Pay per click advertising (Google ads) must have caused more elation and sleepless nights than anything else on the web. By employing the right pay per click management program the ‘I wish I were dead’ moments would be far less frequent.

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 !

So your ads are on display, but in what position and are you paying too much 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.

I like to start my ppc campaign with around 100 to 200 ad groups, each containing two ads and just one keyword phrase (minimum two words) in it’s three forms. With two ads, you monitor 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. Keywords, as I mentioned, can be used in three formats, phrase – “keyword”, exact – [keyword] and broad, which has nothing around it.

For my initial bid I enter two per cent of whatever I make on a sale – what does that mean exactly ? Lets take a situation where my profit on a sale is $30, two per cent of that is sixty cents – my opening 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 !

For ads to appear ‘above the fold’ they need to be in positions 1 to 5 usually, but I advise you not to aim for the top two spots, you will pay less and still get plenty of clicks in 3rd, 4th and 5th place. The techniques I use to get my ads in the right positions and at the right cost will be the subject of my next article.

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