If your company is new to Google Adwords advertising and you’re trying to go it alone, chances are you’re looking for ways to maximize your ad spend. Rather than broadcasting your ad to the largest possible audience, I’ve prepared three suggestions to control your advertising spend beyond just setting a daily budget. These three tools are in the Google Adwords pro’s arsenal, but aren’t commonly-known by the Google Adwords newcomer.

1. Turn off the content network.
In your Google Adwords campaign settings for each campaign, you can disable the content network, which is enabled by default. The reason you want to do this is because if you’re bidding $2 for a phrase on the search network, you’re bidding $2 for the same phrase on the content network by default. Since your ad will be seen on the content network much more than on the search network, there’s more of a chance that you’ll deplete your budget on clicks that generally aren’t as relevant.

2. Bid on more specific words and phrases.
When you bid on phrases and exact matches, you’re limiting the word combinations that would trigger your ad. This not only helps you control costs, it also can make your campaign more relevant to the searcher because the phrases that trigger your ad are more specific.

In addition, bid on phrases containing two or more words.

Let’s say I am bidding on the term “widgets” (without the quotes) with a broad match. Make this phrase more specific by adding qualifiers, and add quotes/brackets around the term. For example, rather than bidding on “widgets,” I might bid on the following:

• “red widgets”
• [red widgets]
• “buy new widgets”
• [buy new widgets]

3. Use negative keyword matching.
Often times, the phrases that you want to match are similar to unrelated or irrelevant topics. For example, if you are bidding on “Peanuts,” (the cartoon), you probably don’t want your ad to show up when someone searches for “Planters peanuts.” In this case, you could add “Planters” as a negative keyword to your keyword list, and your ad would not be shown when a person searches for “Planters peanuts.” To include a negative keyword, simply put a hyphen before the word you want to designate as a negative keyword.

So how do you find potential negative keywords? Go to Google and search for a very broad term that relates to the products you sell. In the above example, search Google for “peanuts.” You’ll see that some sites are food-related while others are related to the Peanuts cartoon.

Hopefully, these tips will help the Google Adwords novice control ad spending while making the campaign more effective.

Internet Retailer reports that retailers are spending more on pay-per-click marketing and natural search engine optimization. 57.4% of marketers claim that search engine marketing performs better than other forms of marketing, including affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing and direct mail. Among the respondents to the Internet Retailer study, natural search engine optimization seems to yield higher conversion rates than paid search.

The pendulum seems to be shifting toward natural search engine optimization. I’ve found that both tactics can be successful, but both require ongoing expenses. A mix of both tactics seems to be the right approach for many companies. Optimizing for natural results is the prudent approach for core keywords, while paid search can supplement these results for keywords and phrases that are related to the core keywords. Regardless of the approach, customers clearly do not ignore paid search ads (“sponsored listings”), and as we learned in 2006, ranking in the top three natural results is critical as these links are most often clicked.

A blog post over at Search Engine Roundtable struck a chord with me today, as this topic has come up when talking to various clients over the past few months.

The question was recently posed if the days of “set it and forget it” are gone. The “set it and forget it” method of pay per click management is when you would set up a campaign, monitor it for a few weeks, then let the campaign run itself.

The search landscape is always changing, and there are a number of reasons that companies should not “set it and forget it.” Here’s why companies should manage their PPC campaigns on a continual basis.

• Competitors enter your space. As pay-per-click search engine marketing becomes an even more popular advertising channel, competitors enter. While some may not know how to run an effective campaign, some will, and as more savvy competitors enter your company’s advertising space, your company will be shuffled down the list if your company’s campaign is not properly managed.
• Increased competition drives up bids. As more advertisers enter your market, bid prices are likely to increase. If companies don’t manage their bid prices over time, they may lose their position. Being the first paid listing isn’t always the best approach, but if your company’s ad isn’t on the page at all, you won’t get results.
• Search trends change/seasonality in retail. As time passes, so does the way people search for things. In the entertainment industry, electronics and others, what’s hot now isn’t what’s hot a few months from now. What people search for changes, and companies need to adjust phrases they bid on to capture the most traffic possible. Additionally, being visible during peak selling times during the year is especially important for retailers, and while upping ad spends at peak seasons may make sense, it may not make sense to be as aggressive during slower seasons.
• The way search engines (especially Google) determine where your ads show up changes over time. As the search engines change their PPC algorithms, companies need to adjust their campaigns accordingly. For example, Google Adwords recently added quality score and now allows advertisers to see their quality scores for individual keywords, allowing advertisers to adjust their campaigns and get better results.
• Testing ad copy keeps companies ahead of competitors. If advertisers don’t test their ad copy, their click rates will never significantly improve. It’s standard fare to run multiple ads at once, measuring the results and removing ads that don’t perform. It’s not uncommon for me to test 25-50 different versions of ad copy per client per year.

For my money — and my clients’ — continual PPC management is the way to go. Continual monitoring and improvement of campaigns will keep your company ahead of your competition while generating the most traffic possible to your company’s web site.

As a follow-up to my last post, “When Google rankings affect your small business’ bottom line,” I wanted to provide some real data for my claim that a web site can get a significant increase in traffic by paying for search engine advertising even though they have a #1 search engine ranking for their niche search term.

My client is currently #1 in Google for their niche phrase, which is a moderately-competitive two-word search phrase. The client’s web site has always been in the top 5 results for this phrase, and just recently re-gained the #1 ranking.

The client also pays for a Google Adwords ad for the exact two-word phrase that they are currently ranked #1 for.

In the last week, the client has gotten 59 visits from the #1 Google ranking, and the client has gotten 54 visits from the paid Google ad. You can see that the client nearly doubled their web site traffic from this niche search term by paying for advertising. What’s more is that the paid ad had a 6.78% conversion rate, proving that people not only clicked — they bought.

There’s an interesting thread on SEO Roundtable today regarding the way Google’s rankings can affect small businesses. The fact of the matter is that when Google shuffles its rankings or when competitors start to get aggressive, small business can suffer when they are shuffled down in the search engine rankings.

It’s a timely post as I have a new client that was shuffled off of the first page in the Google rankings for their particular niche search terms, and their revenue has dropped significantly. I wish there was a rosier picture to paint, but this business has a slow road to recovery ahead of it.

Luckily for other businesses that still have good rankings, I see two ways to prevent business decline, and I employ these with many of my clients that hire me to perform search engine consulting services.

1. When times are good (and rankings are high), try harder to keep your ranking.

Work with your search engine consultant to continue SEO efforts when your site is ranked well. If your site is ranked on the first page or even in the #1 spot, you should be continuing to build links to your site, optimize your site and build your business. If your site is #1 for your niche search term, the target is on your back, and other companies are determined to take that spot from you. Using proven, ethical techniques to improve your rankings, even when your site is at the top of the list, is necessary.

2. Buy search engine pay-per-click ads or improve your existing campaign.

If you’re relying solely on search engine optimization to attract customers, you’re putting all of your eggs in one basket. A paid search campaign can increase traffic to your site dramatically, even if your site is ranked #1 for your niche search term (I have data to prove it).

A #1 or first page ranking can also cause business owners to lose focus on their pay-per-click marketing efforts. I advocate the Rimm-Kaufman Group’s recommendation to evaluate your search engine marketing campaign at least once per year. If you have a smaller campaign with a monthly spend under $10,000, you should even evaluate your program every quarter.

With both paid and natural search engine programs running at an optimal level, you’ll lower your risk of a big drop-off in business.

I’m seeing a trend lately with new Google Adwords accounts and wanted to share my findings and get your feedback.

Back on January 11, I set up a Google Adwords account for a new client. We went all out, writing multiple ads for testing purposes, splitting the keywords into similar groups and targeting the ads geographically.

The results, at first, were poor. The campaign got one or two clicks the first couple of days, then went for days without a click. We decided to raise the bids significantly and write landing pages for each ad group that were designed to be highly relevant to the Google Adwords ads to drive conversion.

After we employed a more aggressive bidding strategy and directed ads to landing pages, the clicks started coming in, and just this week we’re seeing much better results. I’m unsure of what factor (the landing pages or the higher bids) had the biggest impact.

I recently read that advertisers should expect to bid higher at first to get desired results. This is good advice for all of you starting new Adwords campaigns. The folks over at MindValley Labs blogged earlier in the month that new advertisers “get crushed” when employing the same bidding strategies as an established advertiser, and they backed it up with test results.

My advice for those starting a new Google advertising campaign is to a) write and design your landing pages before you activate your campaign and b) start keyword bids higher than normal while also setting daily budgets high. Monitor your campaign closely, and if you’re getting a high clickthrough rate, test the effect on clickthrough rate of backing off of your bids gradually.