Monday, November 10, 2008

Maintaining Your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

By Brian Basch

You finally have everything together. Your have done your keyword research and have set up your campaign for the next 6 months. But here is the challenge, how are you going to maintain your campaign? This is something that many advertisers neglect to think about.

Ideally it would be great if you could just set up your campaign and leave it alone. However this will not work. In reality you will need to track and test every ad for performance. There are many ways that you can do this.

You can get good tools at Google Adwords itself to enable you to know exactly how much traffic a keyword is producing and how many sales. Bear in mind that robot traffic will not bring in profits.

So why go through this extra hassle? This is because, if your ad is not performing well, it is costing you money, and will not bring in profits. In other words you are paying for useless traffic. Even if no sales are made you will still be paying for each click.

Luckily you can rectify the matter and take steps to reverse a poor performing ad. If you have done your work right your ad will have a position within the first 5-10 pages of search results. If positioning is good then you should address the keywords for the ad.

Initially most people think of popular keywords before they consider anything else. They feel that they will drive lots of traffic to their website. This is true but unfortunately this will not result in sales, because it is untargeted. Searchers use these popular keywords when they first start searching but these keywords do not usually take them to where they want to go.

That means that people using these keywords are often not sure what they're looking for. They'll look at a lot of sites before they buy. Good keywords are general enough to be searched for by someone who's not sure what they're looking for, but specific enough to reach the audience that will buy your product or service.

Consider searching for your own keywords to see what pops up. You might be surprised by the other sites that have chosen the same keywords you have. Take a look at the top competitors for a word and analyze their sites to see if they're in line with what you want to be associated with. If you seem out of place in a set of search results, it might be time to change your strategy a little. Remember, a bad keyword is only costing you money!

Careful monitoring of your results will tell you which keywords to keep and which ones to replace. Choose the right words, and you'll end up with productive ads that bring in real, useful traffic. Paying close attention to your pay per click campaign is an important part of being successful and making a profit. - 16463

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