Best Ways to Optimize Your Google AdWords Campaign

You may have noticed that Google makes it easy to set up a Google AdWords campaign, but not so easy to get a return on your investment in pay-per-click. There are a lot of levers you can pull in your AdWords campaign to influence results. Here are eight ways to optimize your Google AdWords campaign for better ROI.

1. Know Your Target Audience Google AdWords Profile

Knowing your target audience, in the context of Google AdWords, goes beyond maintaining a list of demographic parameters that describe the identity of your customers. You also need to keep in mind one important question – how is my audience using Google? Trying to get a feel for their behavioral patterns and letting that behavior inform your selection and use of keywords will give your Google AdWords campaign an edge over your competition.

2. Speak the Language of Your Audience, Not Your Own

Keep in mind that your target audience may or may not use the same vocabulary that you do to describe what you sell. Your keywords should reflect the way they talk about your offerings, not the way you do.

3. Select Primary and Secondary Google AdWords Keywords

Each keyword in your campaign has a cost that depends on how many others are bidding on it. Your primary keywords are directly related to your product/service. In case of highly competitive products, your primary keywords may prove to be quite expensive. It’s equally important to choose secondary keywords that are not directly related to your product. Secondary keywords widen your reach and can bring down your pay-per-click advertising costs if you choose less competitive segments.

4. Select Smart Site Google AdWords Placements

Apart from bidding on keywords, AdWords also gives you access to a wide range of partner websites where your ad can appear. You can choose categories of websites that your target customers are most likely to visit. For example, if you sell digital cameras, you can advertise on photography sites or sites that target gadget-lovers.

5. Use long-Tail Keywords for High conversions at lower cost

Online users are gradually using longer key phrases rather than keywords. These longer phrases have lower search volume than common keywords. However, long-tail keywords increase your chances of clicks and conversions since they are very specific. For instance, “digital camera” is a generic keyword. A long tail alternative would be “best deal for Canon 1000D.” If you’re struggling to find relevant longer tail keywords, there are a number of free Google Adwords Keyword tools that can help you discover profitable, traffic-driving terms.

6. Monitor Conversions, Not Just Clicks

While you pay for clicks, tracking overall conversions from each keyword can help you derive better value out of your campaign. This, however, requires good integration of Google Analytics and AdWords with your CRM and sales management system.

7. Optimize Your Ad Copy

Just like headlines play an important role in a traditional media campaign, having highly contextual ad copy that’s closely related to the keyword being searched for plays a vital role in conversions. An ad for a broad term like “digital camera” might lead to information that would aid the purchase decision of the buyer. However, if the search term indicates intention to buy, the copy should be persuasive and lead the user to a landing page with an option to purchase.

8. Test Your Landing Page Designs

The key to continually increasing ROI from Internet marketing is testing. Beyond testing multiple versions of your ads, make sure to test variations on your landing pages. Google offers the Google Website Optimizer tool that can help you decide the best layout for your landing page. Decisions like where to place the “Buy Now” button and what color to make it may be aided by this tool.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy

Pay per Click (PPC) is form of marketing that drives a targeted traffic to your business PPC involves creating and placing ads on search engine result pages. It is a dynamic marketplace - the higher you bid, the higher your advertisement will be displayed in the list. You pay only when a searcher clicks on your listing and connects to your site. You don't pay to list; you only pay for clicks or click through. This way you only pay for the traffic to your site; there are no other hidden costs. 

You can see some websites or links on the top of Search results; these links are called “Sponsored Links”. These are websites sponsored by search engines and advertisers have to pay search engine for each click. Advertisers have to pay online only when someone clicks on the link on the basis of per click. So it is named as Pay per Click.

Pay per Click is based on bid that is money for sponsored keyword. That amount of money is called CPC (Cost per Click). When any internet user searches for that particular keyword your site would appear in the top according to your bid you have made for that keyword. Keep in mind the rank in search engine is directly proportional to the amount of bid you have made. So be sure before making a bid! It can be the best way to attract traffic and also can mess up your dream business.

Pay per Click is known as other following names:

• Performance Based Advertising
• Pay for Search Engine Ranking
• CPC (Cost Per Click)
• CPA (Cost Per Action)
• CPA (Cost Per Impression)
• P4P (Pay for Placement)
• CPE (Cost Per Engagement)

Why do you need of Pay per Click?

Pay per Click offers and efficient way to reach customers, because with PPC your link of website shows at the top of all other links i.e. in sponsored links. Visitor clicks on your ad and go to the page on your website. With the help of PPC you can grow your business easily and with fast rate.

PPC V/S SEO:

When you enter a keyword at a search engine like Google, you get two types of results - paid search ads or "sponsored listings" and natural or "organic" results. Paid search results works under PPC and organic search results work under SEO.

Getting your website to appear in a sponsored listing is accomplished by engaging in a PPC advertising campaign.

Getting your website to rank as high as possible in natural search results is accomplished through SEO.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) - A latest technique to optimize any website

Social Media Optimization is very successful for internet marketing business in these days or we can say Social media optimization is improved and fast growing version of SEO. But it does not take position of SEO because it is just a part of Search Engine Optimization.

What is SMO?

Social media optimization is very helpful in website traffic exposure. In SMO, social profile is used on Social networking sites which gather a huge traffic for website. I am defining here some social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Myspace, You tube which are used for social media optimization. Forums, blogs, Images, Videos, Podcasts are also part of social media optimization. In other words, we can say that viral networking is closely related to Social Media Networking.

Social Media Optimization is smart way to optimize any website. SMO not only generates traffic for website but also increases ranking of the website on Google and your business reputation too. There are some rules of SMO are given below.

• Increase Content's linkability: Linkability is most essential precedence for all websites, because most of the sites are static. To optimize a site for social media, First and most important step is to increase linkability of content and blog hosting is very helpful to improve linkability of content.
• Build tagging and bookmarking: Adding content features like quick buttons “bookmark to delicious” “share on facebook” “Share on twitter” etc. is simple and easy way to make the process of tagging pages easier. 
• Reward inbound links: Return or reward inbound links are used as a gauge for success of a website or blog; inbound links are dominant to rising in search results and overall rankings. From using Permalinks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you. 
•  Help your content movement: For SMO only changes in existing website is not sufficient. When you have a content that is portable like audio files, video files, PDF etc then submit these files to relevant sites only that will help your content travel and will increase a back links for your website. 
• Promote your mashup: For this technique, follow the idea of YouTube which provides a code for videos on YouTube to cut and paste, so you can imbed videos from their site, due to this the rate of popularity of videos and YouTube increases. With the help of RSS feeds you can also create mashup which helps to increase popularity of your website. 
• Develop your SMO strategy: Define your objectives and set your goals and always aware that what you are doing in SMO and what will be the actual results for website with the help of Social Media Optimization.