Well, are you? Most people don’t know that they are leaving something on the table or they wouldn’t. I mean either you are not greedy at all or you don’t have the same logic most people do. If you know your advertising campaigns are not as effective as they should be, you  test and optimize. If you feel you don’t have enough exposure in a market, you try new channels, do PR, and so on. When there is a problem, you try to find a solution for it.

When it comes to paid advertising, many folks waste their traffic without knowing it. If you send traffic to a page that does not ask for your visitor’s information or gives them a way to come back to your site for more, you are wasting your traffic. When folks come to your site, either they are ready to make a purchase, or they are just shopping around. Maybe, they are just curious about your product and are non-buyers. It doesn’t matter what their mindset is at that point. You should always have a back up plan (a flow-chart scenario tree if you will). If they end up buying from you, you will get their contact information to sell more to them in the future. If they don’t buy from you, you should provide folks with enough incentive to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed.

You may say, “nobody is going to sign up for my newsletter.” That can’t be further from the truth. If you provide the right incentive, people will sign up. Signing up people is not really that hard but retaining them is. That’s why you want to have a clear plan about what you will communicate with your leads about. Most folks have a set of autoresponder messages at had that will go out every 2 or 3 days. They don’t even have to break a sweat to keep their leads. Others try to do it day by day, which is really inefficient.

Planning is the differnence here. If you plan for the scenarios that I mentioned above, you can make sure you have everything ready to go once you start giving your money away to Google. Even if you are paying $0.01 per clickto Google, you should still try to turn those clicks to leads. The more effective you are in that department, the more money you are going to make through your PPC efforts. It’s no rocket science.

If you have been using Google Adwords for a while, you are certainly familiar with the pain that was minimum bid. Google changed the concept to 1st-page bid but the underlying concept is the same. If your landing page is deemed to be not optimized for your search term, you are going to have to pay more to stay on the first page. After all Ad Rank = Quality Score * mCPC.

Many of us have been slapped by Google in the past. You start a campaign, and you run it for a while for $0.20 per click just to find out after a couple of weeks that Google is asking for a minimum of $5 per click to show you on the first page (not the first position). That’s really painful and if you are running affiliate offers through Adwords, I doubt you can make enough revenue to cover your costs.

Now people pray to God hoping for Google to change its mind and reduce your min bids. Here is the thing. God’s not going to fix your problem. There is actually a simple way to get around it. All you got to do is use Google Adwords keyword tool to figure out what Google sees on your page.

Just select the second option (Website content) and use your own URL to figure out what keywords Google comes up with your site. If the keyword that you are bidding on is on that list, then that could be why you are not getting the excellent quality score that you have always been wanting.

Your listing’s quality score is not just about the keywords that are on your page. You have to truly optimize your landing page to ensure Google that your page is relevant to the phrase you are bidding on, so don’t expect to get “great” quality score by just dropping keywords on your pages. But Google’s free tool does allow you to find out what areas you can improve on. With tools from Google, who needs paid tools!