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I've been asked to write a couple tips about starting a good campaign in Google Adwords.
While I use adwords to bring in a pretty heafty portion of my income, I still do not consider myself an expert. Even though I may not be an expert, I know what works, at least what has worked for me.
A couple of things that will make or break your campaign:
1. Your bids. Never bid the lowest possible amount when starting a campaign. I generally lose money on the first day (or at least lower profit margins). Doing so seems to avoid MOST type of google slaps.
As you refine your ads with a higher click through rate ad, lower your bids.
2. Keep refining your ads. Dont stop A/B Testing. It takes about 5 minutes to write a new ad. Every morning the first thing I do is wake up and check my ads. Want to know how important testing is?
I took a campaign with a 3.2% CTR (which is pretty good for starting out) and now am getting up to 13% CTR just by testing over about 2 months. This allows me to make more profit. Think of this task in terms of what it will do to your profit! 
3. Use phrase and exact matching. Just bidding on things such as cats, dogs, pets, etc is going to get you a TON of traffic. If you utilize the phrase matching and exact matching chances are you're going to get such a huge increase in conversions. Think about all the possibilities of keywords that would trigger your broad keywords cats, dogs, and pets. It's much too large of a demographic.
4. Quality Score. It's really not that hard to get at least an OK quality score. If you get any poor quality score words, remove them and try adding them at a later time (24 hours later).
I hope those tips help you guys out!
Besides Adwords, I highly recommend you take the time to put your campaigns in Yahoo Search Marketing ($25 in free credits), and Microsoft Adcenter ($50 in free credits).
Good luck!
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Thanks Jonathan. Good post. Point 4, about the ‘quality score’, does that really works for you? Removing keywords and adding them again 24 hours later?
I’m working for some years with AW, but have problems with the QS. Looks like Google has given the whole landingpage a poor QS (there are a lot of affiliate links on it). What are the most important things to get at least an OK or a great QS? Any tips or tricks? That would be great.
Thanks in advance.
Frank, I’m going to write a post more in depth explaining some of the Quality Score stuff tomorrow. Hopefully that will answer any questions.
Yes, that would be great. Have a lot of questions about it, so would be great if you can write a post about it. Thanks.
Hi Jonathan. That strategy works well. I got a poor score on my keywords; created a landing page with some articles and then I added such keywords again and voilá, I got OK and Great scores. The bad about this is that I’m new to this world and still I don’t understand quite well, anyway my campaign is 2 days old and still has no clicks
but I’ll keep trying.
You’re a great mentor, you were my inspiration to give affiliates a try, thank you and kudos ^_^
[...] post on John Chow was in response to my earlier post about google quality [...]
thanks. i will have to try it.
[...] post by Jonathan Volk and posted by Alfred [...]