Google adwords ads or pay per click advertising must have caused more joy and gloom throughout the internet marketing world than just about anything else. The ‘blues’ are as the result of not organising a proper pay per click management strategy.

Researching a market, then generating the right keywords, followed by organising the ads and getting the whole account published onto the world wide web is no small task. Paying for clicks before organising a systematic approach to determine how you should bid can lead to a very large hole being burnt into the credit card !

OK lets assume that your four line ads are now proudly displayed on Google’s search pages, but where should they be in that list to the right of the page and what should you be paying per click ?

I will now describe my own method for opening the bidding on my keywords, this is the plan I employ successfully with all of my campaigns. This method works – well certainly for me – but I am not claiming that you will make money or that there are not other ways of reaching the same end that you may prefer.

To begin with I would have around 150 ad groups in my ppc campaign, there would be one keyword in every group in the three formats available. With two ads, you keep an eye on the ‘click through rate’ of them both so that you can replace the poorest performing one. Your keyword must be the headline of your ad and where it is more than twenty five characters long it will be substituted with a suitable phrase you have ready. I referred to the three versions of the keyword, these are “broad”, [exact] and broad – which has no embellishments.

My opening bid is 2% of the profit I will generate from a sale – what does that mean ? Lets take a situation where my profit on a sale is $30, two per cent of that is sixty cents – my first bid.

In your adwords account, locate and click on ‘edit campaign settings’. My campaigns are usually targeted at North America, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand so I select those at the bottom of the ‘campaigns settings’ page. Set your ads on ‘rotate’, turn off the ‘content’ and decide on your daily budget. Think very carefully about what you enter here, don’t max out the credit card, start low !

I find that having my ads in position 3, 4 or 5 is best, you should get plenty of clicks and will be paying less, often a lot less, than those ads in positions 1 and 2. Getting your ads just where you need them to be and reducing your costs per click will be the subject of another article.

Making good money by advertising using Google Adwords ads is possible but only with the right per per click management strategy.