Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Should you put the price of your product in your pay per click advertising ads? I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard “we’ve got the lowest prices on the internet” from business owners. I also cannot tell you how many times a 30 second check of their competitors’ websites reveals that these same business owners do NOT have the lowest prices on the web. Sometimes they are not even close. When this is the case, a simple check allows anyone to see that you do not have the lowest prices on the web, then you probably do not want to promote your product pricing on the web. I am still amazed how often I see huge variances in prices on the exact same products amongst different web businesses.

However, if your prices are very similar to your competitors, you may want to try some pricing in your ad copy. You could very well bring in a higher converting crowd by letting them know upfront what their cost is going to be. You may get a lower CTR on the ad because the price might scare some folks off, but those people probably would not turn into buyers anyway, so you could say you have successfully screened out some of the “tire kickers.”

Now if your pricing is clearly the lowest on the net, then by all means you should consider shouting it to the heavens and letting everybody know it. So many buyers are price sensitive these days that your lower price proclamation may be your saving grace. Your competitors might take notice and could try to undercut you, so that is definitely a risk you take, but if you truly believe that they cannot last as long as you can at your price point, then let them try and take you on.

Tough economic times sometimes require bold moves.  To learn more about using your pricing within your ad copy, read what Google has to say in their blog on ad copywriting tips.

Space is a precious commodity when writing for the PPC advertising. With a mere 25 characters for the title and two lines of 35 characters each in a description for an ad in Google, and a 40-character title limit and 70 for the description in Yahoo, sometimes you just need to add one more thing. A great spot to do it is in the Display URL.

For example, your AdGroup is Blue Widgets, your keywords focus on variations of “blue widget,” “blue widgets” and your URL is www.WidgetWorld.com. Your display URL could then be www.WidgetWorld.com/BlueWidgets or www.WidgetWorld.com/BestBlueWidgets. Or What about WidgetWorld.com/FreeBlueWidgets – there’s no rule that says you have to include the www (but you do have to use an extension like .com, .net or .org).

In fact, there are just a few rules to follow with your display URL:
1. You have a maximum of 35 characters.
2. The display URL has to agree with your ‘host domain’ destination URL. You can’t have the Display URL of www.BestBlueWidgets.com and the destination URL of www.WidgetWorld.com.
3. There cannot be an automatic redirect on the destination URL. You can’t have www.BestBlueWidgets.com as the display and destination URL, with a redirect to www.widgetworld.com.

Use the display URL to your best advantage. When used properly, they can give you a little more edge over your competitors. In fact, display URLs are a great thing to test. Take your best performing ad, copy it and try out one or two different display URLs. We do this frequently for our customers at , with very good effect.

Last week I wrote about some of the new features in Google AdWords Editor Version 6.

In addition to the Ad Words performance statistics that I wrote about, they have made some changes to the Editing features available.

Spell Checker
By far, my favorite new editing feature is the spell checker.

This one is a huge timesaver.

We all know that correct spelling is crucial to your ad’s success, but before this change you needed to rely on manual verification.  I would go one step further and download the ad copy into Word to be sure the spelling was 100% error free.

Now this step can be eliminated, still knowing you have error free ad copy.

Drag & Drop
Another useful feature is the ability to drag and drop ad groups within the tree view.

There are many situations when you want to move or copy an ad group between campaigns or into new campaigns.

There are several settings that are available at the campaign level that would lead you to put an ad group in its own campaign.  For example you may want to control the daily budget of a particular ad group separately.  You can also control geo targeting or ad scheduling at the campaign level.  There are other settings as well, but these are the settings I use the most.

As an example, I just had a situation with a client where we noticed their campaigns were maxing out budget on a daily basis.  We were working to manage the ad groups and keywords to maximize their traffic without raising the budget, but there was one Ad Group that converted so well that it didn’t make sense to limit the daily budget in the same way.  We were able to quickly break the Ad Group out into its own campaign with its own daily budget separate from the rest of the groups.

We’ve been able to copy and paste or cut and paste ad groups between campaigns, but this just got even easier with drag and drop.

If you’d like more information or training on using Ad Words Editor, check out this release announcement from Google.