Google Hacks

Generating Google AdWords

You’ve written the copy and you’ve planned the budget. Now, what keywords are you going to use for your ad?

You’ve read about it and you’ve thought about it and you’re ready to buy one of Google’s AdWords. You’ve even got your copy together and you feel pretty confident about it. You’ve only got one problem now: figuring out your keywords, the search words that will trigger your AdWord to appear.

You’re probably buying into the AdWords program on a budget, and you definitely want to make every penny count. Choosing the right keywords means that your ad will have a higher clickthrough. Thankfully, the Google AdWords program allows you to do a lot of tweaking, so if your first choices don’t work, experiment, test, and test some more!

Choosing AdWords

So where do you get the search keywords for your ad? There are four places that might help you find them:

Log files

Examine your site’s log files. How are people finding your site now? What words are they using? What search engines are they using? Are the words they’re using too general to be used for AdWords? If you look at your log files, you can get an idea of how people who are interested in your content are finding your site. (If they weren’t interested in your content, why would they visit?)

Examine your own site

If you have an internal search engine, check its logs. What are people searching for once they get to your site? Are there any common misspellings that you could use as an AdWord? Are there any common ...