Should you scare your customers? Should your sales copy persuade visitors by attempting to scare that they are missing something vital without your product or service.

Machiavelli was an Italian renaissance author who wrote a work called the "the prince". His book was intended to instruct the young Italian rulers of various city states how to govern. One of the main points of the work was the conclusion that it is better to feared than loved.

Could you use fear to persaude your customers to buy from you?

Much of the sales copy in adwords ads today focuses on making the consumer either curious or greedy. This is particularly true in the ads for internet marketing. Most of them make an outrageous claim, like "see how I'm making x dollars a month". This ad is designed to appeal to marketing consumer by appealing to his greed. Plus, the more outrageous the amount, the more curious the consumer is to see how the advertisers is doing it.

This is a very good tactic. Appealing to these two emotions is a great way to approach sales copy.

But, in a column of Adwords ads, you want your ad to stand to out. You should always strive to stand and be noticeable in the crowd. So, if other advertisers already advertisements of this type, could you profit from a different tactic.

As Machiavelli discovered, consumers also respond to fear. In recent years, politcal campaigns have tried, or accused each other of tried, to use fear to get candidates elected.

You could appeal to a fear your consumers have in the first line of ad. Your second line then informs them that your product or service provides a solution. This will compel your consumers to click your ad.

Your Adwords Ad fell off the first page of results for one reason. The quality score was poor. You may have heard other factors caused it, but the quality score is the reason.

The initial quality score is determine by the revelance of your ad and landing page to your keyword. If you optimize both your ad and your landing page for the specific keyword, you should have a good initial quality score.

You optimize your ad by using the keyword in the ad. Put your keyword in the headline and/or the description. It's also a good idea to have the keyword in the url of your landing page, which puts it in the destination url. In addition, you can put the keyword somewhere in your display url, since it won't affect the destination url.

You optimize your landing page by applying the same techniques as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have you do.

• use the keyword in the page name or path path.
• use the keyword in the page title.
• use the keyword and related keywords in the keyword meta tag.
• use the keyword in the description meta tag.
• use the keyword inside "h1" html tags on the page.
• use the keyword throughout the content of your page.

The quality score is also affected by the ads CTR. As your ad gains impressions and clicks, Adwords computes your click through rate (CTR). Adwords draws conclusions about your ads relevancy from the CTR. Google assumes that if your CTR is high, above 0.5%, then your ad is relevant and your quality score goes up. Conversely, if your CTR is below 0.5% Adwords assumes it is not relevant and lowers your quality score.

An inactive ad has either an initial quality score that was poor that made it all but impossible to get a CTR and it went inactive. Or, the CTR for a good initial quality score is below 0.5% and it damaged the quality score to a point that the ad went inactive.

You have 3 options to fix the problem.

1) Delete the keyword. This is often a good solution because the poor quality of the keyword stops becoming a drag on the quality score of your entire campaign. Campaigns have a quality score based on all the keywords, so a poor keyword can damage the quality of other keywords.

2) Improve the quality score. This generally means improving the CTR by rewritting the ad sales copy to more persuasive. The more appealing the ad is to consumers, then more clicks you will get.

3) Increase your maximum CPC bid.

You've read the free guide and you know that the higher the quality score, the less expensive it is for you to buy traffic from Adwords. But what is at the heart of the quality score? How does Adwords assign a quality score?

* CTR within Adwords

The most important factor of your quality score is it's CTR. Google realizes that everything it's robots scan a page for can be manipulated. In fact, Google encourages this manipulation. Google tells you that the landing page must be relevant to the keyword. Therefore Google expects you to optimize your landing for a keyword.

But at the end of the day, the CTR is pretty much written in stone. The CTR is the clicks divided by the impression. If a human consumer find your ad relevant to the keyword / search term, they click your ad. Conversely, human consumers won't click on irrelevant ads. Google counts the CTR so heavily because it's based on the real human visitors to their search engine. Google is essentially letting the consumers drive the process. Google does this because the daily human consumers are a better judge of relevancy than any program.

Google assigns initial quality scores based on other factors. Nut once the impressions start, your ad will sink or swim based on it's CTR. It's a Darwinian game of survival of the fittest.

* Ad Copy and Ad text relevance to query

Google examines your ad copy when assigning a quality score. Google likes to see the keywords in the ad headline or text, and rewards you with a higher quality score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion tokens are not counted as keywords. So while Dynamic Keyword Insertion is likely to appeal to human consumers, Adwords will not boost your quality score. In fact DKI may damage your quality score id you remove the actual keyword from your ad in favor of the DKI tokens.

* Historical keyword performance

Google keeps your keyword historical data, primarily the CTR. That means deleting a keyword will not remove the already generated data. So, if you are deleting keywords and re-adding them to try to clean the slate, it's probably a waste of time.

Adwords considers the recent history to have more impact. This allows you to adjust poor performing keywords in the hopes of increasing their CTR. Without this consideration any keyword that performed badly historically would have a low quality score.

Deleting keywords is still an important task of campaign management. Like pruning plants, you must remove poor performing keywords to raise the overall quality of your campaign.

* Landing Page Relevance

A relevant landing page lowers your minimum bid and potentially increases your ad position. It doesn't directly affect quality score. However, an ad will get a higher position because of a targeted landing page and will generate a better CTR. A better CTR will raise the quality score.

In conclusion, Google has this to say about quality scores.

"There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved."

Negative keywords help qualify traffic and make it more targeted. They do limit your traffic, but the traffic you do get will be more focused. This will prequalify your traffic before it clicks your ad.

A negative keyword is a word that you have decided not to show your ad for. You have regular keywords and phrases, and adding negative keywords tells Adwords not to display your ad when a negative keyword appears in the search terms with you keyword.

The most basic example of a negative keyword is the word free. Imagine an online retailer selling running shoes. That retailer may have the keyword phrase "running shoes" as a phrase match in their Adwords campaign. But, the retailer is obviously selling shoes, not giving them away. So, the phrase "free running shoes" may be undesirable. The retailer uses the negative keyword free and choose not to show his "running shoes" ad for any search containing the word free.

Why do you want to eliminate traffic? If your goal is just pure traffic, you may not want to limit your traffic. But if you are looking for qualified leads, negative keywords help you screen out unwanted impressions and traffic. Screening out traffic means that a consumer who is unlikely to make a purchase with your website doesn't click on your ad. That can save you wasted clicks. But, negative keywords also stop the ad from appearing, which reduces the impressions of your ad. The CTR measures the clicks per impression, so if you limit the impressions of your ad to targeted traffic, your CTR should improve.

Continuing the running shoes example, a keyword search turns up the phrase "running shoes clipart". The retailer is not interest in consumer looking clipart. You would not wants impressions or clicks from someone looking for clipart. So, clipart is a good negative keyword.

You establish negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level. At the ad group level, you are eliminating impressions of you ads for all searches with the negative keyword. At the campaign level, you are applying the negative keywords to all ad groups, which filters down to all keywords.

Click fraud is a well know type of Adwords fraud. Impression fraud is a lesser known tactic your competition could employ against your Adwords campaign.

The most obvious method of Adwords fraud is for your competitor to click your ad repeatedly. This called click fraud. The hope is that this will exhaust your daily budget and cause your ads to stop running.

Click fraud has the unintended side effect of raising your CTR. A higher CTR is a higher quality score and then a lower CPC bid. This offsets the damage, and prevents this fraud from becoming more rampant

A second type of fraud is impression fraud. Here, your competitor disables his ads and then proceeds to search for your common keywords. The attack is designed to create a large number of impressions of your ad with clicking the ad. This lowers your CTR. Your ad could have it's position lowered, or become disabled due to the lower CTR. This allows the competitor to obtain higher ad position.

There is no side effect offsetting impression fraud. However, an advertiser is not likely to turn off his ads during prime business hours. The fraudster would likely wait until the early morning hours where there is little traffic. This would make a good time for him to disable his ads and inflate the impressions on his competition. A spike in impressions during normally low traffic periods could be an indication of impression fraud.

Google is quite capable of recognizing multiple identical searches from a single computer or network. Adwords should be able to identify a large number of any impression fraud attempts. But, there may be large, sophisticated networks that could appear to be from many different sources, thus fooling Google.