Usually in Google ads there’s the green web-address at the bottom. But recently there seem to be more ads showing up that have a call to action there instead of a link. Just look at the picture of the two ads on the left. The first one has the standard web-address there, whereas the second one has a call to action “Learn More Now”.

This is something that you might want to split-run for your campaigns and see how it affects CTR.

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Negative Keywords are a must. If you are selling umbrellas online you don’t want to google to display your ad when somebody is searching for “free umbrella”. So the word “free” is a keyword that you almost always want to exclude. There’s a bunch of other ones, but here I just want to point out how powerful this can be.

If you can reduce the time that your ad shows up by 50% with negative keywords you will have a 100% higher CTR (click-through-rate).

If you reduce the time that your ad shows up by only 20%, you still get a 25% higher CTR. This will be well worth your time of setting up your campaign with negative keywords.

Another very basic but powerful concept in PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns is qualifying your website visitors.

If for example you are selling an ebook that teaches people how trade baseball cards for profit your ad might look like this:

Baseball Cards Profits
How to sell your baseball cards
for fun & profit.
www.baseballcardbroker101.com

Many baseball card collectors will be attracted to click on that ad, but they won’t be willing buyers.

So how do you sort out the people who are ready to give you their money in exchange for learning how to trade baseball cards for profit? You pre-qualify them with an ad like this:

Baseball Cards Profits
How to sell your baseball cards
for fun & profit. $27 guide.
www.baseballcardbroker101.com

You see the difference? It’s clear already that they have to spend $27 on a guide if they want to learn it. The people who will click on that ad will in general be much more likely to actually buy from you and not just look for free information.

Can you think of other ways to qualify your website visitors? If you are teaching a golf swing technique - is it for advanced golfers or for beginners? So then your headline might be “Gold Newbie Technique” or “Golf Pro Technique”.

Other ways to qualify your customers? By age, by income, by nationality, by sex, by price, “Must accept Amex”, etc.)

Examples of this: Instead of a Dating Guide make it a Dating Guide for Men over 40. Instead of a Tax Savings Advice make it a Tax Savings Advice for people with a yearly income of $100,000+ etc.

The point is to only have people click on that ad that will be most likely to actually buy your product instead of just check out your website. Remember: You don’t get paid for having somebody look at your website. You only make money if somebody buys from you. But you have to pay for every click that somebody does on Google Ads on your ad.

Qualify visitors and your CTR might go down - but your conversion rate will be much higher and so will your profits.

But there’s a downside to pre-qualifying your visitors too: Ad-networks penalize you if less people click on your ad. So an ad that get’s clicked on 10 times of 100 times that it shows up will get a better quality score than an ad that get’s clicked on 6 times out of 100. So you might want to weight that in, but generally pre-qualifying your visitors is worth the little penalization.

Again - as always with PPC, don’t just take my word for it. The golden rule of PPC is: TESTING, TESTING, TESTING. So try it, see if it makes you more profitable, and decide for yourself.

If you want to start a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign one of the first things to do is to check out how many advertisers are bidding on that search term. The fastest way to do that is to just search for that phrase in google.

Some keywords have almost a hundred advertisers - just type in “affiliate marketing” and see how many ads show up (per page there is an 8 ad maximum, but then the ads show up on other pages too).

Other keywords might have only two advertisers - when I typed in “pencil” there were just two results showing up.

Guess which campaign will be easier to compete in? Usually everything below 15 ads per searchphrase is an easy game, and every searchphrase that has more than 50 ads will be a tough one.

But again: this is just a rule of thumb, and some search-terms will be just too hard to monetize even if you are the only one. The key to higher profits is as always: testing, testing, testing.