Tag Archive for 'adwords'

Success with AdWords

I’ve been building AdSense sites for years now, but have never done much from the other side, in other words participating in the AdWords programme as an advertiser. But I’ve been getting into this over the last few days to promote a product on a client site.

As pretty much of a noob at this side of things, it appears to me to all hinge on the so-called Quality Score, which is basically a measure of the relevance of your landing page to the keyword you’re targeting. The higher your score for the keyword, the less you’re liable to pay for a good ad placement and subsequent click than an equivalent ad with a lower score. This is obviously desirable as your advertising budget then stretches further and you end up achieving a higher return on investment.

Quality Score

The obvious question, then, is how to increase your quality score. Seems it’s doing the same kind of stuff that makes you successful in organic search: choosing good keywords, paying attention to on-page and off-page optimisation, and even targetting your ads very specifically at the keyword you’re bidding for.

For example, say the target keyword is Bible stories for children, you should:

  • use the keyword in the page, if possible in the title, meta description, heading tags, page body, alt tags, etc
  • get some links pointing to the page with the keyword as anchor text, and
  • use the keyword within the AdWords ad itself

I’m sure there are other finer points / black arts to be considered, but these appear to be the most obvious factors for now. Feel free to comment below if you think I’ve overlooked anything.

AdWords competition update

You may have noticed I’ve been running a little competition lately, to win one of two £30 Google AdWords vouchers. Well, the closing date was supposed to be yesterday 20 September 2008, but I just noticed that I wrote 20 October 2008 by mistake!

Competition update

Also, no-one has entered the competition! Now, this may be partly because of me putting the wrong date on it, but also the post has not received all that much traffic, so perhaps not enough people have heard about it, and those that have have not been from the UK (unfortunately the vouchers can only be used in the UK or Ireland).

Anyway, for those reasons, I’ve decided to extend the closing date by another week until Saturday 27 September 2008 at 09:00 Central European Time. So please alert anyone you know who might benefit from a free AdWords voucher to get them started with pay per click advertising, and get them to enter!
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Competition: win a £30 AdWords voucher

I’ve recently managed to get my grubby paws on a couple of Google AdWords vouchers which I’ve decided to give away to my readers. But I only have two, so I thought the fairest way of doing this is to make it into a competition; to enter all you have to do is:

  1. link to one of the posts on this blog from your site, and
  2. notify me via the contact form on my about me page

The closing date for entries is Saturday 20 October 2008 Saturday 27 September 2008 at 09:00 Central European Time, after which I’ll select the two best entries, notify the winners, and put up a post to announce who they are.
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