If you have worked with Google Adwords for quite sometime, you are probably familiar with the concept of day-parting. The Day-Parting feature allows you to choose when you want to run your campaign and at what time. I used to run a tech deal website, and the market is quite competitive. Now my rivals would kill each other for a piece of the pie until 7 PM EST. But after doing research, I realized that a lot of these guys don’t set aside proper budget to cover much after that time. The result was that I was on the first page by paying only $0.50 a click for highly competitive terms.

Now this technique works in some markets and doesn’t work in others. A lot of big companies have so much money to throw around that they are covered for 24/7. But in smaller markets and more niche ones, a lot of these guys don’t know what Day-Parting is, which means you can take advantage of it to promote your site heavily on certain times or days. First you need to go to your campaign setting and turn on ad scheduling. Once you do that, you can choose the times and days that you want your campaign to show or not to show:

When you combine this technique with geo-targeting and embedded matching, you get the ultimate ninja PPC formula. I will go over the other techniques later in the future, but these are the techniques that a lot of people don’t even know about (surprisingly), so you should definitely use them to your advantage. Stay tuned!

If you have been in the pay per click industry for even the shortest time, you know the frenzy about marketers’ attempts to grab the No. 1 position for top paying keywords. It’s true that for a cool new product that has come out, being at No. 1 position can give you a significant edge over your competitors. In fact, studies have shown that the No. 1 position gets as much clicks as the other 9 listings combined. The costs will be higher, but being at No. 1 means more clicks.

But achieving the No. 1 position on Google Adwords is not as important as many marketers make it to be. Sure. You get more clicks, but a lot of those clicks are unqualified clicks that will eat away your profits. Think about it. There is this new cool GPS in the market that everyone has read about on major media sources. How many of people who are actually searching for the product are going to buy it? There is a good chance that the first three listings will satisfy the curiousity of those visitors.  What that means is you are going to lose a lot of money to people who will not buy the product, leaving you with no sales. 

That’s why positions 4-6 are the best positions to target. You get less clicks but more qualified users. By the time visitors get to position 4, they have already evaluated 3 offers, and they don’t need to just click on your adds if they are not interested. Besides, No. 4 is much cheaper to achieve than No. 1. 

Now there are exceptions to this rule. If you are just starting out a new campaign on adwords and you want to get a higher quality score, you want to get more clicks and get a higher CTR. The best way to do that is to put a compelling ad in one of the first 3 positions and overpay a little at first. That is an investment that will pay you back as soon as Google gives you a decent quality score for your site’s relevance and high CTR. But don’t try this approach for all your campaigns. No. 1 position is overrated in most cases, and this is one of those cases that being No. 2 or No. 3 is actually better than being first.

It’s amazing how many people just ignore Google Adwords tool just because it’s free. It’s one thing to use the Adwords tool to find a couple of keywords, but you should definitely be using the tool to analyze your pages and add LSI keywords to them as well. Remember that Google is paying more attention to LSI these days to determine relevancy on your pages, so you need to make sure you use the tools that Google provides you to optimize your landing pages for Google. Now I have explained on SEOABC how you can use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to optimize your pages for Google. But you can go even beyond that with your landing pages.

Unless you haven’t been paying attention, Google has slapped and double slapped a lot of folks recently. You get up one day and your minimum bid is $5! Why? Because Google doesn’t find your site relevant enough. So how do you go about fixing that? By figure out what is it that is making Google doubt your site. Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool and find out what keywords are deemed relevant to your site according to Google. If you are trying to optimize a page for the word “diamond” but the tool doesn’t seem to find your site relevant to that keyword, then you have some work to do. You may have to tweak your content, headers, and tags to get Google to find your page relevant for that keyword. In addition, you should definitely use the “related terms” part to add LSI keywords to your pages. For instance, if Google finds the word “earrings” relevant to your main keyword which is “diamond,” then make sure you include that word somehow to make your site look relevant to Google.

This stuff is really no rocket science but more about paying attention to smallest details. Google is providing you all the tools that you need to be successful. Sure, you can use paid services such as Wordze to conduct better keyword research, but you should be just fine without it. Sometimes having too many tools can decrease your productivity and affect your results negatively!

That’s one of the main questions that baffles newbies and experts alike. For newbies, it often comes down to their limited budget. You have only $200 in the bank, and you don’t want to burn it in 2 hours. That’s understandable. For the experts, you often don’t know where the sweet spot is that allows you the achieve the right CPA for the company that you are doing business with. Let’s say you are working with an insurance company and you have been asked to generate leads for them with Google Adwords. There are many insurance companies that overspend and waste money on Adwords. You can of course copy them, but if your company doesn’t have that kind of budget or CPA tolerance, then you need to find where that sweet spot is where you get the best CPA for your client/company.

The concept of budget is really flawed in the advertising world. It really should be about cost per lead or cost per acquisition. Tell me, if your customers bring you $300 life time value (LTV), and you are paying only $30 CPA for them, why would you want to have a budget? The more you spend, the more profit you get it seems. Of course, many companies don’t work like that, but even if your EPC is $100 and your cost per click is $0.5, then you are making half a dollar per click. Would you want to make $50 a month by spending less or maybe $50,000 by maxing out those credit cards.

Newbies often are afraid to put their feet in the water. Remember, when you were learning to swim. You were probably afraid to jump into the water too. But once you got in there, it became second nature to you. It’s OK to be conservative and avoid breaking the bank, but you shouldn’t be too conservative. You don’t get to make a million by spending $10 a day unless you are converting 10 people a day and get paid handsomely for them. But with the hight advertising costs these days, I would be surprise if you make it with that kind of a budget. My advice to you is to put your budget as high as you are possibly comfortable with. Don’t let the fear stop you from dominating your market. Remember, if people can’t see you, they are not going to buy from you.

Google has a certification program, you might say. Yes! They do. Certifications are the best ways to get some quick cash in the computer industry. We have Microsoft, Sun, Adobe, and Cisco all offering certifications to those who are simple enough to think they can get jobs by only having those certificates. Google’s Adwords Professional is a little bit different than those other ones. For one, you don’t have to be a genius to pass the written test. But you will have to spend money (yours or your clients’) to prove to Google that Adwords is something you want to do (you will have to spend $1000 in 90 days).

Google’s certification really doesn’t tell anything about your ability as a marketer. Sure. You know the basics. You know how to create a local ad or a mobile ad but you don’t learn how to write a good copy just from the certificate program. In essence, it’s the opposite of what other certifications are all about. You see with MCSE, you get the certification you to prove you are an IT expert (you may or may not be). With Google Adwords Professional, you get the certification because you know the marketing science inside and out and just want to prove you have mastered Adwords and are ready to manage clients. In both cases, we are going to have people who have the certification but have no idea what they are talking about but at least Google Adwords you know what to expect.

Is it worth it? I would say yes. If you are a PPC marketer, it wouldn’t hurt to try the Adwords Professional Program. It’s only $50 for the exam, so it’s not that expensive. And if you are an experienced PPC, you are probably spending thousands of dollars a month on Adwords already, so the second requirement should be a piece of cake (if you are not a PPC marketer, the costs are significantly higher as you WILL have to spend $1000 in 90 days to get certified). Overall, it’s a good certification to show you are serious about pay per click marketing. But that’s about it.

Whether you are a master affiliate or just a PPC manager, Adwords can be tough to get right. Every little mistake that you make can make your competitors’ day especially if you are in a hyper competitive market. But usually the biggest happens when you are being lazy. Unfortunately, when you decide to slack off, you cut things off that seem unimportant on surface. Autopilot Adwords are one the examples here. I have seen numerous marketers who set up a daily budget and bids and then let their accounts go for weeks before checking on them again after a month or so. You can’t expect to improve your account’s performance by slacking off.

Split testing is another practice that doesn’t get enough attention from new and sometimes experienced PPC marketers. Basically, you creat two ads and compare their performance and choose a winner after a statistically significant number of clicks. But for some reason new marketers come to believe that once you create those two ads, job is done. It is not. You should absolutely use tools such as split tester to consistently test and improve your ads. Once you identify the losing ad, you remove it, and ad a new one and start the process over. I have heard people who have increased their CTR from 0.5% to 20% by changing their ads. It doesn’t happen all the time, but improving from 0.5% to 2% is a huge improvement, and you goal should be to make an improvement every time your run your split test. It’s not just about CTR. It’s about quality score too!

If you have worked with Google Adwords before, you have probably seen the campaign option where Google by default tries to show the best performing ads more frequently. So here is the million dollar question. If Google loves its advertisers and wants to provide you with the best value, then should you defy them and uncheck this option?

The answer is a simple yes. Under no circumstances (I don’t care what it is), should you have that option on. Here is why. Nobody says that PPC marketing is cheap. In fact, the costs tend to go up every year by some percentage, so even if you are doing everything right, there is a good chance that you could take a hit when Google updates its algorithms or more competitors enter your industry. One way to combat that is to become a ninja in testing. It means that you test, test, and more test your ads, keywords, and everything else (URLS, Capital letters, Small Letters, Bids, Ad tone, Placements) to figure out ways to manage your CPA. A/B testing is the most basic type of testing you could do, which basically allows you to put two ads against each other and figure out which one wins in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR, and …

If you allow Google to optimize your account and show the best performing ads more frequently, then you basically don’t get to do a fair A/B testing done for your ads. An ad might get the first 10 clicks and be extremely successful after a small amount of impressions, but the results need to be statistically significant. With that option on, you basically tell Google to push that ad more often, which means the other ad doesn’t get a chance to show its potential. So the answer is no! You should always go with rotation.

Many ask me this question about the best way to pay your Google bills. Should you choose the Prepaid method or the postpaid method. Obviously there is no wrong answer her as both could work for you. But let’s see this in detail:

Why Prepay: you pay in advance. It sort of works like the prepaid phones from AT&T. You deposit $25 or more and you can use those funds to run ads. Once you run out, you run out. Your ads will stop until you pay them again. This method is usually for people who want to have no surprises at the end of the month. You get what you pay for basically. Now if you run out of ads in the middle of the day, then you will lose prospects for the rest of the day. It could work for smaller businesses. Also if you want to deposit a million dollars for the whole year, that could work too. But post pay is much easier to deal with.

Why Postpay: Postpay is easier to work with as you are billed at the end of the month or when you reach $50 (your first threshold). The threshold is then increased to $200, $350, and $500 if you reach them before your 30 days are out. The postpay allows you to play with your thresholds and never run out of money. Basically you depend on your budget and not the funds you have with Google. This method is used to maximze the number of prospects received. Big businesses almost always use Postpay. If you are working for an agency, there is a good chance that they do invoicing with Google, which shows Prepaid option is not used that regularly.

The challenge here is to choose the option and stick with it. You can’t change your method from Prepaid to Postpaid or vice versa. So you don’t want to pick one and then try to go after the other. I would suggest using Postpaid version to my clients and those who ask for my advice. However, prepaid could work for you depending on your budget restrictions and your business model. Whatever you do, pick one and stick with it. It’s not like you will get a chance to change it again.