I don’t know about you, but I enjoy a lazy lifestyle. I am not saying that you don’t need hard work to succeed in pay per click marketing. But I just don’t feel as though I have to work as hard as I used to just a while ago. When I started in this business about 8 years ago, there were not many options really available. The Internet was primitive back then. When the search advertising era started, there were not many folks who were taking advantage of it. Sure. Some folks were don’t Google cash back then. The concept of PPC marketing was new back then.

Fast forward 8 years, and we have one of most competitive eras in the history of pay per click marketing these days. Folks who couldn’t start a PC in 2000 are now writing effective ads and managing effective campaigns. Now the costs have gone up due to the increased level of competition, but I actually like seeing folks entering this market. It makes my job easier.

Using spying tools allows me to create campaigns faster than before with the help of my friends (or rather competitors). Spying on others is nothing new, but I know for a fact a lot of top marketers do it on an everyday basis. It’s true that you can start a campaign from scratch and be successful these days, but it is just not efficient enough. The amount of time that you can spend trying to figure out how to start an effective campaign can be spent on more productive things.

You can learn a lot of things by watching the players in your niche. If they are making money with their campaigns on a consistent basis, you can too. So there is no reason to be uneasy about this. At the end of the day, your goal should be to make as much money with as little effort as possible. That’s why spying on others rocks.

I have a confession to make. I have never been good in naming anything in my life. Whether it is naming files or naming sites, I have just been terrible at it. That trait followed me to the Internet marketing world and to my PPC campaigns. When you start your first pay per click marketing campaign, you don’t have to worry about what you name your campaign (or so I thought), but it is very easy to get in trouble when you keep expanding your campaigns every day.

Google allows you to have a total of 2500 ad-groups in your campaign. Now you can do it the wrong way, like I did at first, and reuse your paused campaigns to promote totally different products (without renaming the campaign) or you can come up with a good naming convention for your Adwords account. Using Adwords default naming convention is not recommended. By default Adwords name your campaigns “Campaign #N.” You are obviously allowed to change the name of the campaign at the very beginning of campaign creation process. I used to click on the next button fast until I got to the more important part of the process. That meant that my campaign structure was something like the following:

Campaign #1 – Adgroup #1,#2, #3

Campaign #2 – Adgroup #1, #2, #3

What you want to do is to clearly define what each campaign is about. For instance, if you are selling “ebook x”, and you are bidding on the URL (e.g. ebookx.com, ebookx.net, ebook-x.com), you could name the campaign “ebookx – URL.” This name tells me that the campaign is about ebookx and you are bidding on URLs in that campaign. You could also create a campaign for branded terms and put your URLs in an ad-group called “ebookx-branded-URL.” Isn’t that easier to understand?

You can get as complicated as you want with your naming convention, but at the end of the day as long as you have a campaign naming convention that allows you to figure out what the campaign is about without having to open it up, you are all set. I wonder how many folks have made the same mistake that I explained above.