Once you’ve setup your keywords and your first ad in Adwords, next step is to decide on your daily budget. Choose the budget which fits to your resources.

Place your bid as well. Your bid price is your maximum bid price, which means you will not necessarily pay that all the time. You will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you.

Google will suggest a bid amount; however, it is not compulsory to follow their suggestion. Just place the bid that you can afford to pay per click and which will get your ad listed within the first four positions in Sponsored search results. To find the most relevant bid, use the traffic estimator by clicking “Estimate Search Traffic” – it will give you some idea on the amount of clicks you can expect per day, the position of your ads among the others and how much you will be spending.

I would suggest you place higher bids when setting up your Google Adwords account. That will help you generate traffic on your website rapidly and therefore to figure out which ads work well and which ones don’t.

Pay per Click campaigns, apart from attracting visitors to your website, are an excellent source of indispensable information about how often individual keywords are being searched for and whether customers who come to your website searching for these keywords actually buy your services/contact you etc. This is one of the basics we need to know when we are choosing keywords for on-page optimisation (SEO).

We reckon that this data is even more relevant to the reality than the data provided by available free keyword tools.

It is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which ones to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

• The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.
• Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).
• Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.
• Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using high impressions automatically as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.However, Impressions can give you a good indication on what keywords are being searched for most, so that you can then include them in your search engine optimisation.

There are three critical situations you might come across when you track your Google Adwords campaigns regularly – and here we also provide solutions to the possible issues:

1. Problem: You are getting low/no impressions.

Solution:

a/ Check in “My Account” whether your billing options are set up correctly. Google will notify you of any issues, anyway.

b/ Check your minimum bid and daily budget settings and if you want to have your ads shown more often, make sure the budget per day you have set is enough to cover the cost of all clicks you are getting.

c/ If a/ and b/ are not the issue, you probably want to expand your keyword list to make sure it consists of keywords that are being searched a lot. Google Keyword Tool will help you do this – and you will find it in your Campaign Management in the section called “Tools”.

2. Problem: You are getting lots of impressions but low/no clicks.

Solution:

a/ Modify your ads, make sure they follow the structure as given above and check they include your main keywords.

b/ Make sure that your keywords are not too general, so that they are being searched for quite often, but not so often in relation to your offering.

3. Problem: You are getting lots of clicks but low/no conversions.

Solution:

a/ Check that your conversion tracking code is in place – when you go to your Thank You page and view source, you should see it there.

b/ Optimise your landing page better – as described above – make sure that within the first fold of the screen you can see a clear call to action, benefits and that everything is as simple and clear as it gets.

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they might get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

With Google Adwords, you can also create your personalised reports in only a few minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign or the whole account.

In order to save money, you can delete keywords from your list which do not convert into sales. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targeting them.

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After a few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Your ad should include these keywords. In the same way, if you detect any under performing keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google also has a built-in “conversion tracking” tool that’s linked to AdWords.  You put their code in the “success” page on your website and along with your CTR statistics, Google will then show you the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report, or contact you, or take any action you set as a conversion.

This is the crucial point of tracking your Google Adwords performance. Since conversions are what you are aiming for, you should always check that their number and value is growing from week to week.

Does your website work as a 24/7 sales tool, bringing in sales leads even when you sleep? Or are you having a problem with your website?

Why are you not getting more visitors that contact you or buy from you?

Could you use search engine optimisation, Google Adwords and powerful website content to get more online visitors, more online leads and more online sales?

How about focusing on the following 4 areas right now:

• Learn what you can improve on your website, so that more of your visitors will actually contact you
• Find out about the magic of search engine optimisation and how to have your website ranked in Google
• Understand the power of online newsletters and blogs and know how to setup your own ones fast
• Discover the secret of using online social networking websites for your business

Yes it is true; you only pay when someone clicks on your ad!

Sp your ad better be relevant and then when your prospective customer clicks on the ad, the first page they see should also be relevant to what they want, thus encouraging them to take action to either contact you or buy from you.

So which form of advertising should you use for your company?

Click here to learn more about Effective Online Advertising.

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