In the example of the ad linking to the advertisers main page that contained several links, Google would have likely penalized the advertiser with the infamous Google Slap. The "slap" is how Google attempts to control the relevancy issues. They won't tell the advertiser that he can't use the "how to quit smoking" keywords and link to his main page (which they consider irrelevant to the search), but they will give him the slap down!

To discourage (get rid of) this situation of irrelevancy, Google will simply raise the advertisers minimum bid price on the keywords that they deem as irrelevant. In most cases they will increase that minimum bid price to $5 or in some cases $10 a click. This pretty much assures them that the particular keyword will not be used in conjunction with the irrelevant landing page again, since not many offers can make profit on $5 clicks. There are many advertisers such as insurance companies and mortgage lenders that are paying more than $10 a click, but generally speaking a five or ten dollar CPC would price most advertisers out of the market.

Of course if that advertiser agreed to pay that minimum bid price, then Google would continue to run his irrelevant ad which emphasizes that Big G will favor relevancy over a higher bid price only to a certain extent. Once again, money talks.

Here is a helpful video put out by Google that somewhat clears up the issue of the Google Adwords Quality Score.

Creating an Ad Campaign

Once you have completed this introduction to Google Adwords, you will want at least set up an account to check into it further. To start advertising a product you will need to setup what they call a Campaign. It helps to think of the Campaign as your "base camp" for your product. You will likely want to set up a campaign for each product that you decide to advertise using GAW.

Once you have named your campaign, you will need to create Ad Groups within each campaign. Each ad group contains an ad for your product. You will then have to decide which keywords you wish to add to each ad group to trigger that ad. In the early days of GAW's the idea was to come up with as many keywords as you could discover that people were using to search for products such as yours. You would add all of those keywords into your ad group and let 'er rip. It was commonplace to have several hundred or even thousands of keywords in a single ad group.

Keyword Tracking

As the number of people using adwords increased, so did the bid prices (cost per click). Using massive lists of keywords became a very inefficient way of doing things. Advertisers were looking to cut their costs by only using the keywords that were converting to sales. There was no sense in paying for clicks on keywords that weren't producing sales and this necessitated a method for tracking this sort of thing.

Several software developers came up with their version of a tracking solution. Some of the tracking software worked well, and others not so well. Most were a little clunky to use, difficult to setup and expensive to purchase. But as advertisers we were finally able to track our conversions down to the keyword level. As marketers became more sophisticated and technology improved, we began to target our advertising much more effectively. We eliminated the keywords that were not producing sales and we optimized the ones that were. Laser targeted ads became the name of the game with adwords.

Google has now introduced their own keyword conversion tracking solution. It works beautifully and is free to you as an adwords advertiser. There are still several third party tracking solutions available. However since the Google tracker is free, you might as well start with it and see how it works for you. Setup is as easy as inserting a few lines of code into your webpage. There is plenty of guidance for setting this up at the GAW site.

Targeting Your Ads

So now that we can easily and affordably track our Google Adword campaigns down to the keyword level, it is a whole new ballgame. It is just a matter of forming tightly controlled ad groups. Trimming the keywords that don't convert to sales and exploiting the ones that do.

Let me demonstrate the concept of targeting your campaigns with an example.

Assume that I have a dog training ebook that I want to advertise with Google Adwords. In the past I would have setup a campaign for my guide, let's call it the "Dog Training Guide Campaign". My next move would have been to set up an Ad Group within that campaign. I also need to write an ad for that Ad Group. For illustration purposes only, here is what ad might have looked like;

Granted, this is not a very well written ad, but it only serves as an example. It is a very generic ad that might appeal to a vast array of keyword searches. I would have entered several keywords into this Ad Group that would be relevant to dog training.

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