It’s a different thing altogether to be able to attract potential customers to click on your AdWords ads, and to get them to buy your product or service. Also, remember that the moment that a user clicks on your ad, you’re already paying for that click! So it’s best to be able to recoup your investment in advertising by actually seeing a sale push through.

It’s bad enough to have people arrive at your website, but leave just as quickly because they don’t find anything on your site useful at all. It’s even worse if your landing page doesn’t work!

We already said earlier that you should make your landing page specific enough to the product or service you’re advertising, and not point to your main, generic website. Here are some more specific ways to make sure your landing page is optimized for people coming from clicking your AdWords ads.

Navigation. Make sure your website is usable and navigable. Users would only leave your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for, such as the “buy now” link, product descriptions, reviews, and even pictures (where applicable).

Be specific. Specify what it is exactly you’re asking of your reader. Are they buying a product? Are they subscribing to some newsletter or information page? Be helpful.

Highlight your strengths. Customers are always looking for the best points in a company, product or service before actually buying. Be sure to highlight on your landing page what you think your best points or advantages are. Do you have the lowest price? Do you have the best product? Do you have 24/7 support? Do you have the fastest shipping turnarounds?

The point is that you should make it as easy for your customers to purchase your products, acquire your services, or simply stay on as a loyal customer or reader (if your site’s purpose is as such).

Technorati Tags: adwords, landing pages, google

Let’s move away from talking about the actual AdWords ad setup and implementation for the meantime, and focus on the landing page. After you’ve composed that perfect headline, and set-up your campaign with the most appropriate keywords, the next thing to worry about is the landing page, or the page that users would actually see when they click your ad.

The landing page is especially important since this will form the first impression of your users after they click on your ad. They’ve been attracted by your ad so much that they’ve clicked it already, now it’s time to test whether they will find your products or services interesting.

Some tips to keep in mind:

What not to do . Don’t direct to your main website! Chances are, you are targeting your advertisement for a specific market or client type. However, your website might be too generic, and could offer all your products and services in one go. So this might lead to confusion among your readers.

What to do. Do create a special sub-page for each of your products and services, and direct your prospective clients to this URL. This way, they will see exactly what they want to see from clicking your AdWords ad. They will find exactly the product or service, or even website that they expect.

Above is a sample of ads displayed for “peanut butter.” Now if you sell other foodstuff aside from peanut butter, it would make sense to direct your prospective customers to your web page specifically intended only for peanut butter.

We have more specific landing page tips in store, next.

Beginning AdWords users usually fall prey to the trap of setting their AdWords daily budgets too low. There is a tendency to be stingy in budgeting the daily limits, limiting daily AdWords spending to, say, $5. This is because they may not yet fully trust the potentials of AdWords, and hence only use it on a test-run basis.

However, it’s not possible for an AdWords campaign with so low a budget to be successful, because to indeed test AdWords’ efficacy, one has monitor the trends of the campaign’s performance. Statistically speaking, AdWords campaigns follow the concept called the law of large numbers — it is not possible to successfully plot trends with only a few samples, which can be expected from a very low-budget campaign.

For instance, if you have set your daily budget to $5, then your ad will only appear for a few times before they are clicked, and the limit subsequently reached. Thus, you only get a few samples per day. Say, you get four clicks for the day, one ad may have a CPC of 25 cents, another $1.50, another 50 cents, and another 75 cents. Had you reached your limit of $5, the ad no longer appears. However, in practice campaigns don’t necessarily reach the daily limit (if only a few people click on the ads).

This way, you only have four clicks, and thus you cannot make a good estimate or trend from your campaign.

We suggest you set your daily budgets to a higher level, say, $100 per day. You may already garner clicks amounting to, for instance, $74, but you still have a good number of actual clicks to gather data from (likely about a hundred clicks). With this, you have a good way of estimating the average cost per click, and you can already compare this to the actual sales figures for the day, and subsequently your daily profit (or loss).

Knowing your average cost per click, and comparing with your actual sales, you can then accordingly tweak your daily budget and bid settings to ensure a profitable campaign.