Default Bid for Adwords is the price which you are willing to pay in ad group level. For example, when you want to start a new ad group in a campaign, Adwords will always ask you to enter your default bid for your new ad group. This is because if you forget to add in bid price for a new keyword in the ad group, the default bid will come into play.

With the default bid running, you are sure to show your PPC ad for that particular keyword, unless it is below bid or you have paused the keyword.

You will need to choose the right keyword bid pricing individually for each keyword, in order to maximize the profit in your PPC campaigns. As using PPC is the same as in business, you must always remember two important elements that will guarantee your success. One is to do your best to increase sales, second is to do your best to cut down cost in your business.

I would also recommend that you position the default bid lower than all keywords in the ad group, as you will not pay have to for those keywords that are worth that much. This is the element of successful business using cost reduction.

Do you do the above strategies in your PPC marketing or use it in your business? Share with us what are the ways you use to promote your products or services using PPC. Hear from you soon, and I will reply you.

Previously, I shared on Intro to Google Quality Score, today I like to share why that will determine your relationship with Google can be establish firmly, by following Google Adwords Guideline.  You need not memorized the whole guideline, but need to remember the main idea why Google has to set this, so we can build a win win relationship with Google and Google users.

First an Intro to the Adwords account layout.

Taken From http://blog.revahealth.com/

There are four different levels in the Google Adword account, the keyword level (foundation level), Adgroup level (2nd level), Campaign level (3rd level), and Account level (4th and highest level). Here are the breakdown and details for the four levels:

Account Level: Create up to 25 campaigns in an account level.

Campaign Level: Create up to 100 Adgroups in Campaign level, meaning 100 different themes of PPC marketing

Adgroup Level: Create up to 100 keywords in a Adgroup level, where PPC Ads are also created here.

Keyword Level: The basics of Adwords, quality score starts from here.

Taken From www.hotelpulitzerrome.wordpress.com

You are building Rome little by little, brick by brick….

As you can see that the keyword level is the foundation of the whole Adwords account, the keywords are like bricks, building up a wall (Adgroup), and the wall will be used to build buildings and towers (Campaign), and the empire (account level) will be prosperous and make strong with the rest of the world (Google). This is like building Rome day by day, brick by brick.

So each level is very important to the kingdom or country, if one campaign has many weak keyword quality score, then it will affect the whole account as whole, although this will not hurt the other campaigns, it just mean that the account quality score drop. That is why the keyword level is very very important, you do not want to have a few weak bricks, that will jeopardize your whole empire, right?

Do your best to have good or great quality score in your keyword level. So that you are able to build a strong and mighty empire.

I almost forgot why you need to build your Adwords account this way.

When you have build an Adwords account that has great quality score for all levels, you will realised that when you create a new campaign, Google will give you more leeway if you have a high quality score account. Of course this will be even better if your account is old in age, giving confidence to Google that you can help them give the Google users a good experience when the users use Google search engine.

What I mean by the leeway Google is giving you?

It simply means that when you create a new campaign for a totally different market, you will find that the keywords you bid for will actually be lower than what the other novice Adwords users are bidding in the long run, after a month or so. Google will still access the three critical areas that will determine whether your PPC campaign is relevant and not against Google Adwords Guideline.

Adwords has four Keyword Match type to all its users since its launched in 2000. The bad news is that you may not know what this keyword match type can do for you, the good news is that a lot of people still do not understand what keyword match type can help them in?

For me, I find that its a good thing that a lot of people still do not know what the keyword match typ e is, so I will have less competitor to compete with. But I still acknowledge that with competitors will then prove my skills is up to mark or I am just kidding myself and you. So I welcome competitors to come share the big pie, and may the best man win!

So much for my ego thing, I will start with the four different types of keyword matching that puts Adwords into the cutting edge service.

Broad Match Keyword

This is the easiest to understand, yet the one that will make you lose the most money. The nature of a board match keyword is that when you bid for a keyword as a broad match, you are telling Google Adwords to show your ads as long as someone searches for the word.

For example, you bid on a keyword flower, your ads can appear when someone types ‘flower shop’, ‘flower material’, ‘fake flower‘, ‘red flower‘, ‘purple colour flower‘, or ‘how to make a girl smile with red flower‘, etc…

It is very very very very broad. This is a very good thing, as you might not know what your target audiences will search online. So the solution is to bid on the broad match, you have all the traffic to yourself. Best of all, board match is in the default setting, so you can have your market traffic to your website.

Phrase Match Keyword

You will need more understanding than the broad match. The rule states that if your keyword has phrase that you want to target, for example using “google adwords” as a phrase match. Your ad will be trigger if someone searches for ‘best “google adwords” expert’, ‘”google adwords” professional’, ‘tools “google adwords”‘.

As long as the additional words are either in front or at the back of the phrase match, the ad will trigger. Here are some examples that will not trigger the ads; ‘adwords google’, ‘free adwords tool google’, ‘adwords pro in ppc’.

Exact Match Keywords

This is as easy as the board match. It simply means that the ad will only appear when someone search for that keyword only, no additional keyword is needed, or anything keyword taken out of the exact match, the ad will not appear.

For example, you bid on keywords [how to make money online], the ad can only be trigger if someone searches the exact keywords in the same sequence. Here are some example that the ad will not appear; how to make money online fast, make money online, how to make cash online, etc…

Negative Match Keywords

The most underused keyword match in Adwords. And the only keyword match that can help you save the most on your PPC cost. The primary job of negative keyword is get rid of irrelevant keywords that are searchers are typing online.

For example, you are a flower shop owner in New York, you only sell real flower, so your main negative keyword would be -fake or -not real, or -manmade, etc…

Negative match is best use with board match and phrase match, as these two are the only ones that will bring in the most traffic, even unrelated traffic.

If you want to find out more on the Adwords Keyword Match Type, I suggest you click the link to help you understand more.

Quality Score, one of the most important factors in your Adwords PPC. Google Adwords is the only one currently applying Quality Score system to its users. With a deep knowledge of quality score, you are on the way to making successful PPC in Adwords. That is like winning 70% of the battle already.

Quality score is based on three factors in you Adwords PPC:

1) Landing Page Relevance

2) Keywords Used for PPC Ads

3) Click Through Rate

Landing page relevancy is the content and context of the web page, where once a user click and landed in the web page. What you need to provide is the relevant content that the user uses the keyword to search for your product or services. If your landing page is pre-selling something not related to what the users are looking for, they will leave the page as soon as the page loads up.

This will decrease your quality score, as the bounce rate will increase, thus telling Google Adwords that your user’s experience is bad. The good news is that landing page makes up of less than 10% of your quality score. As long as the keywords are shown in the landing page, your landing page quality page should not go below 5. Next we go into….

Keywords Used for the Ads. This is the channel where the targeted traffic will come to your landing page. Finding out the keywords that targeted traffic users type in Google, will increase the chances of you doing business with you.

Keywords actually tells you what the users are looking for online. Take for example; someone type ‘flower shop’, looking for a flower shop online. But the thing is that this keyword is way to general in term of geographically speaking, if only the user is in your area where your flower shop is operating, most properly you will not be able to do business with the users.

But if the user types in ‘flower shop New York’, this is a very different situation compare to the general ‘flower shop’. One is that if your flower shop is in New York, then you have a higher chances of doing business with the user. Two, it tells you that the flower to be send to is going to be in New York, a high percentage buyer. This is called Geo Targeting, targeting people in a certain area only. Everything up till now, the percentage of you getting a high quality score is only 25% to 30%, the next element is the key to your success in Adwords PPC…

Click Through Rate also known as CTR, is the key in improving your quality score. Why is this so….

Because once you have the right landing page and keywords to target searchers, now you need to do is to attract the searchers to click on your ad. Having a compelling ad and keywords shown on the PPC ad will increase the chances of them clicking your ad, and thus increasing your CTR.

In order to have ad that sell (meaning high click through), you need to understand:

a) Your product: the terms the product do, and how it can help the searchers ease their pain now.

b) The searcher’s state: depending on the product and the keywords they are searching for, will actually tell you what their current situation is. With this information, you will be able to target the searcher’s emotion and their fears.

Once you can provide a solution, that will take away their fears and pain. The chances of you doing a business with them is very very very high.

The PPC is like the door to the store, if your door is not attractive or telling them what your business is all about in the shortest length of words, they will not take notice of your ad at all.

In the past there was only bad, good and great for the ranking of the keyword quality score. It has changed since having 10 different scoring points for you to be at, 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest. Do your best to be 7 and above for the keyword level.

There are a lot other factors that will help increase in the quality score of your Adwords PPC, I will talk about them in the near future. As of now, this post is to simplified what Google Adwords Quality Score is, and how you can benefit from it, thus making more money.

There are reasons why I wrote that as the title. As I have been seriously wanting to improve in my PPC skills (especially in Adwords), the more I find that the tools in Adwords are not telling us the whole story. So I ponder about it and decide to write this post to share with you.

I have been using Adwords for like 3 years now, initially I was not really serious about it and did not make any money, but thank God I did break even. Now as I get to find more and more stuffs about Adwords PPC, the more that I feel that Adwords are not telling me a lot of things. It felt like along in the dark, not able to find the way out.

Why I comment this way?

As I was using the Adwords report, a lot more things are not what they are appearing to be. For example, I did use a “keyword A” in both phrase and exact match, but when I found out that someone actually type the exact match for my “keyword A”, it came off as a phrase match. I checked the spelling and plural stuffs, it was all set by me long time ago.

The “Keyword A” should have triggered the exact match, but instead it was reflected in the phrase match. The search volume was good, so the PPC ads were on.  I am still trying to figure out why this happen?

Then when I used the Ad Preview Tool (login to Adwords account), the keywords which I bid are actually higher than the other ads, but when I use the Ad Preview Tool (without login to Adwords account), the result are very different. They are actually lower position than the login Ad Preview Tool.

My conclusion

You can still use the Adwords tools as to give you ideas and how to market to your niche, but to fully trust it will be not wise. I still use them like the Ad Preview Tool (without login to my accounts) and Adword Keyword Tool (without login as well), they are actually more accurate when you did not login to your Adwords account. Try it, you will be surprise to see.

By the way, here are some links you might want to check it out for more info in supporting my post.
1. 76% of SEMs Don’t Fully Trust Google’s Keyword Tool
2. Can we trust Google Keyword Tool?

Have you ever encounter low search volume in your Adwords campaign? So low that Google Adwords will switch it off. Do you know why this happens?

One of the reasons is that it has such low search volume that Google Adwords deem that it will not make them any money. Surprised! I was too when I got to realised it when studying some of my keywords today.

I found out that the keywords that I am targeting are very targeted, profitable and long tailed keyword as well, basically I am in a no man’s land (no PPC ads search result too!) where there are plenty of gold to dig. This would be a profitable keyword for me to make money in. But the ad was not on for this particular keyword, because of low search volume.

Instead I found out that this keyword was taken out from a primary keyword phrase to replace this targeted, profitable and long tail keyword, which is a very competitive and expensive keyword to bid on. The long tail keyword was worth only a third of the price for the expensive keyword.

Then suddenly I realised that Google will take the most relevant and most expensive keyword phrase, replace the one that is more targeted yet low in volume. Thus making Google more money. I was so pissed at this kind of this arrangement, that I had to voice out and share.

The solution

Well the only solution which I think will work best for me is to target the profitable long tail keyword in organic search. That means SEO. I see that the competitions are weak, not from websites but from free directories, so it will be easy for me to target in for the free traffic.

Next is to target other search engines PPC, and bid on the keyword too. Just a note if you are new to PPC, the other search engine’s PPC are actually lower in price for every click, which is a good thing. You might just pay less than $0.10 per click or even less.

For the switched off profitable keywords, continue to let it run till more search volume kick in and it will restart the keyword again.

If you have encounter this before, and have a better solution to what I just suggested, be sure to share with us. I will be listening.