Saturday, January 19, 2008

Keyword Intelligence

Keywords are important part of pay per click advertising
programs, whether you are a program affiliate or an advertiser.
Essentially, with pay per click advertising programs, you are
relying on keywords to bring you success. That is why you
should carefully choose your keywords. In addition to carefully
choosing your keywords, you should also make sure that the
keywords you chose are successful or living up to your
standards. You can do this by testing and tracking all of your
keywords.

Before examining how both affiliates and advertisers can go
about testing and tracking their keywords, it is important that
you understand why testing and tracking is important. Pay per
click advertising costs money, granted it only costs when one of
your ads has been clicked, but it is still money. Any good
business owner wants to know exactly where their money is going,
as they should. The testing and tracking of keywords will not
only help to ensure that you are not wasting money, but it will
also let you know if you are making any. Keyword tracking and
testing will also let you know if you are wasting your time.

Now that you know why it is important to test and track your
keywords, you can better understand how to do so. As it was
mentioned above, both advertisers and affiliates are urged to
test and track their keywords. Affiliates need to test and
track because it will help them determine exactly how much money
they are making, as well as how much money they are not making
or could be making. Affiliates rely on their website’s content
to show relevant advertisements. For that reason, if you are an
affiliate, your content needs to contain popular keywords,
keywords that would likely be associated with pay per click
advertisements. Google Adsense gives affiliates updated
tracking information; information that you can use to determine
your success with particular keywords.

In addition to using the information that is supplied to you by
your pay per click program, you can also perform your own test.
You can do so by visiting your online website. Take a look at
the advertisements that are appearing on your page. When doing
so, it is important that you look, don’t click. You can easily
get an idea as to what keywords are associated with those
advertisements. To see how much money you may be making, you
will want to use Overture’s keyword worth tool, which can be
found at
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool/. The
higher the maximum bids are, the more money you are likely to
make.

If you are an advertiser, not an affiliate, you can still
benefit from testing and tracking your keywords. Unlike
affiliates, who rely on content keywords, your keywords will
essentially be attached to your advertisements. That is how pay
per click programs decide which websites your advertisements
will appear on. As for tracking, your pay per click program
should also provide you with information, such as information on
which one of your ads was clicked. If you are using multiple
keywords for multiple advertisements, you can compare them to
see which one is the better money-maker.

As for testing your keywords, you will want to perform a
standard internet search, preferably with the keywords or
keywords phrases that you selected. You will want to examine
popular, high ranking web pages. To determine if your chosen
keywords are being used to the best of their ability, you should
be able to find a few of your advertisements displayed on
affiliate pages. If you are unable to do so, it might be a sign
that you need to reexamine your pay per click advertising
keywords.

Whether you are an advertiser or an affiliate, you are urged to
track and test your keywords to see if they are producing
results. By taking the above mentioned approaches, keyword
tracking and testing should only take a few minutes of your
time, but it will be time well spent.

Keyword tracking and testing is a great way to checkup on
yourself, to see if you are benefiting from pay per click
advertising.

Len Hutton

No comments: