How to use PCC for maxium profits online.

So you have successfully setup your first Google Adwords Campaign and everything seems to be going well. Maybe you are like a lot of folks I have consulted with and your campaign is performing but competition is increasing and you have to spend more now than a year ago to maintain your desired position.

If that's the case chances are there is new life you can breath into your account by following the steps in this article. These techniques are so powerful one of them properly implemented could give you another year at your previous spend level. Combine all three and you will have the secret to driving your cost per lead down and conversion rates up.

Tactic #1 - Landing Pages

One of the ways you can skyrocket your conversion rates is to develop specific landing pages for each Ad Group in Google. This will allow you to formulate a specific message to present to the visitor increasing the chances that they will convert from a visitor to a lead. Remember these points when creating a dedicated landing page:

1. Utilize the Search Keyword in the Headline of the Page 2. Have a Clear Call to Action with a Form 3. Offer something of benefit and relevance to the visitor. (PDF Download, Free Trial, Access to Videos, Whitepapers, Discount, etc) 4. Minimize Navigation and Maximize the Call to Action

This technique has tripled conversion rates on campaigns. I have take conversion rates of 2-3 percent and seen them jump to 6-9 percent over the entire campaign. In specific keyword cases conversion rates jumped up over 15%. If you are a really advanced user, try making use of Google Website Optimized which allows you to A/B test variations of your landing page making it easy to identify the top performer.

Tactic #2 - Negative Keywords

The next two tactics kind of go hand in hand. Negative keywords work the exact opposite of normal keywords. Instead of showing your ads when a keyword displays, negative keywords suppress your ads. For instance, lets say I have a local repair company and I advertise under the keyword repair services, but I do not repair electrical. I would want to suppress my ads from showing when anyone searches with the keyword electrical in their query. So if they search electrical repair services, my ad would not show. So many people make the mistake of not creating negative keywords for words like "free" even though they are selling a commercial product that is not free. I analyzed a clients account and over the course of a year they had spent close to $100,000 on completely irrelevant keywords to their business due to the fact that their ads were displayed using the broad matching type. So you might be asking, "How can I find my Negative keywords?" That brings us to our next point.

Tactic #3 - Discovering Negative Keyword with Google Search Query Report

When you look at your stats in Google (campaign overview) you only see the keywords you have selected. Depending on how you have your account setup it might even be difficult to see how much money you have spend on exact, phrase, and broad match in this view.

Enter the Search Query Report! This report allows you to not only see all your match types and the cost per click and conversions, but you also see all the keywords Google has been showing your ads for that are NOT in your account. It attempts to find additional relevant searches to show your ads under using Google's broad match type. This means that if someone searches for the key phrase: Spanish speaking repair service, you will be able to see this and can suppress all ads that contain Spanish, if you company is not bilingual.

When you run the search query report its important to get as much historical data as possible, so set the dates to at least a few months. This will vary with the activity on your campaign, but generally the more searches and clicks the more you can see trends occur that you will want to suppress. I usually sort the columns by the highest cost and work my way down. Good luck in implementing these techniques. I know if you take the time to dial this in on your site you will increase your conversion rates, eliminate bad keywords, and increase CTR by suppressing keywords that are not a good fit.