Do you have problems in contacting Adwords support team? Me too. It took me quite some time to find out how to contact the Adwords support team.

If you have been using Adwords PPC since 2008, it has been known to most Adwords users that contacting Adwords people are seemingly almost impossible. Here is the link to contact them.

You can also login to your Adwords account, click on the “Help” link, you will be brought to a new page, scroll all the way down till you see “Contacting Us” on the bottom of the page.

By the way, Adwords team will be sending you an email that looks like it’s auto-respond type, so you will have to reply them back with more specific questions, so as to get someone real to communicate with you.

So many people are talking about this new thing “Google Instant Search“. I was in Hong Kong when I realised that Google changed how search will be online, so I did some research on how we as PPC marketers can benefit or even not be hurt by this new move that Google has implemented.

There are so many articles or blog posts talking about Google Instant will not hurt us PPC marketers, some commented it will. For me, it’s a bit of both.

Why do I said that?

I did some experiments on my friends, asking them to search Google Instant online, according to their hobby and their interest. I found there are 2 different distinct searchers online. The focused and the browsers.

The focused searchers

They know what they want to find online, thus knowing the full name or related name of the search term. Like for example, I have a friend interested to find out the price of Macbook Air, so he typed in “macbook air price” as search term. Going straight for the search term he typed, ignoring other search results and PPC advertising. Most buyers come from this group.

The browser searchers

This is the complete opposite of a focused searcher, browser searchers do not know have a definite search. I find them doing a lot of random search on their hobby or interest. Some will look at the new Google search results, spending some time on reading the search results. They will even restart on searching on another related term too. Clicking on the PPC advertising that interests them and the organic search results too. Usually they are rushing searchers, that will also explain why they spend time reading the search results.

Now, both of the searcher qualities above are within all of us, just depending on circumstances and situations they are in.

How Google Instant Search Can Hurt PPC Marketers?

An increase in impressions will be the cause, thus decreasing CTR, thus paying more for the keywords in the long term. Although Google did stated that as long as the Google searchers using the Instant Search, does not stay more than 3 seconds, it will not counted as an impression for the Adwords marketers. Click Here to read more about Google Instant.

The problem here is that most of the searchers are browsers, thus getting more impressions for your PPC ads and keywords. But the good news is that most beginner Adwords marketer who do not have a very tight organised Adwords campaign and do not have budgets that can last their business long term, will be eliminated sooner than before Google Instant was introduced.

For those Adwords marketers, who are the opposite of the above, will most properly be successful and having ROI for their business. Because most of the tight campaign Adwords marketers, will target on long tail keyword and they are in phrase and exact match only. Their ads are targeted, landing page for that specific keywords only, thus showing more relevance.

Google Instant is on when you used Google. So how do you switch it off? Go to “Search Setting” which is on the top right of Google, go to Google Instant column, select “Do not use Google Instant”, and click save. This will help to decrease the impressions, or you can always use the Adwords preview tool.

My conclusion

For new and un-organised Adwords campaign PPC marketers or users, it will be a much harder to have a higher ROI. Whereas, for the more advanced PPC marketers, are the ones who will make it and earn even more ROI from PPC marketing. So the only way is to constantly upgrade yourself for more PPC strategies and tips.

There are a lot of PPC consultants out there with Adwords Qualified Professionals, or Yahoo PPC Qualified Consultant, but most of them have not use PPC to generate income for themselves yet. They are just like stock brokers who are trying to sell you stocks, yet they have not invest in it yet.

That is a very sad thing, and of course there are real PPC consultants who knows what they are doing, and will help you in driving targeted traffic, and at the same time lowering your PPC cost.

The question now is, how do you find these PPC consultants who are experts and can help you drive targeted traffic, making you money in the end?

1) Ask them if they have been making money using PPC to drive traffic to their websites?

I must say that this is going to be quite hard, getting them to show you their money making niches or markets. Who would let someone find out what their profit making niches are? To tell the truth, I would not even tell you my niche let along the PPC consultants.

BUT what you can do is to to get them to show you the total amount they have actually pay in Adwords PPC, or other PPC platforms. The amount will show you their experience in using PPC as a traffic tool to their websites. I would recommend that the PPC consultant has at least $2000 spending in their PPC. This would be a normal range to gauge them.

2) Past Clientele Of PPC Consultant

Besides having the Adwords Qualified Professionals, the consultants would have some past or current clients who engaged in their PPC services before. Finding out from them, how are the consultants doing, how much profit has the clients made since they use the PPC services, etc…

This is a great way to find out. Having some social proof will set your mind at ease.

3) Traffic Or Leads?

Someone who would engage a PPC consultant would usually come from a middle or large enterprise company. They would sometimes want to capture leads instead of just getting traffic to their websites.

This is where the consultant, will share with you on creating a specific landing page for your company product or service, plus using a form to lead capture or even get the targeted audience to call your company. They would have to advise you (company) on getting the best structure of getting sales for your company.

From there onwards, monitor your sales compare to the previous month where the PPC service was not engage. If there is an increase in sales of 10 to 15% from the online, then the consultants know what they are doing.

If you are looking for a PPC consultant, be sure to find out from them the above 3 things, before you engage them.

Taken from www.keenplan.blogspot.com

I was at the Google Analytics Master Class today, where one of the speakers Jon Stona was sharing that dating a girl is the same as conversion using Adwords PPC. I find it very funny and very true to all men and Internet marketers out there.

You go out with a cute lady, bring her to a great restaurant where there is romantic ambiance. Then you bring her to walk the nearby beach, where you listen to the night sea wave together, she likes you and you likes her, everything is going great. You walk her home, and the time to kiss her at her door steps. You froze, you do not know what to do, and worst of all you wet your pants. This is not a great experience for you and her.

This is also true for your online marketing using Adwords, you have paid for the traffic coming to your web page, the only thing in your mind is to convert that traffic to a sale or a lead capture or send them to the affiliate sales page etc…

You see, you have already made the investment (Google Adwords) to bring her out for nice dinner, and it can be expensive, gave her flowers (free report for example), show her the night view at the beach (using video to educate your prospect), then at the end of the whole event, you have to ask her the question or the usual action is to kiss her. This is giving a good user experience, and most properly your traffic (girl you are dating) will buy from you or do what you tell them to do.

Make every date (click) count, because if not you are going to lose out big time in the long run.

This post is to remind me of main advantages of using PPC, especially Google Adwords for my business. You can also use it for your reason to use PPC for your online business.

1) Fast Traffic. After I have done my keyword research for the niche I want to be in, I will be sure that within 15 minutes I will get the traffic to my website. Of course all this is after I have set up the Adwords campaign and the ad groups.

2) Targeted Traffic. I will only show my ads to people who search the keywords that I bid on. This way, I am getting very targeted traffic to my website, and not any Tom, Dick or Harry.

3) Geo Location Traffic. Though organic results are free, but not all the time I will get the customers I want. I may have a services that is only operated in a particular country only. I can always use the Adwords GEO targeting to set to the country or location I want to show my PPC ads.

4) Discover Buying Keywords. Though the use of Adwords conversion tracking, I will be able to find out the buying keywords that searchers were using. With this buying keywords, you have already found gold that spells success for your niche market.

5) Actual Search Impressions. I am also able to find out how many people are searching for my product online using PPC. This is important information to all marketers. Have you heard of a phrase “Those who have the most information will be successful”, I am not sure who quoted that but its true for me in this case. Having the actual search impressions for a keyword is like knowing whether I will succeed or not.

6) Budget Control. If I have a budget for a new campaign, I can always set my daily budget to the one that I can afford. This is so much better than using Newspaper ads, as the ad space will be more expensive and no way of finding out how many actually see your newspaper ad.

7) Control. This is what I love most about using Adwords PPC, total control. The above 6 reasons tell me that in Adwords, I can control everything that I want in Adwords. Not like investing in stocks, where I can only control when I get in and when I get out. With Adwords PPC, you control everything!

No matter what, I will still use Adwords PPC for my online business, as it gives total control. What are your reasons for using Adwords? I like to hear from you.

PPC (Pay Per Click) primary job is to bring targeted traffic to your website, a traffic driven tool that is fast and targeted. What most Internet marketers wish for when the Internet first began back in the 1990s. But without a plan, PPC can only do that much for you and I.

That is when I realised that PPC is like the newspaper ad, but much better. Advertising your product or services to people when they see the ad (this is called impression in PPC term). Whether they take action or not, will depend on how compelling the ads are in showing the benefits, and a call to action too.

It is after when your targeted audience saw your action, click your ad to find out more, and now they are interested or want to buy from you, what do you do?

Do you have a plan in what your sales or lead process will be?

If the answer to the above are “NO”, then you would have wasted PPC click that you just paid to Google or Yahoo or MSN. With out a detailed plan to define what are you going to do with the interested audience, your online business is near to failure.

There is a hope for you, by planning what you want to do with them. How?

There are basically 2 ways for you to profit in using PPC, one is to lead capture their details like name, email or even mobile or fax. The other way is to send them directly to what you are promoting or selling online, from there the audience will decide to go ahead to buy or not to buy from you or the merchant.

1. Send targeted audience directly to merchant: This tactic is not that great, but it still works if you know the buying keywords that they are searching online. This already help you win half the battle. The process is simple, set a PPC campign that has buying keywords, follow by a writing a compelling PPC ad, and lastly with a landing page that pre-sell them the benefits of the product or services they want.

And lastly a eye catching click here button which they can’t miss, that will direct them to the merchant with your affiliate link. This is very easy to setup and it does not cost much for having a hosting and domain name purchase. It will cost you as low as USD $10 a month to setup a online business.

2. Capture the lead, to educate them. Yes the targeted audience have to be educated in order for them to reach a decision to buy from you. You can set a series of emails using auto-responder which will educate them on the product or services.

This is the preferred choice for most marketers. Here are the 3 main reasons why we love to use this strategy:

a) We already pay for them to our site, we must make them come back for more….

b) Relationship building: This is what most marketers lack of when they do not communicate with their clients.

c) Upsell: When you have done the first 2 reason above, you will find that it will be easy for you to upsell them to other related products.

With  a written marketing plan and sales funnel, you will find that profit is on its way to you. When you fail to plan, you are actually planning to fail. Which of the two strategy suits you the best? As yourself, and write it down what you want. Share with me using the comment what you plan to do. I will be listening.

Clicks, Impressions & CTR

New Google Adwords users sometimes are in a position where Adwords will tell you to bid higher so that your ads will show on Google search engine. Google Adwords may be showing you that you have 1000 impressions but it actual fact your ad impressions is only 20 to 30% of the actual impressions.

The main reason why this happens is that you are new to Google Adwords, and Google do not trust that you will give a good user experience to the Google search users, that is why they are testing you if your ads and landing page are relevant.

And worst of all, Google Adwords will actually ask you to increase your bid so that you will appear in the 1st page of the Google search result for the keyword you are bidding. Even if you increase your bid, the impression will increase slightly to more than 10 to 20% of the total impressions for the day, depending on how high your new bid is.

How is it that Google Adwords will show your ads 100% of the time?

To answer the above question, only quality score and click through rate (CTR) can get your ads to show 100% of the time. As you are new and have no quality score history, you will not be able to show your ads 100% of the time. In order to increase your CTR and quality score, you got to have compelling PPC ads that will get the attention of the searchers to click on your ads.

This will take time to show your ads 100% of the time. Work your way to increase your CTR and quality score history. This is a long term winning strategy with Google Adwords.

What about landing page?

Although landing page does affect a bit, but you can always try to improve your landing page quality score by being relevant to the the keyword and ad. Read more on Landing Page Secrets here.

Once you understand the above reason, and how CTR and quality score affects the ad impressions shown to the search users when you are a new Adwords user or new account, you will then focus to create a attention grabbing and compelling PPC ad to get a click. Only then will you be able to gain your CTR and quality score history, as this builds trust with Google Adwords with you. As long as we give relevant PPC ads and landing page, in the keyword we are bidding,  Google will reward you with high quality score.

What will be your strategy if you are in this situation as well, I like to hear from you. Be sure that I will be talking back to you. Use the comment below to share.

Ask yourself these questions before you decide which currency to use for your Adwords account.

1) Is the products or services you are targeting only for a specific area or location only, and no other place?

2) Are there going to be other related products or services for that area or location only?

3) Is this going to be a international product or services?

4) How many countries are we talking about?

If you answer yes to no 1 and 2, then set your Adwords account to the country’s currency which you are targeting. If you answer yes to no 3 and  ‘Many Countries’ for question 4, then set to the U.S currency, as most of the online transaction is using U.S currency.

You can also make it easy for you to do accounting when most of the online transactions are in U.S dollars.

BUT, most of you will still use your own currency to do the PPC payment. This is not wrong at all. It actually makes perfect sense to do this, as its easier for you to account for the costing too. And Google Adwords will also ask you for your credit card or debit card details, the cards are most likely to be from the country you live in too.

One thing to note is that as currency values are different, and they varies day to day. It is a good pratise to adjust your bidding price weekly for the first 4 months. Once your campaign is stable and gain good quality score, then you can stop adjusting the bidding price.

Of course, you will have new competition come competing with you always. Depending on how big is the market, the bigger it is, competition will be very tense and tough as well. In this case you might want to use some spy tools to spy on your competitiors, and monitor if they are making profits if their PPC ads still show after some time.

My Take Home Advise

I would prefer to use local currency for local online marketing, and U.S currency for all international products and services online. This is my preference, what you need to do, is to find out what suits you best, then set according to what you want.

The pros and cons for using different currency and local currency are already stated above. You will need to find out yourself. If you do not know what to do? Then follow my example, it will save you a lot of time from deciding things that are not making you money. Remember Adwords PPC are quick and result driven, so you must be like one too. Talk to you soon…

I came across a search query recently, asking “Is PPC Profitable in 2010?” What would you think? For my opinion I still think PPC  will be profitable, actually more profitable than in 2009 or any other years before. As our technologies grow day by day, we are highly dependent on speed and results.

Taken From www.free-legal-document.com

And this is where PPC is able to provide these 2 factors so efficiently to us. BUT, PPC is a double edged sword where if you know what you are doing, you can get great results from PPC, if you do not know what you are doing and expecting the PPC service provider like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, to help you in setting up the PPC campaign, you can be sure that you will pay a lot for your PPC ads and they will treat you like a VIP customers, making you less profitable than you should be too.

Back to the question… Is PPC Profitable In 2010?

PPC will still be profitable, actually it will be even more profitable than the previous years after it was invented. Many of us are so dependent on the Internet, when people want to find something, they go to the search engines 90% of the time. This information alone is going to worth gold to you and me.

If you position yourself well (top 3) in PPC or SEO, you are almost guarantee success for all business, be it online or offline. With good marketing strategies planned out, the upsell, side sell, down sell, your business can be profitable using PPC on its own already.

Take for example, I have a local business service (not owned by me), which most of the Singaporeans will use once a while, my PPC and SEO are in the top 3 position.  I am already dominating there for that service and making me thousands of dollars monthly. You can use this to your advantage.

It can also work for international products too, you will need to be very focus on the niche and know the target audience’s needs and what are their pain. A deep research of the market is a MUST, and it has to start with keyword research first, then the trend of the niche, its seasonality, etc…

I would recommend using a good keyword research tool, although Google Keyword Tool give you good research, but they are limited to broad keywords, not the long tail keywords where the money is. I would recommend using Keyword Research Pro: keyword research tool to help you in the research.

PPC is a skill that needs time to perfected, and be a lot of new stuffs (especially for Adwords) will be invented to help you in your PPC journey. I would suggest that you invest at least 2 hours a day for a year to get yourself familiarized with Adwords or other PPC platform (Adwords is the better choice), and get your hands dirty on a new project to promote. This way you can be sure that you can learn PPC the fastest way and you will understand it better as well.

Remember that to have profitable results in PPC is attainable, you just need to understand and practise PPC skills to be making money online. How would you think that those who are top in their field be able to make it? Because they put in affect (a lot of affect and time) to learn and to be the best in their fields. That will be your goal if you want to see your PPC profitable in 2010.

This is a very short post.

Recently, there has been a lot of Adwords users been banned. There are talks in the internet marketing forums, and even on blogs like PPC Blog, read here for more info.

Most of those who were banned are mostly affiliates promoting someone’s product. Most of them do not have products of their own, and not that the Google Adwords are enforcing such strict rules in promoting affiliate products.

Although it happen last year, but I think it will continue to happen if users do not abide in Google Adwords rule.

How to prevent yourself from being ban by Google?

1) Get yourself familiar with Google Awords guidelines in promoting products or services.

2) Unlearn the old PPC marketing, they are not going to help you much.

3) Learn from those that have great PPC expertise in Adwords.

My best bet is to follow on Google’s new way, or you will miss a lot of making money chances. That will be all now.