Note: This brief post is a culmination of various IM sessions and emails with current and past clients. I hope these Adword tips help some of the Adword beginners out there.

Classic Adwords conversation starters…

• My Adwords are costing way too much!
• I am not getting that many sales from my Adwords program.
• What’s a decent ratio of spend vs. return?

Adword Settings

Having the proper setting is a good start.

Having “Content network” selected as a target source is usually not the best approach for a new Adword campaign. For beginners, I would recommend opting out of that for the first month or so. Understanding the search portion first is key. Based on all my current clients, the search “generally” gives the best return. Target the content (i.e. sites running Adsense) network later. Perhaps after you have bench-marked a few that you would like to advertise in. Opting in for “content” can easily eat up a bunch of your ad pounds/dollars/quids at this stage.

Benchmark some content sites (i.e. blogs who run Adsense) who seem to be industry related and look to be potential good referrals. You can turn them off if you don’t like the traffic or the costs they are creating.

Figure out which hours seem to have the best conversion and which ones have the least. This is usually a later thing after you have run about a month worth of ads. Many times you will find that you end up spending too much money late night when you could have put more money into the 8:00am-10am slot.

Adword Keywords

Think hard, think real hard of all possible combinations, then use the Adword suggest tool.

When coming up with keywords use the synonym opt-in as well.
Make sure all your keywords are not broad phrases. You need to utilize the “” (quotes) and the [ ] (brackets) wrappers. These help focus and refine the CPC.

Adword Adgroups

You should have more than one Adgroup in each campaign. You need multiple Adgroups so you can control the spend and adjust based on each Adgroup. Furthermore, each adgroup should have a common denominator. That’s what makes them “groups” (i.e. by brand or make).

Example: You sell sugar thingies. One of the campaigns is cookies. Of the Adgroups could be chocolate cookies. Once inside your Adgroup I would expect to find keywords like “chocolate chip cookie”, “chocolate chip cookies”, “chocolate cookies”, gourmet chocolate cookies”, etc.

Adword Ads

There should be more than one ad variation for each campaign. You need to be able to test a few different variations with different copy. This give you the metrics you need to make better decisions on the copy you use in the future. Some marketing language may work and others may totally flop.

Create a unique “seen” URL for your visitors based on your adgroup. It gives them click confidence. Example: http://www.YOURSITE.com/cookies. Users read it like that, but they actually go to http://www.YOURSITE.com/something/cookies-s/123.htm.

Utilize the Adword keyword injection. This helps CTR quite a bit. http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74996