Use these tips to increase the your Web site traffic.

1. Add new or previously unused keywords.
2. Search your Web site for items that haven’t been advertised.
3. Include more specific keywords: inkjet or laser printers instead of just printers,
4. Separate your high-traffic keywords form the poorly-performing keywords and put the best performers in a separate campaign.
5. Increase daily advertising budgets and the Max CPC for high-performing keywords.
6. Optimize to increase your quality score.
7. Expand your Geo-targeting area by choosing more countries to advertise in, or by creating another Web page in a different language and advertising it in countries where that language is spoken.

Google Advertising Truisms to Keep in Mind

• Don’t pay a higher CPC to try to get into one of the top three positions.
• The top three positions don’t necessarily generate the best performance, and it’s not unusual for the 6th, 7th, and 8th positions to generate bigger profit margins.
• Traffic and sales aren’t static. They change every day, so don’t expect them to be the same every day.
• A high numbers of clicks doesn’t necessarily mean high profits.
• Establishing a good history is vital for a new campaign’s success. High CTRs is the best way to create a good history.
• Avoid being too general. Instead, be as targeted and specific as you can.
• Set aside a regular time for managing your account. It certainly won’t manage itself if you don’t do it!
• To see if your ad appeals to customers, try to think like they do and see it as they see it.
• Send potential customers to the most appropriate page on your Web site.
• Always group similar keywords and put each group into its own AdGroup.
• Use your best-performing keywords in the text of your ads.
• Test a variety of different ads.
• Be sure to use call-to-action phrases in your ads when it’s appropriate to do so.
• Add new keywords to your keyword lists.
• Never bid more than you can afford to pay!

Managing Your Account

Making a habit of managing your account regularly is important. In case you haven’ learned how, the following tips should help.

1. Verify that Google received your most recent payment. Occasionally, credit card payments are denied, for a variety of reasons. Just re-enter your card information to make sure it’s correct. And consider using the Google payment feature that allows you to enter two credit cards in case one is denied.
2. Reactivate your inactive keywords.
3. Verify that your Campaigns are generating close-to-average traffic. If any aren’t, take the time to identify the problem and fix it.
4. Verify that your daily advertising budgets are set higher than the Google recommended amount. The recommended budget amounts are not updated very often.
5. Increase the bids for keywords that are ranked higher than 10.0 (but ONLY if you can afford to).
6. Have a look at the numbers for your text ads to make sure they’re still active and have good CTRs.
7. Look at the history of individual keywords, AdGroups, and Campaigns to help you make smarter decisions by reminding you what you did in the past to improve your account, as well as the anything you did that hurt your account!

Content (Contextual) Advertising

Content text ads are displayed with Google AdSense on participating Web sites. They usually appear inside advertising boxes and look very much like Google AdWords ad boxes. Contextual advertising can increase your traffic significantly which , in turn, can boost your sales.

Google looks through all your keywords and compares them to words found in the sites that participate in AdSense to try to a Web site that is a perfect match for your ad. When Google finds the right Web site, you’ll start getting Content impressions and clicks.

Contextual Ad good points: Content Ads CTR has no affect on your Google Search ad CTR; It doesn’t affect the performance of ad ranking of your Google Search ads either. And it helps generate a lot more traffic!

Contextual Ad not-so-good points: You may have to pay full bid price for each click, depending on the Web sites your ad is displayed on. And you won’t be able to see which keywords produced the most click. While generating lots of traffic can be a plus, it can quickly turn into a minus if the increased traffic costs you a lot more money!

Managing Your Content Network Bids

The best (and easiest) way to manage your content network bids to increase your profits is to enable separate bids for the content network. In your Campaign Settings, click on Content Bids, which will allow you to specify different bids for Google’s Content Network and Google’s Search Network. You’ll specify your bids in your AdGroups, not in your Campaign.

If your Content Network is performing well, consider lower your bid one or two cents to save a little money. If your Content Network is losing money, reduce your bid by at least three-to-five cents to lower your advertising expenses.

Site Targeted Advertising

Setting up Site Targeted advertising is almost exactly the same as setting up Contextual Advertising, with one big difference: instead of choosing keywords to advertise your Web site, you select the Web sites you want to advertise on, and your ads will appear on those Web sites instead of in the Google Search.

Site Targeted Advertising Benefits: You get to select the Web sites where you want your ads to appear. It’s a good opportunity to get your ad on the site of a competitor with higher rankings than yours, if the owner participates in the AdSense program.

And while the bid price may seem high, the click rate is fairly low: 1-5 per 1,000 impressions, on average. Your total cost will probably be quite reasonable.

Disadvantages: Many times your ad won’t show on the most popular Web sites. It’s not only more expensive, but also confusing to select appropriate Web sites to advertise on.

To determine relevance, Google looks at your keyword, your text ad, and your landing page. If each of these is all relevant to the others, you’ll have a good relevancy rating which, in turn, will increase your quality score.

To make your keyword and text ad relevant to each other, all you have to do is include the keyword in the ad.

To be sure that your keyword and landing page are mutually relevant, include your keyword in the text on the landing page.

If your keyword doesn’t appear on the landing page, create some kind of connection between the landing page and the text ad. Use the keyword density tool to locate and list all the keywords on the landing page and put one with high density in the description of your text ad.

Quality Scores

Three types of quality scores affect your positioning, minimum bid, and overall return on-investment:

Account Quality Score: An average quality score based on everything that happens in your account. It’s determined by average click through rate on the search network; account performance history; your ad’s relevance and other relevance factors over which you may have little or no control.

Account Quality Scores are used to determine minimum bids for low-performing keywords you add to your account.

Ad text relevance to keyword This score is determined by the average performance of each of your AdGroups; each AdGroup received its own score. An Group’s quality score reflects the sponsored click-through rate, land page(s), account quality score, ad relevance, AdGroup history, and other relevancy factors. The AdGroup score determines your Content Advertising ranking, placement, and bid.

Keyword Quality Score: Each keyword has its own quality score, which is determined by the historical CTR of the keyword on the search network, the keyword’s relevance to your text ads, landing page quality, account history, and other relevancy factors.

The Keyword quality score determines the minimum bid, position, and ranking of your keyword on the search network.

Selecting Keywords The Easy Way

Google will be happy to save you the time and effort required to find your own keywords by telling you which keywords to use. It makes sense, since Google determines which keywords are—or are not—relevant for your Web site.

1. Access Google’s Keyword Research Tool and click on Website Content.
2. Enter the main address of the Web site you’re advertising (the display URL in your ads).
3. Click on the Get Keywords button.
4. The keywords in the list that appears are all keywords that are extremely relevant to your Web site, according to Google’s definitions. And they’ll have lower bids and almost all of them will be active for search.

   If the list is too small and you’d like more keywords:

5. Click on the Keyword Variation link of the first keyword in the Google list, and enter the word in the Enter one keyword or phrase per line text box, and click the Get More Keywords button.
6. Add the relevant new keywords to the keyword list on the right.
7. Repeat for each keyword in the list until you have the number of keywords you want in your list.

Optimize your Search Campaign the right way to improve Quality Scores fairly quickly. Take the following points into consideration:

1. Have you put related keywords into separate AdGroups and optimized the ad text to relate to your keywords?
2. Are you including high performing keywords in the text ad’s title or description?
3. Do you delete text ads that perform poorly and replace them with new higher performing ads to raise the CPRs?
4. Did you unintentionally change the destination URL?
5. Have you increased your keyword bids so the majority of your ads appear on the first search page?
6. Have you set your daily budget high enough to receive the maximum possible traffic?
7. Do you remove keyword with poor quality scores from you AdGroup and putting those keywords into a more appropriate AdGroup?If you take care of all the issues in the above list, your keywords should begin to generate more traffic. If your account is three days old or less, it may take Google a few days to approve your account. You won’t be able to see all your traffic until your account is approved. Approval usually takes from one-to-three days.A good Web site brings in approximately one sale for every one hundred targeted visitor, depending on a variety of things like prices, popularity, and demand. If you’re not getting one sale for every 100-300 visitors, it may mean that you’ve spent more than you’ve received from a sale. Make sure your bid prices aren’t too high in relation to the number of sales your keywords are generating.

Improving Quality Scores with Google’s Policy Changes

For AdWords accounts and affiliates:

Avoid Web sites:

• with little or irrelevant text on the home page
• with AdSense ads on them
• that are already heavily advertises
• with duplicate content on each page
• that force the visitor to sign up for e-mail newsletters
• without a privacy policy
• that are confusing or tricky to navigate
• that can be considered borderline illegalwith any other factors you may want to avoid.

For Advertisers and Web Site Owners with Landing Pages…

To generate the highest amount of traffic with the lowest possible keyword bids, make sure that your Web pages includes as many of the following items as possible. Google may not require you to increase you bid price if it regards your Web site as important and informative.

Your Web site should:

• contain a minimum of 150-250 keywords on the landing page.
• have a privacy policy.
• not duplicate other Web sites.
• provide information without requiring site visitors to register.
• give examples and, when possible, demos of the product(s) you sell.
• provide a complete description of your business.
• let visitors know exactly how to contact you.
• provide easy and intuitive navigation.

AND:

• Avoid sponsored links: It there are any on the landing page, make sure they’re marked as sponsored links.
• Don’t put important information in text graphics.
• Eliminate sloppy HTML and fix broken links.
• Avoid dynamic pages if possible.
• Don’t put too many links on a page.
• Not all search spiders can view JavaScript, cookies, DHTML, or Flash. And don’t try to track or block spiders on your home page.
• Be sure your Web page is people-friendly, not spider-friendly.
• Don’t participate in link programs.
• Avoid Google management programs.
• Don’t hide text or links: Google may think you’re spamming.
• Never re-direct visitors.
• Don’t put anything irrelevant on your landing page.
• Give your images descriptive names.
• Use ALT tags for all images.
• Make sure the text on your Web site is descriptive and informative.
• Use the Keyword Density tool; density levels should be 2-5%
• Create unique landing pages that contain the keyword in the URL for the best quality score and content rating.

Google Has a New Advertising Policy

Google ‘s Quality Score was introduced into AdWords in 2005, and is the main reason people are complaining about AdWords!

It’s a mathematical formula that is kept a secret from almost everyone. It was created to help ensure that Google search results only display the text ads that meet Google Web Surfers’ need as well as possible.

The source of the complaints that Quality Scores have generated is that if Google doesn’t think your text ad, AdGroup, keywords, Campaign, etc. aren’t performing as well as they could be, it may result in poor ad positioning, higher minimum bids, and “Required First Page Bids” for keywords

The important things the Quality Score determines are:

• Your minimum required bid
• Your ad’s ranking
• Whether or not your keywords are displayed on the first search results page.

Here’s Google’s Quality Score formula:

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

The actual calculation looks more like this:

Keyword CTR

+ Ad text relevance to keyword
+ Ad text relevance to landing page
+ Current max bid (max CPC
+ Your ad’s performance history
+ Other unknown factors
—————————————————-
= Your Quality Score

Here are brief explanations of a couple of the factors:

Your CPC: The more you pay Google per click, the higher your ad’s position and Quality Score will be. To Google, your bid is the most important consideration in determining your Quality Score.

Your CTR: The higher your Click Through Rate is, the better your products and services are determined to be, which results in higher a higher position for your ad.

Historical Performance of Your Ad: If your ad has been consistently relevant to your website, has had a high CTR, and has performed well for quite a while, your position and Quality Score will increase. This means you should NEVER change the target URL in your ad. Changing it will reset your Quality Score to 0.0.

If you decide to change your target URL, pause the AdGroup that contains the old URL, then create a new AdGroup with the new target URL.

Relevance of Your Text Ad: If the overall theme of your ad is the same as the overall theme of your website, your position and Quality Score will go up.

Other Unknown Factors: Google will not release these to the public.

Ad Text Relevance to Your Keyword: If your keyword appears in your text ad, your Quality Score will increase. This is why it’s important to group you keywords into separate AdGroups based on their similarity.

Ad Text Relevance to Landing Page: If your text ad contains words that are also found on the ad’s landing page, your Quality Score will increase.

Ad text relevance to keyword If keywords in your AdGroup also appear in the text of your ad’s landing page, your Quality Score increases.

A Quality Score is calculated for each individual keyword in your account, although Google also considers your account’s overall historical performance. Keep in mind that a few keywords that are poor performers can have a negative effect on better performing keywords.

To Find Your Quality Score…

Login to your account and access the AdGroup for which you want to check the Quality Scores. Click on the Keywords tab and look for the Customize Columns text link. Click the text link to open a drop-down menu, then select Quality Score.

When the page finishes loading, you’ll see the Quality Score for each keyword. Ideally, they all show up as “Great.” If they don’t, you have some work to do to improve the rating.

Aim for placement on the first page: the surest way to position your ad on the first page is to have a keyword ranking of 8.0 or less. That ranking should be your goal—not over 8.0—because any first page position will give you the same number of impressions as any ad on the first page, and that’s important to understand.

The top three positions on the first page are very expensive, especially compared to lower positions on the same page. And occasionally, ten ads are displayed on the first page, so even if your keyword ranking is between 8.1 and 10.0, you could see your ad on page 1, and at a significantly lower cost that the those top three positions.

Save your money and avoid cutting your profits by aiming for the first page.

What to do if you simply can’t afford to display your ad on the first search page:

Bid only what you can afford to bid. Never bid too much for keywords, especially not for the ones that are poor performers, unless you enjoy losing money!

How is the Position of my Ad Determined?

Google rates your Web site using what they call a Quality Score. They do provide the following Ad Ranking formula:

Ad Rank = Cost Per Click x Quality Score

but provide very little additional information. The formula looks simple enough, but Google uses a complex Quality Score algorithm to make certain determinations about your ad. We’ll provide a more in-depth explanation a bit later.

How Can I See If My Ad Is Being Displayed?

Don’t try to see your ad by searching for it on Google.com! Google does understand that people do like to see their ads being displayed, but warns that you can hurt your ad’s performance by searching for it on Google. When you search for your own ad, you add impressions to it. If you don’t click on it, you may be hurting your Quality Score.

In addition, Google regards it as click fraud when you search for your own ad and click on it. People try to increase their CTRs by clicking on their own ads and Google knows when you do it. Click fraud can cause your account to be banned!

Is There Risk-Free Way To Search For My Ads?

Yes there is! It’s a special Web site address where you can use Google’s Ad Targeting Preview Tool to search for your ads. And it’s actually better than searching for your ads on Google.com because you can choose the region you want to search.

For example, if you advertise only in New Orleans, you can specify that location and you’ll see only New Orleans ads. Another option: you can check to see if your ads are displaying in just about any city or state in the U.S., or foreign countries.

Best of all, this tool does not hurt your account in any way. And the impressions don’t count if you accidentally click on your ad.

To access this tool and try it out, all you have to do is go to https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

One reason that Google AdWords has high conversion rates and is so popular is that Google is very strict and very serious when it comes to their advertising. What follows is a list of the rules that every advertiser must follow in order to continue advertising.

• . There are almost always eight ads on a search page, although there can be as many as ten. Your ad will not appear on the first page if its rank is higher than ten.
• . Google provides each Web page with one advertising slot per keyword. You cannot create another Google account to advertise the same Web page with the same keyword to try to double your ads on the page. Google identifies attempts to place multiple ads by Display and Target URLs.
• . If you are an affiliate of a merchant who is advertising for a certain keyword, and you create an Ad for the same keyword, Google will not show your ad unless your Quality Score is higher than your competitors Quality Score.
• . Google does not permit misspelled words in text ads unless they are recognized as commonly misspelled. Google will not display your ad if you break this rule.
• . Your text ad cannot be entirely in upper case (capitals), but you can capitalize the first letter of each word.
• . Google only allows one affiliate ad per Web site per search query. So if you are a merchant and want to advertise for a certain keyword, but one of your affiliates already has an ad for that keyword, your ad might not be shown. You can override this rule by bidding higher than the competing advertiser or if your Quality Score is higher than your competitors.
• . Your destination URL cannot have a popup window—as defined by Google— on the page. Google defines a popup window as a window that opens in a new browser window and includes pop-under ads. Dynamic or Flash popup windows are not mentioned in this restriction.
• . Destination URLs cannot link to Web pages that are under construction.
• . If you include a price in a text ad, you must show the price on your Web page within one-to-two pages of the destination URL.
• . You cannot use superlatives such as Best, Most, Top, etc. in your text ad unless it is backed up by legitimate third-party support.
• . If you advertise something for free in a text ad, it must be supported within one-to-two clicks of your destination page.

When a keyword is rated as poor quality, it may be totally irrelevant or it could need to be more targeted. An irrelevant keyword is one that has absolutely nothing to do with the product(s) you’re advertising.

A keyword can also be poor quality if it isn’t targeted adequately in your ad or on the Web site. Correct this problem by moving the word to a new AdGroup where the text in the ad is more closely related to the keyword.

How Do I Know What Is (or Isn’t) an Acceptable Bid?

Since an acceptable bid depends on your conversion rate and how much you can afford, it will vary from one person to another. Google might tell you that it’s a bid that will put your keyword on the first search results page and you have a quality score of Great or OK. Unless the product you’re advertising is very expensive, your bids should be no more than $0.20.

When Do I Need To Create A New Google Account?

Creating a new Google account provides an easy alternative to trying to fix problems in your current account. Try a new account if all the Web sites you’re advertising have poor quality scores and most of the keywords require bids of $0.50 for a first-page position.

New Google AdWords accounts only cost $5.00 to open and there’s no limit on the number you can have.

Some Helpful Quality Score Facts

• If your ad is in one of the top three positions, you should have a high CTR. Google knows this and the information is in their quality score system. If your well-placed ad isn’t getting a high CTR, you need to increase it. The same is true for the last positions on a page.
• If you make changes to the keywords in your account, don’t expect your quality score to immediately improve. If you delete keywords or raise bids to adjust your account, it will be about three days before you see then changes. If you have to redesign a Web site or you change text ads, it may be twenty days before the changes are reflected in your quality score.

Other Quality Score Detail Messages

If you receive a message that doesn’t indicate problems with keyword relevance or landing page load time, but says that your landing page isn’t highly relevant, it means that Google doesn’t like the Web site you’re advertising.

You can look for another Web site to advertise if you receive this message. If you own the Web site, you’ll have to some work to correct the problems, but you can improve its status. Read the Quality Score In Depth section for suggestions on how correct the problems.

If the Quality Score details indicate that both the keyword and the landing page aren’t highly relevant, it can mean you won’t be able to advertise the product again in your account, and you certainly won’t be able to advertise the Web site you were promoting.

Additionally, any Web sites you promote in the future that have similar products will have keywords that are inactive for search too. If most of your keywords become inactive for search, your best bet is to start a new account. If only a few are affected, delete them immediately and hope that the unaffected keywords will rescue your account and eliminate the keyword issues.

If you receive a No response to “Ad Showing?” along with the message that the keyword phrase doesn’t currently trigger any of your ads, the keyword doesn’t have a past history in your account and Google hasn’t yet started displaying it. It’s a message that frequently appears when you’ve added new keywords to your account.

And finally, if the “Ad Showing?” response is No, and the message tells you that the keyword you entered has a low search volume and isn’t showing any of your ads, the keyword isn’t receiving enough traffic for the diagnostics tool to be able to determine whether or not your ad is being displayed.

Whenever you have inactive keywords that are too expensive to increase the bid, and if nothing else works, try moving the keyword to a new AdGroup and creating a text ad that includes the keyword in the text. Otherwise, just delete them from your account.

While everyone has a few keywords that aren’t displayed on the first search results page, the primary factor that keeps keywords off the front page is Quality Scores. When both your Quality score and your bid are low, your keyword will not appear on the first results page.

However, even when keywords aren’t display on the first results page, they are displayed in the contextual network, so they’re still generating traffic in the Content Search.

Be careful in your use of keywords with low quality scores. An AdGroup with a large number of poor quality keywords can have a negative effect on the performance of high quality keywords.

How Can I Find Out the Quality Scores of My Keywords?

You can see how Google ranks a key word with the Ad Diagnostics tool. In your AdGroup, click on the Keywords tab, then hold the mouse pointer over the magnifying glass next to the keyword. A popup window will display information about the keyword. Click on the Details and Recommendations link for more information about the keyword.

Understanding Google’s Diagnostic Messages

Keyword Analysis Popup Messages:

Message 3-a: If you saw this message and the details indicate that no problem was found, it means that although your Web site and account are fine, it’s not as good as your competitor’s ads. If you catch this problem early (within 24-48 hours of it becoming inactive) you can fix it by increasing your bid by 50% more than the recommended bid. This will improve the bid quality score and decrease your minimum bid. When the minimum bid decreases, lower your bid to an acceptable level. If you don’t catch this within 48 hours, you’ll have to increase your CTR to bring your quality score up.

Message 3-b: This can be a bad message to receive. Google evidently thinks this keyword is bad in your account. If you receive this message, do not increase your bid. Delete the keyword immediately. If the keyword hasn’t been deleted within 24-48 hours, Google will look for similar keywords in your account and will label them as poor quality too. Delete every keyword in your account that Google says isn’t highly relevant.

Failure to delete these words quickly can result in never being able to use them in the future without them being inactive for search. If you choose not to delete them, you can expect to notice very soon that almost every keyword in your account is becoming inactive for search. When your keywords are inactive for search, your impressions will drop sharply, and you’ll quickly discover that your decision to keep these keywords has become very costly!

The easiest way to fix this problem is simply to create a new Google account. If you choose to fix the existing account, delete all the words in your account that have this message. You also have to find the word or phrase that Google is using to link the keywords to each other, as well as keywords that are active for search and contain the phrase linking them to the inactive keyword.

Make those words highly relevant, and increase their CTR and bids to increase their quality scores. Keep a sharp eye on the words for a week or more, then begin to add some of the previously deleted keywords. Make sure the added keyword remain active and relevant. If they don’t, it will require some hard work to improve your account history for the inactive keywords

The Google Budget Optimizer

Google’s Budget Optimizer simplifies setting individual bids for your keywords. When the Budget Optimizer is turned on, it will ask you for a monthly maximum advertising budget, then automatically and continuously adjusts the bids for all the keywords in a particular campaign.

While this is supposed to maximize the number of clicks on an ad, it doesn’t always perform as expected. It may set the Max CPC very high to increase the number of click due to a particular keyword, but you may end up with fewer clicks than you would have had if you had managed your bids yourself.

If you’d like to try it yourself, you can access it in Edit Campaign Settings in the Bidding section.

Your Maximum Daily Budget

Your Max Daily Budget is the amount you are willing to pay each day for clicks. If your daily budget is $10.00 and the current month has thirty days, your monthly advertising bill will be $300. If you spend more than $300, Google will credit your account.

Google will let you set your daily maximum at any amount from $1.00 to $250,000.00, but if you set it very low, you shouldn’t expect to receive many clicks. If you’ve heard rumors to the contrary, things have changed since those rumors started!

If you have problems with your budget, your ads aren’t running, or you receive a message that you have exceeded your daily budget, use the Ad Diagnostics tool to find out why. This happens occasionally with new accounts or, occasionally, when you create a new campaign. When this happens, a Google account reviewer will have a look at your account, and the problem is usually corrected in about three days.

Should I Adjust My Max CPC for Keywords That Are Performing Well?

Even keywords that are already performing well can be made to perform even better, and that can be done by adjusting the bids. If a keyword is making a good profit, has a high rank, and has a great CTR, you can probably lower your Max CPC a little.

If your quality score is high enough, lowering your MCPC by one or two cents won’t affect the keyword’s good performance and you’ll pay a bit less per click and increase your profits for that keyword.

First, check the keyword’s conversion rate (the percentage of clicks that result in sales). Google’s Conversion Tracking feature provides the data once you enable it.

How Do I Handle Keywords That Are Just Barely Making a Profit?

The easiest solution when keywords are performing badly is simply to lower the Max CPC, which keeps you from spending more than the keyword brings in.

Alternatively, you can create a new AdGroup with poorly performing keywords and target the text in the ad toward them. This can improve your CTR because searchers are more likely to click on an ad when they see their search words in the text ad.