If you want to mine every ounce of performance from your pay-per-click ads, review your work to be sure you’re not making any of these frequent mistakes. If you are, you’re not alone, many internet entrepreneurs make them. Avoid them and your business will take off for sure:

• Bidding on keywords/phrases which are too general. You have to be specific to get meaningful results, otherwise you’ll just get lots of unrelated traffic. Don’t bid on “dogs”. Bid on “border collie nutrition” or “border collie senior nutrition” instead.
• Not bidding on enough keywords/phrases. Some people only bid on 5 or 10 keywords. Others bid on 50 or 60. The folks with the most successful websites bid on 1000, 2000, even 4000 keywords at once. You have to use WordTracker to find all of the relevant phrases that real people use to search for your niche every day!
• Bidding on keywords/phrases which are too expensive. Don’t bid on the ones which cost a dollar a click or more (don’t even think of bidding on “mortgage” or “insurance” for example)! Instead, bid on lots of more-specific keywords/phrases which only cost 5 or 10 cents a click. You’ll get more relevant traffic for a much lower cost.
• Not using WordTracker to see which keywords/phrases people really use when they search. You can guess what people might use all day long, and you’ll get lucky here and there. But you’ll never come up with all of the phrases which people use all over the world to search for your niche. You just won’t. Why leave money on the table? Use WordTracker to be sure you capture what people are really using when they search.

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I discussed Google’s false accusations and shut-down of my account (see my recent posts here, here, here, and here) with Joel Comm today, author of the best-selling and newly-updated What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m not the only one unfairly accused by Google. Here’s Joel’s reply to my plight:

I’m sorry to hear that your account was closed. You are correct. It can happen to ANYONE and people do need to be aware of it. I’ve had at least one person tell me they saw some odd things happening with their stats and they took a proactive stance, emailing google about it. That turned out to be a very good move.

Best regards,
Joel

Joel’s advice about proactively emailing Google is good, and I also heard of that working for one person (though in true robotic fashion, Google’s initial response to the proactive email was to immediately shut down the person’s account, but they later re-activated it after much pleading from the person who was actually trying to be proactive – it seems you just can’t win with Google, no matter what).

In my situation however, I didn’t see anything odd happening with my stats ahead of time, my only warning was after Google had shut down my account and then they wouldn’t let me see the ad stats to determine what happened. My site stats didn’t show anything out of the ordinary, leading me to believe it was just a few clicks instead of hundreds or thousands which caused the problem. And once again, these were low-dollar-amount ads, not ads which would’ve cost the advertisers any significant amount of money, certainly not warranting Google’s “protection.”

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