Google Adwords 101 – An Earners Guide For Maximizing Your Profits With Google Adwords

Wise use of Google Adwords or other PPC programs can boost your profits. Not learning how to use Google Adwords properly can cost you loads of money in Adword bills and loss of business. Here are a few Google Adword Tips I’ve learned over the years.

Let me clarify one thing up front. I’m assuming you have a Google Adwords account or have enough knowledge about the program to open one.This guide will be discussing Google Adwords, NOT Google Adsense. If you do not know the difference, go to Google and learn about both. In a nutshell, Google Adwords is a program where you’ll be using ads on the Internet to help you promote your products or services. Click the button below to sign up for Google Adwords.


The one of the fastest ways I’ve learned to blow through an advertising budget is to set up an Adwords account, find a huge list of broad matched keywords for my business and set a high daily budget for my account. Before I found out how to optimize my Google Adwords advertising, I could easily spend $100 to $200 a day promoting my small business.

It’s only natural for a business owner to want to try and attract everyone under the Sun to his website. But when you’re paying top dollar for every click, it’s only wise to bring in those customers who are ready to buy.

Here are the tips and techniques I’ve used over 5+ years to grow my small business every year.
It’s All About The Keywords

First off, forget about using the “broad matching” feature. You should set down and take your time coming up with a list of specific keywords that potential customers will be using to find you through search engines. Google has a keyword tool that is more than adequate for this purpose. As an Adwords client, you’ll have access to many tools such as this one and best of all, they’re Free!

What is broad matching? Broad matching for example would be you selling blue rocks. You choose “rocks” as your keyword. Then, anyone searching for rocks, red rocks, green rocks, round rocks, square rocks, big rocks, small rocks, etc would see your ads. That’s broad matching.

Why is this bad?

Because if you’re only selling blue rocks and someone clicks on one of your ads when they typed in “red rocks”, then they just cost you a click, plus they’ll not likely buy any of your blue rocks because they were looking for red rocks specifically.

You only want people who are interested in buying blue rocks. I know it’s tempting to broad match. All those potential customers that you believe you’re missing out on do not want to buy from you. It’s the truth. You have blue rocks and they want red rocks.

You’ll blow through your Adwords budget very quickly with little to show if you use broad matching for popular keywords such as real estate, loans, mortgages, ect.

Understanding CPC and CTR

Know what these two terms mean. CPC stands for Cost Per Click. CTR is Click Through Rate.

Why are these important?

Let’s use the rock example again. Let’s say your competitor is also selling blue rocks. Let’s also say that both of you have a CPC of $2 on the keyword “blue rocks”. However, your competitor has a higher CTR than you do. Which ads do you think Google will show more? That’s right, your competitor because his CTR is higher than yours. This higher CTR tells Google that they’ll make more money showing your competitors ads than yours. It also tells Google that Internet users prefer your competitors ads over yours.

Just because you have the highest bid doesn’t mean you automatically get the top spot. The highest bid doesn’t mean anything if someone doesn’t click on your ad. If no one clicks on your ad, Google doesn’t get paid. Google likes getting paid!

Google combines CPC and CTR to come up with a value in ranking ads. (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but this is my nuts & bolts definition)

We’ll see later about testing your ads to get a higher CTR rate.

Use Dynamic Titles

Dynamic titles are another tool that Google Adwords provides to advertisers. Dynamic titles allow you to have keyword targeted ads without creating an individual ad for every keyword. To use dynamic titles, use brackets around your keywords, like this {your keyword here}. To optimize dynamic titles, put an alternative title in Title field of your Google Adwords, like this {your keyword here: your alternative title here}. You’re using the alternative title just in case the keyword doesn’t show up for what ever reason.

Now when someone searches for “your keyword” your ad shows up with the keyword they used in the search. The keyword they typed in will show up in place of the “keyword”.

For example, let’s say you used the keyword “blue rocks with dots”. If you used the keyword “blue rocks with dots”, your ad will show up when someone searches for this phrase. Since it’s the same exact phrase they searched for, the chances of them clicking on that ad and visiting your site are pretty good.

Use Customized Landing Pages

If you were in the market for a new red sports car and clicked on an add that advertised the same model and color you wanted but after clicking on the link and arriving at the landing page you found it was an add for a used pickup truck, what’s the chances of you actually going ahead and buying that pickup truck? Yeah, slim to none.

Now, if the page you arrived at was all about the model and color sports car you wanted at an unbelievable great price, the chances of you buying that car has greatly increased.

Customized landing pages work the same way. For the greatest conversion rates, each keyword should have its own landing page.

Using your homepage isn’t a good idea unless the keyword matches a product or service on you home page exactly. Otherwise, use a landing page and then push them to the homepage if they need more information. Make sure you give them the option of ordering directly from your landing page also. Some people will want to order instantly and you should make their journey from your landing page to the order page as short as possible. It’s freakin’ unbelievable some of the hoops webmasters make their customers go through to order.
It’s Okay To Be Negative

Unless you have money to pee away on your advertising campaign, use negative keywords. Negative keywords are words you don’t want people finding you by. For example, if you’re selling Blue Rocks, you would use the negative keyword “free” because you don’t want people clicking on your Adwords ads and costing you money if all they want are Free rocks. You’d also include the colors such as “Yellow”, “Red” and “Green” because you only have Blue Rocks. Don’t waste your money bringing customers who aren’t going to buy from you to your site. Negative keywords will filter out the words you specify and will not show your ads when someone types them into the search field.
Keep It Simple At First

The Content Targeting and Search Network are two features best left up to expert Adword users. Keep them turned off at first. Wait until you have some experience under your belt before tackling these two. Conversions and click through rates can vary greatly when using both and there’s no need for you to waste your money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Keep it simple in the beginning and stick to what you know and what works for you. Once you get into the groove and feel like experimenting, then you can give these two a try.

Be Creative With Your Creatives

It should go without saying that you creatives should be optimized. However, all you have to do is perform a search on your favorite keyword to find creatives that leave you scratching your head and wondering what the advertiser had in mind when he created it.

You have an option in the URL fields of the URL show and the actual URL where the web surfer will be directed. You can use the shown URL for a little extra attention by using a creative URL. For example, you could have the URL show as www.mysite.com/blue-rocks-with-dots. You can do this with every specific keyword you have, www.mysite.com/blue-rock-without-dots, etc. This is attention getting.

Nothing turns most of us off than seeing ads that scream “Free”, “The Best”, “Download It NOW”, etc. Don’t use superlatives. Besides Google will probably reject these ads any way.

Set an Adwords Budget and Stick To It

In the beginning, there were times when I’d blow a whole months budget in a week by getting into a bidding war with broad matched keywords and have little business to show for it. Fight the urge to get into a bidding war! Let your competitor pee away his budget.

If you ads aren’t converting, it’s likely not your position, but rather your ad. Keep changing the ad until you get the conversions. Don’t throw money at it hoping you’ll get it right.

Track Everything

Before starting a Google Adwords or other PPC campaign, you should have some way of tracking the results. It may sound anal, but I can tell you from experience that if you don’t have a journal or some other way of tracking your ads that it’ll cost you money in the long run.

One of the things you want to track is your Return On Investment (ROI). You should know what the campaign is costing you and how much profit your making for each unit sold. Just because you pay $1 per click doesn’t mean your paying $1 for each sale. If it takes you on average of 30 clicks to make one sale, each sale is costing you on average of $30, not $1. This can add up to be a big deal if you have a product or service with a low price point.

Other things you need to track include your competitor’s ads. See which keyword they’re using and their ad. Do they change their ad often? You’ll also want to track impressions, click through rates and clicks. Google makes this easy for you in your control panel.

Test, Test and Test More

You should continually test ads against each other in A/B testing. Google makes this easy to do. Test your creatives, test copyriting, test landing pages, test products and even test positions. Just because you’re #1 doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get all the clicks. Sometimes #2 and #3 bring in just as many clicks, but at a lower cost per click. Again, test, test and test more. Let your lazy competitor spend all his money. Our goal here is to help you keep your money and make more through wise advertising!

I like to start a campaign with about 6 ads. Google will allow these to be show evenly. The default setting will let Google show the ad with the highest CTR to show more often, so make sure you choose to have your ads run evenly while doing your test.

Don’t Try To Sell Your Dry Cleaning Service To Japanese

If you have a small Dry Cleaning shop in Chicago, there’s no use in your ads showing up in Japan, Europe or even New York City!

Use Geotargeting to drill down to your city if you have a local business.

In some cases, you can geotarget your state, region or city. Make sure you know your market and advertise accordingly. This goes back to that crazy idea of saving your advertising money.
Get Their Attention With An Arrow

This tip comes from Jeremy at Shoemoney.Com. A while back he mentioned that he tried arranging the keywords in one of his creatives so that they looked like the point of an arrow head. This would mean having keywords at one end on line one, at the other end on the middle line and at the same end as line #1 on line 3. I’ve tried this little trick and did notice a slightly higher CTR on my creatives. Some swear it doesn’t work, some of us know better. No one is sure why this works, sometimes it just does.

When it comes to my business, I’m willing to try anything within reason. Never disallow any idea just because “No one’s ever done that” or “Everyone says that doesn’t work”.

I started my business from nothing. Just me and an idea. Within a year I was near the top of my field. People told me it would take years, if ever, before I made any money. I set record earnings my first full year in business. People told me to do this or “you have to do it that way” to succeed. I ignored conventional wisdom and I tried everything.

Some people called me a “one shot wonder” and that “he won’t last long”. Now, after 6 years, some of those people work for me.

I had nothing to lose except for some money and I could always get a “real job” and earn that back. The worse thing that could have happened to me is that I’d have to go back to “working a real job” and I’d have loads of debt.

Pay Per Click companies like Google can be a huge boom to your business if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, they can suck you dry.

Google Adwords and a my own Website are two of the biggest reasons I was able not only to succeed, but to pass over many other companies who’d been in business for many, many years.

You too can carve out your place among local, regional, national and the global markeplace by using Google Adwords and other PPC programs wisely.