I have not used Adwords for a long time though I have been a happy user about 3 years back. Adwords has always been good and has become even better in 2010.  Here are the ten innovations that made Adwords better in 2010 as per Google Adwords blog.

AdWords Campaign Experiments

AdWords Campaign Experiments is a tool that allows you to accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements.

Adwords Campaign Experiments allows you to test and measure changes in real-time by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign, a kind of split test of evaluate the performance.It helps you to better optimize your account by providing you information on keywords, bids, ad groups and placements impact your campaign performance.

Search Funnels

Search funnels is a feature that provides you with data on how your keywords converted. This video explains it better

Click here to view the embedded video.

This feature helps you to help you understand how users search for your products before converting.

Product Ads

You can highlight your most relevant products with pictures and prices directly on the search results page with Product Listing Ads and Product Extensions.

These are 3 of 10 innovations listed on the blog. To read the complete list go to Adwords Blog.

Keyword research is an indispensable part of online business and internet marketing. From market research to product creation to PPC campaign, one cannot function without keywords. While there are excellent tools available for a price, there are equally good tools available free of cost.

This is big list, real big. Few of  them are teasers for their paid versions but useful anyway.

Without much ado, here is the list. Go ahead! Press your bookmarks

Google Keywords Tool
Adword’s Keyword Tool External

Webmaster Toolkit Keyword Research
Webmaster Toolkit Keyword Research

SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Free Keyword Search
KeywordDiscovery.com

WordTracker Free Tool
Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker

Keyword Tumbler
Keyword Tumbler Marketing Tool

Apogee Competitors keyword tool
Meta Keywords Advice

Good Keywords Software
Good Keywords

DigitalPoint Keyword Tool
Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Submit Express
Submit Express’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

Google Sets
Google Sets

KeyWord Corral
KeyWord Corral

Key Compete
KeyCompete

SEO Digger
Seo Digger

Traffic Travis
TrafficTravis.com

KW Browse
Kw Browse

Gtrends
GTrends

Good Keywords Tool
Good Keywords – Find the best keywords

KeyWord Clean Up
Keyword Cleanup

Keyword Optimizer
Keyword Optimizer

Keyword List Generator
Free Top Keyword List Generator

Keyword Extend
Keyword Extend

KeyWord Combinations
Keyword Combinations 1.07

Keyword Wrapper
AdWords Wrapper

Local Keywords
Local Keywords at 5minutesite.com

Typo Generators:
Typo Generator

MSN Demographics
Demographics Prediction From MSN

Power Seller Keywords
http://www.powersellerkeywords.com

SpyFU
SpyFu

Google Insights
Google Insights

Google Adwords have finally started evaluating Landing Page Load Time for calculating Quality Score. They are late by one month as per their previous announcement but they have finally started it.

For those who do not know Quality Score is dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords calculated using a variety of factors and measures like

According to Google, quality score is used to calculate ad position placement and minimum bid. Better your Quality Score, higher is your Ad position and lower your minimum bid.

Google has further divided the score calculation for minimum bid, placement on search page and placement on a content site.

Landing Page Load Time Contributes to Minimum Bid calculation.

How Does Load Time Affect Your Score

Google says

A high-quality landing page should have a fast load time as well as feature unique, relevant content

So?

Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.

How Does Google Decide Wheher Your Page Loads Slowly?

Your page loading time is calculated with the regional average where your server decides. If your server is in America then your page loading time would be weighed against the average load time in America.

How Do You Know What Is Happening?

You would be able to view your keyword grrading on keyword analysis page. There would be three situations

• Page Loads Slowly- This would affect your quality score negatively.
• No Problems Found- No affect on quality score
• No Problems found (Marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region) This would affect your quality score positively.

What Should You Do?

If you see a problem with your quality score and your page is loading slower, you may want to reduce the loading time.

• Reduce page size
• Avoid redirects or make them more efficient
• Reduce number of graphics

A faster page is good for both advertisers and users. Google wants to reward you for better and faster page.

Enjoy.

Yahoo! has made a change in its minimum bid policy.

Minimum bid at Yahoo! would not be $0.10 any more. Yahoo has announced that minimum bid could be higher or lower than that.

Minimum bid for content network would stay at $0.10 meanwhile.

Publisher from all over all reporting a steep rise in their minimum bids. A rise of 400% has been reported.

If you advertise with Yahoo! Search Marketing, you may want to check your account.

Google Optimizer, Google’s free content testing and optimization tool is out of beta. It allows you to test different variations of your site content and design to determine what will be most effective at converting your visitors into customers. The tool allows to carry multivariate experimentation and provides better user experience. The tool can be availedthrough Adword account. Check out Adwords blog for more info.

Google has officially announced availability of demographic bidding for all its Adwords’ customers. Earlier beta, this feature has been made available with effect from 21 March.

What is demographic bidding?

Demographic bidding is a feature that helps you target your advertisements to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups.

Thus you can choose to focus your advertisement to target on females between 30-35 years of age. You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding.

You can refine your reach based on users’ gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves.

AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

But Google uses comscore data to identify the visited sites of the target group that you specify in your ad.

If you are selling to women aged 30-35 years of age, your ads would be on the sites which are heavily visited by those age groups.

Demographic bidding is supposed to help you achieve targeted results.You can also use demographic reports, available in the AdWords Report Center, to get insight into how your ads perform for specific demographics. These metrics can help you decide how to adjust your bid modifiers and restricts to reach the audiences that give you the most clicks and the best ROI.

You can target as well as restrict the ad for a particular demographic group.

Landing pages have very important role in converting your pay per click visitors into customers. Tests have revealed that landing pages can improve the conversion rates up to 200%.

A landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.

To make most use of your campaign, your landing page should be built for maximum conversion. Here are few tips that can help you.

Make A Clear offer
Fromvery beginning your page should be clear about your offer. Whether you are selling or inviting to join your list or offering a free download. it should be clearly mentioned. This avoids confusion.

No Navigation Please

Landing pages are devised for capturing leads or ggeneratingsales. there is no point in keeping yournavigation in place and let yor visitor go astray. Remember! More links to click, more confused would be your reader as to where to go.

Call For Action

Whenever you add a call for action, response dramatically goes up. So “Order here”, “Click Here to order”, “Fill in the form” are some calls which when used judiciously would improve the response.

Use Good Web Design Concepts

Landing page should be constructed with sound web design concepts. You must use good fonts, format your page well and make judicious use of graphics. Your content should be spaced enough and broken in pieces so that it is easy to scan that.

Make Your Landing Page Relevant

This would require creating different landing page for different ad groups. Include the search term(s) in your heading and page title. That would make you feel your reader that he has come to right place for answer to his search query.

Say Thanks, Provide The After Effect

After your visitor converts, it is a good move to take him to another page where you can make more offers to sell or extract more information.

Your pay per click has done its job by bringing a visitor to your web site. Now it is your landing page that would take over.

Make that take over effective.

Pay per click advertising should be highly targeted to extract maximum profits from your campaign. A targeted ad brings more clicks and gets higher conversion rate.There are many tools and methods which you can use to make your campaign targeted. PPC service providers offer many features which you can use for this purpose. Of course, your experience refines you.

There are many ways in which you can target your audience. This could vary from one service. Here are some tips and tools that you may use to create a killer campaign.

Use Matching Options to Improve Your Campaign: You should bid on well matched keywords. You can try different types of matching options to produce maximum effect. Here is a basic understanding of different types of matches

Exact match- Your ad would be displayed only when exact keyword you are bidding on is typed. Thus, if you bid on “golf accessories”, the ad would be displayed on “golf accessories” search and not the likes “accessories for golf” etc. You can use this exact match to target your campaign.

Broad Match- A listing is triggered by the keyword phrase or slight variations of it, even if the words are out of order or separated by other words. Example: “golf accessories” will match “How To Play Golf” and possibly even “Golf Swings and Shots.” Broad match search is very useful for brand names and bigger companies with a name tag but it is not a good option for small budget businesses. It can result in a lot of poorly targeted clickthroughs for general terms and thus produce unnecessary burden on your campaign.

Negative Match- The ad is not displayed when a negative word that you have chosen is typed into search engine along with keyword. For example if you list “free” as negative keyword along with golf accessories then your ad would not be displayed when someone types “free golf accessories”. This kind of matching would allow you to keep people away who are not likely to buy.

Phrase Match- Ad is displayed when the phrase as it is written for bid is included in the search, though search might include other terms as well. Thus, “golf accessories” will match “golf accessories for starters” but not with “accessories for starters of golf.” Again this option can result in higher non contributory clicks.

Use Contextual Targeting: This is offered by Yahoo Search and Google AdWords both. Contextual targeting places your ad on websites which have the content related to your ad. It is a good idea to use contextual ads because it adds to your exposure.

Contextual display is enabled by default in both search engines and you are allowed to disable the display if you wish. But you need to regularly monitor where your ads are being placed. Because sometimes you would find your ads on non related sites too.

You are given option of blacklisting the sites where you would like not to display the ads.

Google Adwords also allows you to advertise on a particular site also if that site already using Adsense.

Geographical Targeting: Both Yahoo Search and Google AdWords allows you to choose which countries or geographic regions your ads appear in. This is a good option for businesses providing local services. In such cases non-local clicks would not bring any profits

Target Different Audience Sections: You can divide your audiences into different sections and then make a separate ad for each section. For example “Money making at home” is broad keyword which you can divide amongst different target markets. You can have Money making at home for moms, for retired, for unemployed, for office goers and so on.

To make the process more impactful, you would need to have separate landing pages for each.

A targeted campaign bring more results. A campaign can be made more and more targeted as you monitor and track your own results and then modify accordingly.

Pay per click advertising is not a pleasing subject for many webmasters. One, it costs money and second it requires diligence. But with bit of hard work and campaign management, you can master the art of pay per click advertising very well and boost your business growth as a result.

The common mistake that people do when starting a PPC campaign is to aim and bid for the top rank. It is true that you would get maximum exposure when you are a top but cost of staying at top is quite a lot and may lead to nosediving of you campaign.

For successful PPC campaign, you need to bid on keywords in such a way that they get clicks from potential buyers and avoid people who are interested in information only, while keeping your costs minimum.

Today i bring you seven tips that would help you to achieve the above objective

Bid What You Can Afford:This is quite plain and simple but needs to be reminded. If you stretch your budget to meet your budget, his would put you under financial stress. In such situations, it is not possible to support the campaign for a period enough to evaluate. You would want quick results and might get frustrated soon.

So decide your budget first and bid accordingly.

To decide amount of bid, you must calculate return on investment or ROI. Before you can monitor your own results, you would need to calculate on average values available.

Conversion rates of visitors into customers vary from 0.5-8%, depending on various factors including what you are selling, type of traffic (whether targeted or not) and website design etc.

Let us keep one percent as the conversion rate for your future campaign. That means out of every 100 visitors, one would buy from you. Let us say you sell a product for $40. That means each of your visitor should cost you less than 40 cents to make it an effective campaign.

Thus you need to keep your bids lower than that otherwise you would make losses.

You would modify these bidding prices as your own data becomes available.

Do Not Go For The Top Position: Getting a second, third or fourth position would also bring you a good traffic and cost you less. You can test your bid prices in different campaigns. Vary your bids so that your listing appears higher and lower on the page and see how does it affect your profits

Work On Keyword Variations: Do not directly bid for a competitive keyword. Instead find a work around by prefixing or suffixing that, trying misspelled versions and using phrases instead of simple keywords. For example instead of money making, you can bid for money making for moms.

You would find plenty of situations where you can apply this. You must use this strategy to your advantage.

Try Smaller Search Engines Too: While they would not bring loads of traffic, they would still bring visitors and would cost much less. Findwhat, Kanoodle,Enhance Interactive and LookSmart are the ones which you can give a try.

Create Different Ads for Each Product You sell: A very effective strategy if you diligently do it. You should write separate ads specific to each keyword and phrase you bid on. These customized ads would attract more attention and clicks from potential buyers.

You would be converting more and more of these visitors to buyers if you pull them with highly specific ads and direct them to a page on your site with the product or service they’re searching for.

After you have decided that you would be using pay per click advertising for your business, next step is to plan the campaign in detail.

PPC apparently looks simple but can result in waste of of money if you are not careful enough.The greatest market reach are offered by Google and Yahoo in pay per click arena. Therefore you would start with either of them. I find Google Adwords easier to follow and with more user friendly interface.

The basic principles of PPC campaign are good keyword strategy and the process to convert your visitors into customers. Campaigns need to be placed so that you end up earning more than you bid.

Plan Your Budget: You would be spending money. You yet do not know which keywords would bring in revenues and which would suck your money. As you are managing it yourself and would like to try a lot of keywords. Initially, you may end up loosing money. Therefore, it is important to set aside the monthly budget that you would be spending on the campaign without making anything in to return. This could be $50 or $100 depending upon your capacity.

Choose Your Keywords Well: Choosing relevant and optimum keywords id essential part of your campaign. Check your competitors, take help of keyword suggestion tools provided by your PPC service. See for the volume that keyword has received in the past and competition in each keyword. That would help to plan your bid for the particular keyword.

Choose Your Bid Well: This is a step that you would learn with experience only. You cannot master the technique untill you apply it. Do not aim for top position. You would be bled very soon. Aim for second or third position. Your bid suggestion tool provided by your PPC service would let you know what should you be putting in a bid to get the position.

After your campaign becomes live, you would have to check the performance of your keywords and make adjustments.

Write Good Ad: Your ad copy should be good. You would get limited number of characters to express yourself. Google Adwords allows just 35 characters per line and ad just contains two lines. So write wisely.

A better ad would result in more clicks and more visitors. Google Adwords rewards ads with better clicks by reducing cost per click.

You can use the search keyword in your ad to enhance the effect.

Define Website Response: In PPC campaign where every visitor costs money, you should work hard on converting every visitor into your customer. The approaches may be different but it is necessary to make your visitors land on a page where he is expected to generate a response.

This might be a purchase or downloading a report after opt in or download of trial software. See for yourself what is best for your business.

Monitor & Track: This is important to understand. Your campaign would mature after learn what works and what not. It is necessary to monitor and track your results. Both Yahoo and Google have created special tools that can be used for this.

Test, Test & Test: Google Adwords allows you to put more than one campaign for one keyword. You can test performance of your headlines or ad. You can also use more than one landing pages to test your sales letter or website look or anything.

Give your test some time and then apply the most effective results.

Do not hesitate if you want to go for PPC. You may loose some bucks initially but that would also teach you a lot about PPC and your site.

The key is to follow most effective process and method.