Controlling spend with the daily budget We see this time and time and time again with people hitting their daily budget every single day. They often mistake this to mean that their campaign is going well, and they must have done a good job and things are ticking along nicely. What this generally means is that their ads are hitting the daily budget quickly, and then stop showing. They are leaving free traffic on the table. We generally in this occasion will edge the daily budget higher, and the keywords CPC lower, until we are still now spending the same amount per day on average, but are getting much cheaper clicks, and overall a lot more traffic for the same daily spend.

Too many keywords in one Adgroup If you wish to have the highest possible CTR and quality score, you need to be either getting your keywords into the ad copy, or having ads that are super relevant for the particular keywords in the campaign. When you have a category, or group of keywords in an Adgroup hat aren't performing as well, pull them out and put them in their own ad group with their own specific ads that you can test. You will improve the quality score and CTR at the same time.

Not split testing multiple ads The 3 online rules to online marketing are:

1. Test
2. Test
3. Test Always make sure you are playing king of the hill with your ads. You can do this by setting up 2 ads in each ad group. Then in your campaign settings you can either allow Google to optimize delivery, or evenly distribute traffic. SNEAKY TIP #1 Personally the way I do this is with 3 ads and then evenly split traffic. 2 ads are the control, and the 3rd ad is the new ad trying to beat the existing one. This means 66% of the traffic goes to the original control, or winner... and 33% goes to the new ad I have just written. Another benefit of this method is that after some traffic has passed through, you can tell if your data is statistically relevant when you see the CTRs on the 2 control ads are the same, or very close. You can then tell if your new 3rd ad is a winner or not.

Not utilizing image ads Google is expanding their business, and you are expanding yours. Take advantage of all their advertising networks. This includes image ads. Not as many people are doing it as the normal text ads, so the competition is less, and they can greatly help with companies that are trying to brand. You are getting your brand before eyes, and not necessarily having to pay for it. You can also generally have calls to action on your image ads, that Google will not allow in their text ads. SNEAKY TIP #2 Set your ads up on a CPC basis and on the large banner images drive traffic to a phone number. You will not have to pay anything to Google for a customer that saw your image ad and immediately phoned the number.

Allowing auto bids for the content network Take control of your advertising. If you allow Google to charge you top dollar they generally will. Set separate bids for you content traffic, as generally traffic from this source isn't actually looking for your service... they just stumbled upon your ad. So normally conversions for this type of traffic will be lower.

Not cutting the fat Initially you should be building a large keyword list and then driving your first clicks to that. All along you should be tracking, and conversion tracking where possible needs to be implemented. Once you have collected your initial data, you can make the decision of which keywords are working and which ones aren't. Just cutting those keywords that don't convert can make a previously non-profitable campaign super profitable.

Making changes too early So you think you have found a winner with your new ad? Well not necessarily. If you put our money lucky #13 on a roulette table, and lets say in the first 4 rolls it came up 3 times (lucky you). Does that now mean in the future that 13 is going to come up 75% of the time? You can only make decisions about these types of things once you have collected enough data. So let things run there course before you make any further changes. My sneaky technique #1 makes this easier, but there are also tools online to check whether you have enough data to be statistically relevant. Don't make changes until you know 100%.

Not recording what they have changed It's all fine and dandy to continually be beating your control ad in the beginning, but if you consistently want to make improvements down the track recording what you have done already is critical. The consequence of this is wasting time and money to test things that you have already done in the past, but you wouldn't remember because you don't have it saved anymore. Even I was guilty of this in the early days. I would write a new ad by editing an old one. What you should do is delete the old one and create a new one. Google is nice enough to save the ones you have deleted so you can always go back and look at them and their data. They can even offer inspiration as you may see an idea but perhaps it wasn't executed properly. So always make sure you leave a trail of what you have done, and keep moving forward.

Not using website optimizer Split testing your ads is only half of the puzzle. If you really want to make the most of your pay-per-click, you need to improve your site and advertising together. Improving the page visitors come to will improve your quality score, your conversion ratio, and your cost per conversion all at the same time. Converting traffic at a higher rate also means you can pay more per click and continue to takeover and dominate your market. So make sure you are testing and improving your site and your ads. Getting a good conversion rate, also lets you battle it out with Adwords newer features, like their conversion optimizer which allows you to set a cost-per-action bid, and is smart enough to track when your conversion is best, so you are only displaying ads during that time of the day.

Author: Simon Hill Director of Department Marketing www.DepartmentMarketing.com