Affiliates, Choose Your Adwords

By Stephan Miller
Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2004

I'll have to admit that I didn't believe all the hype about Google Adwords for the longest time. Then I caught myself clicking on some of the Adwords ads instead of the search results. That made me think. Five bucks. What's five bucks? Lunch at McDonalds. I could skip that for a day. So I surfed Clickbank for a while, found something new and really targeted, popped a few keywords in and wrote the ad. Basically, I used the sledgehammer method of marketing. Fifteen minutes later, I was getting clicks. Then I went to bed, of course. A few things I have learned. If I'm on the computer at one in the morning, I must hide my creidt card from myself. Or maybe I was wrong?

I woke up the next day and discovered a few things. One, all of these gurus I decided not to listen to weren't lying. I had made sales. In fact, I made more instant affiliate sales in 12 hours than I ever did before. Another, I had a lot more to learn. But I was hooked. So I bought a few ebooks to learn more and went to work. Why the hell had I waited so long?

Adwords is a crash course in direct marketing. You learn quickly what people want and what keywords they type in to find it. And you can just as quickly lose money if you don't learn the medium. Google Adwords takes all the guesswork out of optimizing webpages. If you have the money, you can buy
all the traffic you want. The key, though, was to buy sales as cheaply as possible. These are the basics. After the basics, Adwords gets complex. It comes down to fine tuning. Fine tune your keywords correctly and you will receive instantly targeted visitors who are ready to purchase specific products.

Click Through Quantity

A lot of internet marketing comes down to keywords. Adwords is no difference. You must learn to think like your customers. What keywords would they use to find the product you are selling? Sometimes you just can't think of them. This is where keyword tools come into play. I have listed a few free keyword tools that will help at the link in the resource box.

If the keywords you are using are not performing well, there may be a few ways to fix this. One is to fine tune the keyword. Instead of using "e-mail" to sell a spam blocker, you can use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool to find such words as e-mail filter, junk e-mail, and such. Then delete "e-mail." Obviously, everyone who uses "e-mail" in their search terms isn't looking for a spam blocker. In fact, very few will be, so don't destroy your click through rate by using terms that are too general.

You can also fine tune the keyword by using brackets, quotation marks, or negative keywords. Brackets around [e-mail filter] will allow your ad to be shown only when searchers type just "e-mail filter" in Google's search box,
not "e-mail" and not "free e-mail filter." Using quotes will allow your add to be shown for both "e-mail filter" and "free e-mail filter", but not "filter e-mail". Using "-" like "email-filter" will allow your add to be shown for all searches containing "e-mail" that do not contain "filter." You can find more details here: (https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html).

Another problem may be that your customer just does not see your ad. Just by creating a new ad that contains the keyword that hasn't been producing that well may improve your click through rate. This works because Google highlights the keywords that the searcher used in your ad. You can also try
capitalizing power words in your ad to get that ad seen. If you know the keyword should be working but isn't, try this first. If this doesn't help consider narrowing the keyword or dropping it. Don't be scared too.

Use 300 keywords instead of 30. The more keywords you use the better. You will receive customers looking for specific products and you will have a better chance of getting keywords that cost five cents instead of five dollars.

It may just come down to good old ad copy. An Adwords ad is haiku of advertisements. You must pack a punch in three lines, four if you count the url. Go for the benefits not features of the product. Use active verbs that make your surfers want to click instead of static nouns.

Click Through Quality

You can get all the clicks from Adwords that you can imagine, a 20% click through rate and still not get any sales. All this means is that you are throwing money down an internet hole. If you are paying for every click, all clicks are not the same.

If you are trying to sell a product you definitely want to get rid of freebie hunters first. How do you do this? Add a price to the ad. Or if the adcopy on the product's page is killer, you can use something along the line of "Low- priced". In other words, use a phrase that tells the surfer that he will be getting out his credit card.

Another way to convert more clicks through Adwords comes down to keywords again. More specific keywords will convert more surfers into customers. If you are an affiliate for a motorcycle helmet company, you don't want to use "motorcycle" as a keyword. You want to use "motorcycle
helmet." Or else, you'll customers who are searching for jackets, exhaust, pictures.

There are a few type of affiliate programs where you wouldn't mind freebie hunters. One is site that uses cookies. Think of the last time you purchased an ebook. Did you buy it when you saw the first ad? Probably not. You waited. But after reading about the product all over the net, you decided to get out your credit card. I discovered these type of customers after I deleted the campain from Adwords that actually brought in the sales. The site's cookie credited me with the sales weeks after my ad brought
them to the site.

Another example is programs that pay for leads. Some companies will pay you if the surfer fills out a form. They depend on their professional followup to get the sale. But the point is, you have made cash and the surfer didn't even have to pay. You just have to get him to sign up for info.

Set a Budget

Figure out how much you want to spend a day and stick to it. A good start is $5.00 a day. Also set your maximum cost per click. This will keep you form spending way too much. Some products I have the CPC set at $0.05. On others, I have it set at $0.50. It depends on how mony clicks you actually
convert into sales.

You must also set a cutoff point. Decide how much money you can spend on a new campaign without any sales before you drop it. It could be 300 clicks or $20 spent. Whatever you set it at, you must stick to it.

Tracking

Google Adwords allows you to set up campaigns, followed by ad groups, followed by individual ads. This structure is great for testing your ads. And believe me, you have to test and you have to track. A campaign can be set up for one product. Then you can set up an ad group for each feature of the product. One ad group may focus on the products ease of use. Another may focus on the low price. And in each ad group you can have multiple ads. Using this system and Adwords tracking features, you track which ads work best for clickthroughs.

But you still have to track your conversions. Commission Junction is great in that you can send each ad to a link. Then when you go to their site you can discover which ads are producing the most sales.

But whatever you do, know your average sale, know your average price per click and know how many clicks it takes for you to make a sale. Then figure your return on investment. You may be spending more than you are making. It's easy to get caught up in the process and forget you are trying to make money. Don't get into bidding wars. And always test something new. Nobody's perfect.

Following the Rules

In my little experiment, I also ran into a few rules that Google wants you to follow by breaking them. The best way. Here is the link to the FAQ: (https://adwords.google.com/select/faq/index.html). One, you can't use trademarks as keywords. Second, you must get a 0.5% clickthrough rate or Adwords will slow your campaign down. Also, if you are an affiliate, you must at least put "aff" at the end of your ad.

In summary, Adwords can get you instant sales, but you must study the system, finetune your campaigns, and track your results.

About the Author
Stephan Miller is a freelance programmer, and writer. For more Adwords resources, visit the page below
(http://www.profit-ware.com\resources\googleadwords.htm)