Here I am trying to address strategies to minimize risk when starting new adwords ad campaigns. If you’re new to Google AdWords, have a limited budget, don’t know what your current conversion rate is, or want to advertise some new products and aren’t sure how well they will sell; than these tips will keep costs low.

1. When first setting up a campaign, turn off the content network. This option is “on” by default. It’s a form of contextual advertising and tries to position your ads on sites like About.com, The New York Times, Food Network and others. You typically will see high impressions in your system, but often low CTR–click-through-rates, as determined by impressions to clicks–and low-quality clicks. These aren’t serious buyers; they’re wasting your dollars and time.

New campaigns should be limited to Google.com and in some cases Google’s search network. This will limit where your ads are displayed to the strongest converting traffic until you can verify that you are getting a decent conversion rate.

2. Use VERY specific (long tail) keywords and keyword phrases to describe your product. Avoid generic words that apply to multiple products and especially if you sell only upscale or expensive versions of the item. (Searchers are more likely to be in the market for the cheaper versions. Whenever possible use keywords that will target only what you are selling.)

3. Keywords should be entered as phrase and exact match ONLY (no broad match keyword phrases). If your budget is really tight or there may be more traffic than you need use exact match only and create ad groups with one to four keywords, tightly matched.

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Most of you have heard of Tracking202 from Wes Mahler. The main disadvantage was you needed to host you data on their server.

Prosper202 is a self-hosted PPC tracking solution, it is the same code used on Tracking202. It is an online tool to help you track you keyword and campaign performance with pay per click. This software is powerful, self-hosted and fast.

With Prosper202 you can upload your sale stats from affiliates into and also your paid keyword stats from adword into and be able to clearly see how you’re profiting or where you’re losing.

Prosper202 is a free PPC keyword tracking application from Wes Mahler and his crew. It’s the same people that created Tracking202 but Prosper202 allows you to host the application directly on your hosting account if your not willing or are feeling nervous about your keyword information being out there on someone else’s server.

It also comes with Export202 which allows you to duplicate PPC campaigns from network to network.

Prosper202 Key Features:

• Works with Every Single PPC Network Out There!
• Cloaks Keywords from Advertisers and Affiliate Networks keeping them a secret!
• Works with Landing Pages or With Direct Linking!

It seems like a great tool, I’ve only been able to play around with it for a little while but I definitely think you should check out the service being provided by Prosper202 if you’re in need of a great keywords tracking application.
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The most common complaint advertisers have - especially if they have a consultant managing their advertising - is that their ads are not appearing where they want them. There is a very good reason for that: that is simply not how pay per click advertising engines work. Advertisers and their consultants have to let themselves off of this hook because it is not possible to consistently place your ads precisely where you want them. Read on to find out that where you see them is not where they are for everyone else anyway.

Where your ads appear is likely to vary for every search because the factors Google uses to decide which ads appear in which position changes with each search. Every single time someone types in your search phrase Google holds a new “auction” for the positions the ads appear in. Even if the search phrase is exactly the same, the mixes of advertisers bidding on that phrase ARE different and so are many other variables (discussed below).

Here are some variables that affect how many advertisers participate in each search auction:

• Ads being manually paused and resumed
• Using what Google calls Ad Scheduling to designate which days and hours ads are active
• Limiting ad impressions with the Campaign Daily Budget (often unintentionally)
• Geo-targeted ads that only appear when searchers are identified as being in a particular location

Of these, the Daily Budget setting causes the most volatility in where your ads will appear. The more advertisers whose ads appear inconsistently, the more erratic your ad positions will be. This is due to a far greater variation is the quantity of advertisers and the bid amounts you are competing against.
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The more keywords you use the more successful your advertising will be. This can be very time-consuming. Fortunately for us, some generous individuals have created free tools to make it easier and speed up the process. Mike’s Marketing Tools provides a simply wonderful tool called AdWords Wrapper. You can paste any list of keywords into this tool and click the “Wrap Adwords” button to get any combination of broad, phrase, and exact match keyword phrases. You can also generate negative keywords lists to use in Ad Groups.

If you currently have broad match keywords you can click the edit keywords link in your AdWords account and copy and paste the list into AdWords Wrapper. Mike updated the tool to make it even better by having this tool correctly preserve the bids and urls that may be present in your existing keyword list. He also provides options to remove the bids and urls if you prefer.
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Many advertisers repeatedly search for their AdWords ads using Google’s search engine. Doing that is detrimental to your advertising success for these reasons:

1. If you are searching and not clicking, you are increasing your impressions and lowering your click through rate (CTR).
2. A lower CTR increases your advertising costs.
3. One goal of Google’s system is to display the most relevant ads - if you don’t click, their system assumes your ads are not relevant. You can actually DISABLE your ads by doing this.
4. Google’s system also tracks ad performance by geo-location. It may decide that your ads aren’t relevant in your geographic area and stop displaying them there. If your business operates only in a local area this can seriously affect your potential in that market.
5. Google modifies the ads and organic results it shows individual searchers so you’re not seeing what your potential visitors see anyway.

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