Firstly, check out your competitors’ ads. It’s worth finding out what they’re including in their ads, if they include any benefits and calls to action and if they include prices. If your products are particularly competitively priced then why not add them in? Including prices can also pre-qualify visitors who are only looking at buying the cheapest.

Once you’ve got an idea of what your competitors are including in their ad text, then start drafting your own words. Make sure the headline of the ad includes the main keywords you’re targeting, and keywords are also in the description. You get 25 characters for the title and 35 for each descriptive line. I also tend to capitalize the first letter of each word. Here’s an example:

Customer Service Training   (25 character title)
Innovative Quality Customer Service     (35 character description per line)
Training for Call Centre Staff

Ensure your ads reflect the theme of the keywords in your ad group and write several variations. One ad is not enough to work out whether or not it’s going to be effective, so try at least 4 different ads to start with.

One useful tool is the keyword insertion tool, which means Google will automatically use the query the user is searching on for the headline of the ad, as long as it’s 25 characters or less. If it’s over 25 characters, Google will use the default headline text specified by you. For example:

{keyword:Customer Service Training}
Innovative Quality Customer Service
Training for Call Centre Staff

In this example, ‘Customer Service Training’ could be replaced with ‘customer staff training’ if that’s what the searcher typed in. It’s a very useful tool as people are more likely to click on ad text that relates closely to what they’re searching for!

For more on ad text and the keyword insertion tool, visit the Adwords help centre:
How Much Text Can I Have in my Ads?
How Do I Use Keyword Insertion?

The ‘search’ network means that your ads will appear to the right or above search results on Google and their search partners which include AOL, Ask Jeeves and other search engines who display Google ads. In fact you can opt to have your ads appear on Google only and not the other search engines.

The ‘content’ network is a whole network of websites who opt to display Google ads on their site in return for a commission from Google if someone clicks on them. Google automatically matches your ads with the content displayed on the website – it’s the general theme of the website and the theme of your keywords that Google uses to decide the match. This can be a bit hit and miss, so it’s worth checking which sites your ads are being shown on.

Before you decide to continue with these default settings (i.e having your ads on both search and content networks) consider how much you’re spending and if you really want your ads on the content network (certainly to begin with). If your budget is fairly small, then just concentrate on the search network and disable your ads showing on the content network.

If you really want your ads on the content network too, then I find it works best to set up a separate campaign for the content network and allocate its own separate budget. So disable the content network in your settings for the campaign to be shown on the search network only, then set up a brand new campaign for the content network (so you may need to disable the search network on that one). You’ll find it easier to control and keep tabs on the sites displaying your ads than having them all lumped together with the search ads.

You can then see how your content network ads are faring with their own budget and adjust budgets accordingly for both networks separately depending on the return you’re getting from your ads.

You can read more about the search and content networks in the Google Adwords Help Centre.

One of the first things to learn is keyword settings. Adwords has four settings you can use for your keywords or key phrases: broad match, phrase match, exact match & negative. The default setting is broad match.

What these settings mean is that your keywords can trigger your ads for different keyword combinations depending on which settings you use, which are as follows:

Broad match: Keywords on this setting will mean your ads will show for the keywords you input into your list plus variations of the keyword, synonyms and a range of combinations of your key phrases. For example, a physiotherapist sponsoring the keyword ‘neck pain’ in a broad search could find the ads triggered for keywords such as ‘neck pain and dizziness’, ‘neck pain in pregnancy’ and ‘neck shoulder arm pain’. You may even find your ads triggered for keywords such as ‘neck brace’ so when leaving keywords on a broad match setting, you need to ensure that the keywords don’t trigger your ads for untargeted searches.

Phrase match: This setting is more targeted than broad match and means your ads will be triggered for your keywords exactly with perhaps a word or two before or after your keyword. Using the above example, ‘neck pain’, this keyword on a phrase match could trigger your ads for ‘neck pain in pregnancy’ but not ‘neck shoulder arm pain’. Your keywords will be listed in quotation marks e.g “neck pain”

Exact match: Your keywords will only be shown exactly as you input them into your campaign, so for example, ‘neck pain’ will only trigger your ads for ‘neck pain’ and no other keywords at all. Your keywords will be listed in square brackets, e.g [neck pain].

Many of my campaign keywords usually end up as phrase or exact matches, but there’s no harm in experimenting with broad match, as long as the keywords that trigger your ads are relevant to your offering.

Negative: these are keywords that you don’t want to trigger your ads at all. Using the ‘neck pain’ example, a physiotherapist may not want ads triggered for ‘neck brace’, so ‘brace’ would be included in the negative keyword list.

For more on keyword settings, you can read up on the Google Adwords website.

So what is click fraud?
Basically it involves third parties clicking on your ads multiple times to use up your budget quickly so that your ads are stopped also making your business suffer so that your paid ads deliver no return from your spend.

Fraudulent clicks can come from a variety of sources: competitors, disgruntled customers, disgruntled suppliers, even disgruntled staff all trying to increase your advertising bill as much as they can, to the point that you may need to stop your ads. ‘Bots’ can also be the cause of click fraud which is automated clicking on ads.

The major pay per click advertising providers, i.e. Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter are all well aware of the problem and there has been a lot of publicity about the subject over the last few years.

Most people have 2 burning questions on the subject:
What are the search engines doing about it?
What can I do about it?

Firstly, what are the search engines doing about it?
The providers have systems in place to track fraudulent clicks or ‘invalid clicks’. They can track multiple clicks from the same IP address, which is often how click fraud is detected. The pay per click provider is then obliged to refund those clicks back to the advertiser. Google has a whole section dedicated to click quality which you can find here.

What can you do about it?
The best way is to monitor your pay per click campaigns and look out for any sudden spikes in traffic or unexplained trends in your clicks that can’t be accounted for. For example, sudden very high click through rates, particularly on your more expensive competitive keywords which usually have lower click through rates. Perhaps you usually receive a high ROI (return on investment) from your adwords campaign, but suddenly the return has decreased. If you think that you are the victim of click fraud, the first thing you should do is collect your data and contact the pay per click provider with your findings.

If you want to read more about click fraud, here are a few links on the subject:

Botnet click fraud at record high – TheRegister.co.uk

Click Fraud Not Dead Yet – SearchEngineWatch.com

Click Fraud 101 – SearchEngineWatch.com

Needed: A Detailed Picture of Click Quality – Traffick.com

All of the PPC providers have a free tool built in that helps you to select keywords to sponsor so that’s a good place to start. Firstly brainstorm keywords you want to include and don’t forget to ask your friends and contacts for ideas as they may use different search queries from you. The keywords tools will bring up further suggestions based on your lists and also give you information on how competitive the keywords are and how much they may cost to sponsor.

Once you’ve drawn up your list, make sure you don’t include any single word keywords. Using single words means your ads will show for much less targeted keyword combinations and will probably be more expensive. You also need to make sure that you include plurals in your keywords. Google Adwords requires inclusion of both so if you only put singular keywords, your ads won’t necessarily show for the plurals.

You can also add negative keywords into your lists – these are keywords which could potentially trigger your ads but you don’t want them to as they’re not targeted. For example, if you’re providing event management to companies, you may not want your ads to show up if someone types in ‘event management jobs’. So ‘jobs’ would be a negative keyword.

Once you’re happy with your list and all your keywords have been segmented into appropriate ad groups, you need to keep a close eye on which keywords work and which ones don’t. It may become apparent quite quickly which keywords are highly competitive and your keywords will end up far down the list or you’ll get a high number of impressions and few clicks. This is the time to start refining your campaign to ensure you get the best return from it.

Pay per click does require a lot of management at the beginning, but once you get into a pattern of gaining good click through rates and keep on top of your budget, you should find that your return outperforms your costs.

Whatever you do though, just make sure you track the return from your ads – I wrote about ways to do this in my recent post, Measuring your Marketing ROI.

1. Not dedicating enough time
Setting up an Adwords campaign and forgetting about it is one mistake I see too often. Businesses set up their account, put in a few keywords and hope for the best. Too often have I come across accounts that are rarely looked at and performing badly. When you commit to an Adwords campaign, you must dedicate time to managing to make sure you get the best return from it.

2. Creating one ad
Google Adwords allows you to create as many ads as you want per ad group but in many cases, I find only one ad written. When setting up an Adwords campaign, make sure you test ad text as some ads will always perform better than others, even with the smallest variations in the wording of the ads. Start off with at least 3 or 4 ads and if the click through rates on the ads is low, keep introducing new text until you get more satisfactory click through rates.

3. Not researching keywords
Many campaigns I come across haven’t researched keywords adequately or put in just a few variations, at worse single word keywords. Google Adwords has an excellent keyword research tool, so use it to ensure you’re targeting the right keywords. Make sure you include singular and plural variations too. You can find out how competitive keywords are and roughly how much they might cost so you can do all the research you need before setting up your campaigns. Separate your keywords into ad groups and write targeted ad text for those groups, you’ll find your campaign performs much better.

4. Sending traffic to the home page
I don’t come across this mistake as often as some of the others, but businesses still do it nonetheless. When setting up your ads, make sure the ads click through to the relevant page of your website, depending on what you’re advertising. It’s no good sending visitors to the home page of your website and expecting them to find the information for themselves, they’ll soon get bored, go elsewhere, resulting in a wasted click. Make sure you present your visitors with exactly what they’re looking for and if your website doesn’t lend itself to this very well, then create specific landing pages for your ads.

These are some of the most basic errors I find with Google Adwords, and it’s well worth ensuring your campaigns are set up correctly, particularly as Adwords is now very competitive and clicks are expensive. Don’t waste money by targeting the wrong keywords or sending visitors on a wild goose chase! There’s an excellent help centre in the Adwords interface, and you’ll find answers to most questions you may have there.