Google Adwords is the system used to power the sponsored text ads returned by Google when you do a search. These are the highlighted ads that sometimes appear above the organic results and more usually to the right of them down the side of the page. It is also the system used to provide contextual adverts on literally millions of websites globally – these are usually text ads, but more recently Google has allowed advertisers to use banners and video adverts in these slots.

Adwords is an extremely effective way to market your web site online and get immediate results and it only costs £5 to get started. However, care needs to be taken as it is possible to blow an enormous amount of cash if you are a newbie and configure your campaigns incorrectly – you have been warned.

This short guide will provide you with ten top tips for managing your Google Adwords campaign.

1. Set a daily budget, this is a safety valve and will stop your campaign costing you a small fortune. Start small say £10 per day.
2. Remember you have to bid for position, so set a cost per click that gets you above the fold i.e. in the top 5 otherwise you will get very few clicks.
   
3. Measure conversion rates. The Adwords system provides a small piece of code that you can put on your website to measure conversions and will give you a cost per conversion.  It is even better if you can work out the value of a conversion. You can also integrate this with Google Analytics, but that is the subject of another post me thinks.
4. Target Long Tail keywords. According to the Adwords system it will cost you £3-£6 to get your site in the top three for “Home Information Packs” and several visitors per day, but this search “cheap home information packs” will be much cheaper per click, more targeted and will convert better if it is applicable to you. The volume of searches and traffic will be much lower though (too low for Google to provide useful data), the other thing to consider is the geographic terms such as “Home Information Packs Bolton”
5. Optimise your titles and your descriptions. You should create multiple ads for each keyword you are bidding on. Click through rates improve by including the keyword in the title, description and the URL as these are highlighted when the search results are changed. You can automate this by using this curly brackets in the title and descriptions to return the search term e.g. try {KeyWord: Home Information Packs} as the title.
   
6. Optimise your landing page. Many people do not realise that Google monitor the relevance of the landing page. For example, if you are bidding on the keyword “Home Information Packs” and the landing page is about Energy Performance Certificates you are going to pay more per click for a given position. This might involve the creation of specially written landing pages.
7. More advanced users may want to experiment with a/b testing.  This allows you to set multiple landing pages and compare which converts visitors to customers the best.
   
8. Use the Adwords data to feed into your organic search engine results.  If a keyword is converting well for Adwords start optimisting your web site for these words to improve your organic rankings and to reduce the cost per click – remember point 5.
   
9. Apply the your knowledge to alternative contextual advertising systems such as Overture, MSN, Mirago and Miva. (I have found the conversion rates for the last two to be poor)
10. A significant number of clicks will be fraudulent clicks, so consider installing click fraud monitoring scripts. I have managed to get money back from Google using these scripts.
11. Try to calculate a value for each conversion and adjust your budgets accordingly. E.g. If you are making £100 and spending your £10 daily budget by lunchtime, consider increasing it.
12. Monitor at a keyword level and adjust your bids accordingly. Consider removing poor performing keywords.
13. Compare conversion rates between the content network ads and the Google search results ads.
14. Some will create a whole site excluded from the orangic results just for adwords traffic as it makes it easier to measure conversion.  These kinds of sites would use different e-mail addresses and different phone numbers to faciliate this.
    

Good luck – let me know how yo get on.