Save money and slash your Google Adwords costs while driving more traffic.

The golden rule of Google Adwords is relevance. Google will grant you low minimum bids if you master the science of relevance. Without relevance you'll be paying too much per click and your competition will beat you in the market.

The google search engine is the undisputed search engine leader. Google beat out Yahoo, Altavista and MSN in the search engine market by building a better mousetrap. Google's search engine algorithm is a complex formula using many variables to return pages highly relevant to the search term used. The Google search engine is the best search for pages relevant to the search term. That's how they beat their competition. Relevance.

Google uses the same principal with Adwords. Advertisers with a message relevant to the search term are rewarded. Advertisers who are not relevant are allowed to compete, but they pay much higher rates per click.

Google determines relevance by two primary methods. The first is by examining each of you keywords and ads. Google checks the keyword, the ad headline and text, and the landing page to determine how relevant they are to each other. An automated program, or robot if you prefer, will crawl your landing page and determine if your page is relevant to the search term. A relevant page may only need to bid five or ten cents per click. A page not relevant will have to pay ten dollars in a competitive market.

The second method Google uses to measure relevance is the ads click through rate (CTR). Every time Adwords shows your ad to consumers, Google records that it gave our ad an impression. Every time a consumer click on the ad, Google records the clicks. The CTR is the number of clicks divided by the impressions. Adwords will assume that if consumers are clicking your ad frequently then the ad is relevant to the search term and will adjust the quality score upwards. Adwords will adjust the quality score down if the ad is not getting clicks. There will be more information on the CTR later.

You can verify the keyword, ad and landing page relevance for yourself with an experiment. Take a competitive keyword and create an Adwords ad for it. For example, try adwords marketing as your competitive keyword. Go and create an Adwords ad for it and set the landing page to some website that is not about adwords marketing. Any website will do, as long as it's not about internet marketing. What did Google set the first page bid at, five dollars, ten dollars or more?

Adwords will tell you why you got such a high first page bid. The magnifying glass icon next to you keyword will give you diagnostic information. Adwords will tell you your quality score on a scale of one to ten. The quality score is how Google has scored the relevance of you keyword, ad and landing page. In this experiment, and in the example on the right, you have a poor quality score.

Adwords will event provide details of your quality score. Click on the details and recommendation link. Google will tell you your landing page is not relevant, and perhaps identify other problems.

You have just created poor ad. Go ahead and delete the ad group and campaign. You are not about to pay that much per click.

Start another Adwords experiment. Create a new campaign and a new ad group for adwords marketing. Use only that keyword as a phrase match. You can also add an exact match for the same keyword. Do not use the broad match. Do not use any other keywords except the phrase and exact match.

This time, use the keyword adwords marketing in the ad headline, and only this keyword. As you'll see later, having the keyword in the ad itself boost the quality score.

Use the landing page http://www.adwords-marketing-tool.com/adwords-marketing/adwords-marketing.aspx as the destination URL. The URL is complex, and for a specific reason, but more on that later. This is a customized landing page on this website, tailored for the keywords adwords marketing.

The landing page is now highly relevant to the keyword. Adwords rewards you with a lower minimum bid. The same keyword went from ten dollars per click to much lower. Stop and pick your jaw off the floor.

You may not get the same low first page bid or a 7 out of 10 quality score as in the screenshot. First, you are probably not using all the proper techniques in your ad. You'll learn all of those techniques in just a moment. Second, the campaign in the screenshot has an established CTR, which assists the quality score. The ad you just created doesn't have any impressions or CTR.

You'll notice in the screen capture that you don't even have a good or great quality score. The quality score is just ok. The keyword adwords marketing is extremely competitive. There are many existing pages on the web about adwords marketing with established traffic and backlinks. These pages have good and great quality scores. You are not going to rise above these pages on day one. The keyword is simply too broad and too competitive. That's why the quality score is only ok. Build a solid Adwords click through rate (CTR), develop organic traffic and get some backinks and you can achieve a good or great quality score for competitive keywords. Alternatively, select a more specific and targeted keyword. You can become a good or great quality website for targeted keywords.

You are now spending much less than you were with a poor ad. A reduction from ten dollars to ten cents is like paying one dollar for what you used to pay a hundred dollars for. The savings are amazing.

There are three main components to any Google Adwords ad. You'll want to examine each part of the ad. The parts of the ad are listed below.

1. The keyword or phrase that triggers the ad to appear
2. The landing page the ad will send the consumer to
3. The actual text of the ad, or sales copy if you prefer

The key to the strategy is get all three parts of the ad working in harmony. A good keyword, a focused ad and a highly relevant landing page will get you a good or great quality score. A good quality score will allow you to bid very little for your keywords. You will be able to get traffic at a fraction of the cost for an uneducated advertiser.

You are now ready to proceed with the Free Adwords Strategy.

Deleting poor performing keywords is essential to maintaining an Adwords campaign. Each month you need to check your keywords and remove the poor performing keywords. It's like pruning dead branches to make a healthier plant.

Do you delete the keywords, or move them around to alternate ad groups and campaigns? It's quite possible to move keywords using the Adwords Editor. It depends on how you want to maintain your campaign history.

Adwords makes decisions on the quality score based partly on past performance. By only moving poor keywords to a back burner ad group you help Adwords maintain your account history. Adwords rewards account that have been active longer and have a thorough history.

Moving keywords will not affect your performance history. Google's optimization will move keywords from one ad group to another.

Deleting a keyword can affect the performance history, and damage your account to the extent of removing that history.

But, deleting keywords performs other useful functions. First, it prevents new impressions of your ad. If the keyword was not performing well, impressions without clicks will be dragging down the CTR of your entire campaign. Second, erasing certain history data may be necessary for a clean, fresh start. But be warned, not all history is deleted. The Adwords help section says...

“If you delete a keyword and then add it back to your account in any other format or any other location (placing it in another ad group, for instance), our system will still take the keyword’s past account-wide performance into consideration. A poor performer can affect an entire ad group and/or campaign, if it is used multiple times.”

Cookie Stuffing is an illegal method of generating Affiliate sales. Affiliates who use cookie stuffing are hoping to get commissions on sales they did not make.

Marketplaces like ClickBank exist to help merchants promote products. The idea is that an affiliate marketer will promote a product, and in return for his expense, time and effort the merchant gives him a percent of the sale. ClickBank makes every effort to protect the effort of the affiliate marketer. ClickBank has a policy that if a consumer visits an affiliate marketers website and leaves, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if the consumer comes back to purchase the product in 60 days. The affiliate will get credit if consumer makes the purchase up to 60 days after the initial contact. This protects the affiliate since many consumers do not make purchases on the first visit.

ClickBank has to track the consumer for 60 days to enforce this policy. It is done through a cookie. A cookie is a piece of information stored on the consumer's computer. The cookie is written to the consumers computer when the affiliate website is browsed, and the "hoplink" is clicked. The cookie remains on the consumer's computer for 60 days. Should the consumer return and purchase the product, the cookie is read and the original affiliate receives credit for the sale.

The presence of the cookie is what has lead to cookie stuffing. The premise is to write ClickBank cookies on a visitor's computer without the visitor's knowledge. Should that visitor happen to purchase a product in 60 days, the affiliate will get credit for a sale.

For example, imagine a blog comment or a forum post where an affiliate has managed to place an image tag that points to his hoplink. The affiliate wants these image tags to be on pages with high amounts of traffic. Every visitor who views that page will see a broken image tag. Behind the scenes, the ClickBank cookie with the affiliates code has just been written to the visitor's computer. Any high traffic website will do. The more people that view the page, the more cookies will be written. Should any of these visitors happen to purchase the product in 60 days the affiliate will get the credit for the sale.

The affiliate marketer simply has to spam as many websites as possible with his image tag (or javascript popup or iframe tag). The more people that end up with his cookie, the more sales he'll get credit for.

All affiliate programs are vulnerable to this type of fraud. ClickBank and other market places will ban affiliates for this practice. However, it may take some time before the fraud is noticed. In addition, cookie stuffers find better means of hiding their tracks.

Do you know how to measure the performance your Adwords ads? Two reports from Google Analytics that show detailed Adwords data.

Last time, you saw how Google Analytics is the best way to track the performance of your ad groups and keywords. Google authored both Adwords and Analytics and can quickly integrate the two together. You learned about auto-tagging and cost data

Now let's take a look at the Adwords data you get inside Analytics.

Adwords Campaign Report
The site usage tab shows the visits per campaign and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is useful for determining what keywords are worth expanding, and which are worth dropping. The Clicks report displays impressions, clicks, total costs, CTRs, CPC, and ROI. The ROI is extremely useful and is something you can't get inside Adwords alone. With this information you are not limited to measuring just CTR.

Keywords Position
The position report is extremely interesting because it tells you what ad position on the Google Search page is generating the most clicks. It's generally assumed that the top Adwords position will generate the most the clicks. You may find that this is not the case for your campaign. You may decide that you can lower your CPC if your ads perform well in lower positions.

Google Analytics is the best way to track the performance of your ad groups and keywords. Google authored both Adwords and Analytics and can quickly integrate the two together. Plus, if Adwords makes enhancements or changes, Analytics will change along with it. Third party or custom tracking tools will have a harder time keeping pace with Adwords.

You link to Analytics using your email address Adwords. If you setup your Analytics account under a different email address, simply add your Adwords email as an Analytics administrator.

You should enable the auto-tagging and cost data features when linking Analytics to Adwords.

Auto-Tagging
Auto-tagging allows Analytics to gather information from Adwords. Google will append querystring parameters to Adwords landing page urls. These parameters are just key value pairs that appear after a question mark in a url. The parameter added is the Google click id which is abbreviated gclid. Analytics will recognize this parameter and will use it to integrate Adwords data into your Analytics account. This all done for you when you enable auto-tagging. Auto-tagging should be enabled by default.

One very important side note about auto-tagging is that it generates a unique id for each click. When a consumer clicks your ad, Google process the click and redirects to your landing page. This is how Google records clicks. Some advertisers use third party tools to track Adwords clicks. These tools use the weblogs that record every hit on a page. But a problem arises when a visitor uses the back button on the browser. The weblog will record another hit on the landing page which translates into a click, but Adwords will not (since it didn't go through the Google servers). A similar problem occurs if a visitor uses the refresh button. Shuman Ghosemajumder at Google says this particular problem accounts for a 40% fictitious click count. Many of the Adwords fraud claims arise from this 40% inaccurate count.

When you use auto-tagging, the Google servers append the unique gclid to the url. This querystring parameter will appear in the weblogs. You could then safely count all the weblog hits for a gclid as one Adwords click. This would prevent the fictitious clicks. Should you use a third party Adword tracker now or in the future, please use the auto-tagging feature available in Adwords and Analytics integration.

Cost Data
Cost data allows you view Adwords budget information inside your Analytics account. You can enable it with these steps.

1) Log in to your Adwords account at https://adwords.google.com

2) Click on the Analytics tab.

3) Click on 'Edit Settings.

4) Click the 'Edit' link in the upper-right corner of the 'Main Website Profile Information' box.

5) Check the 'Apply Cost Data' checkbox.

6) Click on the 'Save Changes' button.

Next time we'll discuss two of the reports in Analytics you can use to get additional Adwords data.