Well, since J-Money has been getting everyone and their mothers excited about spending money via CPC companies to generate traffic. I decided to share something that will probably make the biggest difference in how Google places your ads. I know that most people are probably using some kind of ad generation tools to create ad groups as well as their ads on the fly based on a set of keywords. But, what most people don’t realize is that Google will display the best performing ads highest regardless of how much you are willing to bid for them.

Currently, I am bidding on some pretty expensive keywords with a $4 to $5 max CPC and that gives me a bit of incentive to make sure that I am getting the best performance out of my campaign that I can. One thing I noticed the other day was that the traffic estimation tools in the Adwords dashboard were showing an estimated position of 1-3 for the keywords I was bidding on with the max CPC that I had already been running. But, my ad positions were averaging between 5 and 6. WTF? So, I took a look at what the top placed ads looked like. What I already knew but was clearly ignoring is that the keywords people search for, that are found in the Adwords ads, get bolded. Clearly this gives the ads with some or all of the keywords in them a huge advantage. This is really simple stuff, yet I and just about everyone else seems to ignore it.

I did not totally ignore this knowledge. I am trying to do a couple of things with my ads. First, I am trying to pre-qualify people before they click on my ad. I don’t want some donkey who is not going to perform or take the action I want him/her to take clicking on my ad. After all, they are costing me $3 to $5 every time they do so. So, I was trying to put a few more words in my titles than I should have. When I simplified the ad title a bit and focused on the core keywords that I was bidding on, boom the CTR shot through the roof. Without any other changes, this new ad is being shown in the #2 slot as we speak.

So, how does this help you if you are bidding on 50k keywords? It affects you even more. You need to test more than the next guy because a higher CTR is going to pay even bigger dividends for you. So, get off your ass and test out different titles and ads to get the highest ctr you can and then use that ad or ads in your high volume stuff.

tags: ads, adwords, arbitrage, cpc, ctr, writing