Very few people realise you can save yourself a bundle of money on your Adwords costs by simply changing your ad. The idea here being you pre-qualify the people who see your ad to ensure only those who are looking for your product or service actually click on it.

The process is simple: you add some copy to your Adwords ad which pre-qualifies the prospect. For example, if you’re selling fishing tackle you could add ‘for carp fishing only’. If you’re selling beginners golf clubs, you could add ‘for beginners only’ or ‘for high handicappers only’. I’m sure you get the idea.

Here’s some more examples of how to pre-qualify your Adwords traffic:

For professionals only
For women only
Over 25s only
Left handers only
For download only

… and so on.

Another great pre-qualifier is to add the price to your ad. Someone looking for something for free is less likely to click on your ad when it’s got a price of $1,997 in the copy. You WILL get freebie seekers clicking it out of curiosity, but over all you will get more targeted traffic to your site.

Another example: the debt management niche. Ads will say, for example, ‘Debts of £15,000 or more?’ That’s a pre-qualifier. They might also say ‘England and Wales only’. Yet another pre-qualifier. Put them both together and the people who click on that ad are generally going to be living in England or Wales with debts of £15,000 or more.

Hopefully these examples have shown you how to use pre-qualifiers effectively. What you need to do is brainstorm ideas about WHO your ideal customer is and use their characteristcs and demographics to create pre-qualifiers for your ads. You’ll get more targeted Adwords traffic with less clicks.

We’ve finally had some great weather here in the UK (well, my part of the UK anyhow) so I haven’t been working much. However, I figured I should get a post up otherwise you might start to think this blog is going the way of most blogs.

I’m gonna briefly talk about tracking your Adwords conversions. In other words, working out how much it costs you to get a sale/sign-up/whaever your conversion goal is in relation to the amount of money you’ve spent getting that conversion.

It’s something that very few Adwords users do and, as a result, they have no idea which keywords are making them money and which are losing them money. You see, Adwords displays conversion stats by keyword, so Google knows which keyword in your campaign resulted in your ad begin shown, which got the click, which got the conversion. The Adwords interface will then tell you how much it cost you to get that conversion based on your overall cost.

Now why would you want to do that? Quite simply to work out if you’re in profit or making a loss, and to see which keywords are getting you conversions and which aren’t. In turn, you can then kill off the keywords which aren’t getting you conversions and put your budget into the ones that are instead.

I’m sure you can see how powerful that is. I’ve been using it pretty much since Google introduced it, and I was using my own tracking software before that because I know just how vital it is; it can be the difference between a winning campaign and a losing campaign.

All you need to do is put the tracking code Google gives you (from within your Adwords account) onto your conversion page. So for example, if you’re selling an ebook you’d put it on your download page. If you’re tracking how much it’s costing you to build your mailing list you can put it on the page people are sent to after opting in… and so on.

If you’re not doing this then make some time in your day TODAY to do it. You’ll be looking at 15 minutes work (tops) to discover exactly where you’re making money and where you’re losing money. And when you get rid of the losing money part, the wonderful world of massively increased profits will find its way to your door.

I’m a big fan of keyword research tools. Things like Wordtracker, Keyword Universe, Keyword Elite and Nichebot do a terrific job of helping you find those all important keywords that could turn you a healthy profit without you ever realising it.

But there’s one problem with them: just about all of your competition are using them too. That means (assuming you’re all using these tools effectively) that you’re all going after the same keywords.

So what’s the solution? Use the one keyword tool only YOU have access to… your brain!

Before I hit the keywords tools I usually have a brainstorming session to try and empathise with my target customer. I get into their head and think the way they think in an attempt to work out what they would type into the search engines to find what they’re looking for.

This is a really powerful technique which, when used with keyword tools, can yeild some amazing results and have you bidding bottom-dollar on keywords which have little to no competition… even in the most competetive of markets.

Don’t rely on software to do all the work for you. Use your brain and, with a little practice and a lot of patience, you’ll start hitting keywords your competitors will never even consider.

Side note: keep an eye out for more keyword research tips and tricks in the future. Some of these things will blow your mind

During the copy writing workshop in York (which I’ll write a review of when I get an hour spare) I spend 5 minutes at the front talking about Google Adwords.

I just wanted to follow up that quick review with another tip that will hopefully make things easier for you when it comes to getting your keywords into your ads. Remember, when your keywords are in your ads they are displayed in bold, so they stand out more.

The idea here is to get the keywords used to trigger your ad to be in the ad headline, therefore attracting more attention and ultimately more clicks.

This requires a couple of things. Firstly, your Ad Groups need to be well maintained with only a small number of highly related keywords in each. In other words, if you’re selling cars for example, you’d need an Ad Group for Ford, another Ad Group for Volvo, another Ad Group for TVR, and so on. You could break this down even further to Ad Groups such as Ford Mondeo, TVR Cerbera etc. but for this example we won’t go that deep.

Next, you need to do your keyword research and split the relevant keywords into the relevant Ad Groups. All this is doing is making your campaigns much easier to manage and makes the next part work really well.

You see, Google have some called DKI, which means Dynamic Keyword Insertion. And what this does is insert the keyword within your Ad Group which caused your ad to be displayed.

Now, if you are using DKI in the headline of your ad, here’s how you would do it:

{keyword:Default Headine}

Let me explain how that works. The ‘keyword’ part tells Google to insert the keyword which triggered your ad into the headline, that is, if there is enough room. Remember, you only get 25 characters.

And that’s what the ‘Default Headline’ part is for; it tells Google what the default headline should be if there isn’t enough room for the keyword, if the keyword contains a trademarked term or if it breaks their editorial guidelines.

So in the car selling example, you could have this:

{keyword:Cheap Ford Mondeos}

Side Note: There’s dodgy information out there claiming it’s the keyword the searcher used which is displayed in your ad. Not true! It’s the keyword within your Ad Group which triggered your ad that’s displayed.

Finally, there’s a few variations of the ‘keyword’ setting. You can use the following:

{keyword:Default Headine} - displays the keyword in all lower case
{Keyword:Default Headine} - capitalises the first letter of the first keyword
{KeyWord:Default Headine} - capitalises the first letter of every word in the keyword

There are a couple of others but I can’t remember what they are. The one I use in just about all cases is the last one: KeyWord.

So, will this help with your clickthrough rates? It should do, yes. As with everything related to advertising you need to test it to see which works best. Sometimes things aren’t what they seem and you must also let your target audience tell you what they want to see in your ad. Never try to second-guess them.

One final tip: please download Google’s Adwords Editor. It makes life so much easier. When I spoke about 33,000 keywords in a single campaign I wouldn’t have been able to do it without that software. And it’s free! Get it from here.

Hope that helps you out if you’re after more info about Google Adwords. If you want to know more, go to www.replytojimbob.com and I’ll see what I can do.