the term searched on automatically replaces the question mark in the title of your ad....