Google Adwords is a great tool! Careful use can lead tolegions of highly targeted visitors breaching the moataround your site, and demanding to pillage your products! Onthe other hand...

Adwords is also a great place to drain your advertisingdollars if you're not careful. Like any other automatedsystem, it requires constant feeding and attention to keepyou from wondering just why you spent hundreds of dollarsand received a paltry return on your investment. Here's 7great ways I've found to do just that, (and yes I've beenguilty of several of these to one degree or another.)

1. - Not getting enough keywords, and I don't mean justnumbers. Good ones. A lot of people run a search on theirfavorite keyword tool and pick the top ten or twenty wordsor phrases getting the most traffic, thinking somehow thatTHEY will beat all the others using these keywords. There isa reason why these keywords are so popular: everybody andtheir grandmother are bidding on them! A much betterapproach is to come up with at least a couple hundred,better a couple thousand words that you have a shot atgetting a high ranking for. After all, if you have 1800keywords and can get a top 8 (first page) position for mostof them, you'll see a lot more clicks than you will chasingthe top dollar words. If you get a hundred of the lower tierwords giving you a couple of visitors a day, well, you dothe math. Not only that, but often the less expensive wordsare altogether more specific, delivering far more targetedvisitors.

2. - Not creating adgroups. You should use this function! Itcan help you focus your advertising much more effectively.By arranging your keywords in tightly focused groups of 10-30 phrases, and writing a keyword-specific headline for eachof them, you have a much greater ability to see what'sworking and what's not. Also gives you a chance to testdifferent headlines and text copy.

3. - No negative keywords. This you gotta do. And it's soeasy. Simply add -free (or whatever else you don't wantassociated with your searches) and you won't end up payingfor a lot of clicks for people who weren't interested in thefirst place.

4. - Using only broad keyword searches for their keywords.When you're paying for this stuff, you want to be asspecific as you can, particularly if you're playing in avery competitive market. Why hope that a broad search willreturn someone interested in what you're selling? Better toget as focused as you can on the words they may be searchingfor. Google helps you with this by giving you moreinformation on the impressions and click-throughs than youcan handle, but be pro-active, and prune the dead wood after100 or so impressions. If they haven't produced by then, theodds of them improving by leaps and bounds are not great.

5. - Not testing and rotating your ads. Even a small changein a headline or ad text can make a HUGE difference!Particularly headlines. Your ad text won't be read if theheadline is boring or uninviting. Learn to write killerheadlines, and do not be afraid to test and rotate your ads.Also don't be shy about deleting ad groups if they're notclicking through enough. Remember, you've got a list ofseveral hundred words; either these aren't right or theheadline/text need tweaking. Test, test, test!

6. - Not using the content targeted feature wisely. This isa tricky one. Google, in it's infinite wisdom, seeks outalternate avenues to show your ads, thus deliveringsubstantially more clicks to your campaign. Trouble is,though, you have no control over this, and it IS your money.If you are attempting to run a tightly focused campaign onlimited funds, this one is a potential budget buster. It caneasily rack up a lot of clicks, but are they of worth toyou? In my experience, the CTR is ALWAYS a lot lower. Iguess it could make sense for large campaigns with a verypopular product, but for the most part, you'll want to bevery careful. Which leads me to my last, and most importantdollar-drainer of all.

7. - Not having a GREAT sales page. This one is the hardestto fix, but without doubt the most important. All the clicksin the world won't mean a thing if the sales page you'resending your hard-earned visitors to doesn't get the jobdone. If it's your product, there's hope! You can addressthese issues, and after testing and more testing, cancorrect and come up with a page that sings! If you're anaffiliate, you might consider a separate landing page, whereyou might offer a sincere testimonial in an attempt topresell the product more effectively. (That is not a badstrategy even with a good sales page, as personalrecommendations go a long way!)

There you have it. 7 Great ways to lose infinitely more thanyour shirt!

Keith Thompson is the webmaster at Internet Marketing Here & Now, where you can find all sorts of information concerning pay-per-click advertising.

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