Sunday, March 1, 2009

How To Get A Better Clickthrough Rate With Google Adwords

By Dennis J. Thomas

Google Adwords beginnings quickly come to realize that using the system effectively is best defined as a learning experience; in your quest to create the perfect advertisement, you're certain to make missteps and have to reconsider your strategy along the way. Be that as it may, however, other marketers have gone before you and mastered much of the technique needed to succeed with Google Adwords. By listening to the advice of pioneers such as Perry Marshall, you can learn a lot about, for one example, boosting your CTR or clickthrough rates.

For those who seek to increase their clickthrough rates, here are some of the strategies that master marketers have learned through experience:

Doing Negative Keyword Research

Running keyword reports on a regular basis is vital for your success with Google Adwords, and there are several free and paid keyword selector tools available online. Wordtracker is one of them, and offers both a free keyword selector tool and a paid subscriptions service. You can populate a spreadsheet with all relevant keywords and key phrases, but these are also a valuable resource for identifying negative keywords for your specific market.

Negative keywords and key phrases are those that are related to your specific niche, product or service, but do not offer immediate value. After identifying what your ideal customer may be searching for, you'll be able to conjecture the specific key terms (positive keywords) they may use to find you. For example, if you are selling referral tracking software, you want to identify customers who are typing in key phrases such as 'buy referral tracking software', 'using referral tracking software', etc. Those who might type in 'free referral tracking software' do not fall under your target market radar, and need to be eliminated. You can employ this strategy with every niche and keyword list, paring it down until you have a very refined, highly targeted listing of keywords that apply only to your ideal customer.

Split Test to Create More Effective Adwords Ads

Split testing is commonly used in offline marketing strategies to test the market. For example, a company may send out two different direct mail pieces to select customers to gauge response rates, or they may create two different promotional offers to see which message or campaign is more effective than the other.

For those using Google Adwords to attract customers, the strategy of split testing is equally enlightening. After you've done the keyword research described above, and considered which keywords will not be effective in attracting potential customers, you can further hone your advertisements by running multiple versions with slight differences. The ultimate result will be the ideal ad: one containing only information and keywords with CTR-maximizing information, and no distracting, extraneous elements.

Split testing with your Google Adwords campaign is one of the best ways to maximize your online marketing efforts and steadily increase your clickthrough rate. Perry Marshall, a Google Adwords educator and online marketing strategist explains that this is one of the most effective - if not the most effective way - to increase your clickthrough rate over a short period of time. By continually split testing ads against each other, you'll start to see a noticeable traffic increase and can eliminate the poor-performing ad early on in your testing phases. - 16035

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