If you want to drive crazy amounts of traffic to your website, sales page or any other landing page, you can’t go wrong with a Google Adwords campaign. Actually, that’s only partially correct. Google Adwords is Google’s paid advertising platform. It’s how Google makes its money, for the most part. It can be an effective means for driving serious amounts of traffic to anywhere you wish online. However, it will only be effective if you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you start developing your first Google Adwords ad campaign, you should spend some time familiarizing yourself with the platform and the business of PPC.
What Is PPC Marketing?
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing involves specially placed ads that then cost money 
whenever someone clicks on them. Each ad in your PPC campaign will be designated a certain cost-per-click or CPC. This is how much you will be charged each time someone clicks on your ads. By creating a Google Adwords campaign, your ads will be placed only on those pages of people you’re targeting (at least if you do your job correctly). This is great for sending targeted traffic to your page, provided you have the budget for a long-lasting ad campaign.
The Pitfalls of PPC Marketing
PPC marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods, but it’s also one of the most expensive. There are many free and low-cost marketing methods, but PPC is definitely not one of them. Don’t let that deter you. You can make more money than you spend at PPC if you’re good enough. In fact, your return on investment (ROI) will oftentimes be higher with PPC than with any other marketing technique. You must know what you’re doing, however, or else you could lose your shirt completely.
Setting Daily Limits
Many marketers have tried PPC marketing with little to no results and some have gone broke altogether. The reason is because these marketers jumped into PPC marketing without learning the ropes first. Another reason why many of these marketers end up going broke is because they don’t set daily limits.
A daily limit will stop your ad campaign if you ever get to a certain click amount. For example, let’s say that you start your ad campaign with $100. You have an ad that costs $5.00 every time someone clicks on it. If you set your daily limit at $20.00, your ad campaign will stop whenever your ad is clicked four times. Of course this is just an example. Your ad may cost more or less, your budget may involve more or less money and you may want to set a higher daily limit to allow for more ad clicks.
The point is, you should always set daily limits or else you could find yourself broke in a matter of days, no matter how much money you start with as your opening budget.
Keyword Research
Proper research is going to be the cornerstone of every one of your Google Adwords campaigns. Your choice of keywords will determine where your ad is placed and how much your ad will cost when people click on it. Google provides a free keyword research tool for Google Adwords customers. You should use that tool, and others, to conduct thorough keyword research. Only by carefully selecting the keywords that are highly searched for, but that have low competition, can you hope to phase out your competitors and reach your target audience with red hot, attractive and click-enticing ads.
Research The Competition
Before you begin your first Google Adwords campaign, spend some time spying on the competition. What keywords are your competitors using? When do your competitors’ ads show up and how often? How are they wording their ads? Do the landing pages coincide with the ad content? Is the ad to landing page experience a good one for the website visitor?
These are all questions you should ask yourself when you’re looking in on any competitor’s progress. Then, use that information to make your own campaigns and landing pages better and more efficient. Your ad campaigns can blast your competitors out of the water and you can drive thousands of new website visitors to your site in a short amount of time, but you can’t do those things if you d don’t know what your competition is up to.
Use this advice to develop your first Google Adwords campaign and you’ll avoid many of the mistakes that many new marketers commit. Your competitors will wonder where you came from just as they witness your ads taking over and their traffic flowing in your direction.
