Major components of Google Adwords are the ads and the keywords. Lets take the ads first..

The ads are constructed with four lines. The first line is the title and contains a maximum of 25 characters. Usually the title contains a major keyword or key phrase. Always mention what you are offering in the title.

The second line should mention benefits to the shopper; why he or she should buy from you rather than the other guy. Google gives you a maximum of 35 characters to highlight the benefits of your product or service.

The third line can continue with some benefits but it should contain a call to action i.e.buy, sign up , etc. Again you have a maximum of 35 characters including spaces.

The fourth line contains the website's URL and the last line contains the URL of your destination page or landing page. This lets you determine what you want the shopper to see first and that first site must be relevant to your ad.

When a user enters a search query on Google.com, Google scans keywords on each webpage to see if that page matches the search. Google then shows the webpages that most relative to the word or phrase entered in the search. Google also displays ads in response to search queries. But with ads, Google scans the keywords that you've chosen to represent your business. When a user searches for keywords you've selected for your ads,your ads can appear next to the search results.

Preparing ads that will get shopper clicking can be difficult. However, with Adwords you will know right away if you are doing it correctly. The number of clicks and price of the clicks will tell you immediately.

Google Adwords provides you with plenty of help. Google allows you to put up as many ads as you want . This way you can compare the results and select the most effective ad. This is called split testing and that can be expanded to the landing page as well. In fact, Google has a routine allowing optimizing multiple variables in the ad and in the landing page. How that works is beyond the discussion here but will be described in a later article.

Writing relevant ads depends upon the keywords and phrases. So how do you get those effective keywords? Start with what you and only you know about your business or product. These keywords of course are related to your business are product. Guess at how people would request your product or service and then you will have a good start at selecting keywords and phrases. Here again, Google helps. Google has a keyword tool that generates keywords from the few words that you might think of initially.

The tool not only gives you suggestions of many other keywords but it will provide you with estimates of the traffic and cost per click level. These are only estimates but the data utilized to calculate those estimates comes from Google's giant database.

Another keyword tool beyond Google is Wordtracker. In Wordtracker, you can input a root word and it will generate many possible keywords. It also has a comprehensive keyword research capability. Each keyword is evaluated for daily traffic and competition. After you select one level of a keyword, wordtracker allows you to dig deeper and locate more targeted keywords and phrases. Targeted keywords and phrases are really important for achieving profitability.

Utilizing the keyword tools available, you will probably end up with more than enough keywords and you can then began to narrow your selection to the most cost effective ones for your business. Usually two to three words or phrase is best for any one ad group. That number will be easier to control and monitor and is more likely to generate a higher conversion rate. I'ts not the number of click that you are interested in but it is the number of clicks you convert into a customer that counts.

The most cost effective utilization of Google Adwords is getting the best Quality Score for each keyword or phrase. We will discuss how to do this next time.

John Lane, MBA

Copyright (c) 2008 John Lane