In the unforgiving world of PPC advertising, the few make money and the majority make money for good old Google, which are you ?

There is a dawn chorus that’s heard in almost every country in the world, is it the birds heralding the dawn, no it’s the sound of running, often naked, feet heading to wherever the PC is in the home. First the Google home page, then ‘advertising programs’, followed by ‘Google Adwords’, followed by – disappointment as, once again, they discover the sales column is blank and the cost one full !

They are gambling more so than they realise. They are, in effect, amateurs in a world where only those with a professional approach have any chance of surviving. The tragedy is that only about 10% of internet start-ups last more than 90 days, which, to me indicates that the numbers unable to make PPC work must be roughly similar.

You will find, on my website and across the web, articles where I have gone into, in detail, keyword list creation and how to compose the ads themselves, but no room for that here. I do need to repeat, however, that I believe in large numbers when it comes to a PPC campaign – but please, do not begin by bidding on the whole list ! The best way, I have discovered, is to have a very large campaign loaded into Google Adwords but only have a fairly small (perhaps a couple of hundred) ‘live’ at any one time, cutting out the unsuccessful and replacing them with more from your ‘paused’ list.

To give a real life example, I recently put up a campaign consisting of more than 4,000 ad groups, with only 200 of them appearing on the web, as keywords failed to perform they were deleted and another from the main list taking their place. Having it all up in one go makes managing the whole thing easier but this approach has one very obvious, very large, problem, how is it possible for anyone to create a campaign of this size manually ?

It can’t be done manually, if you don’t want to scramble your brain, the only answer is PPC software that can cope with the whole operation. Having ’seen the light’, the next job was to track down software that could do everything I needed it to and in a way I could easily understand.

After a lot of research it came down to two outstanding examples of PPC software, both of which ticked all the boxes.

1. Handle keyword lists of any size.

2. Give every single keyword some sort of tracking code so I could figure out which produced sales and which should be ditched.

3. Could place two versions of an ad within every ad group so that I could see which performed best

4. Make the keyword, where possible, the headline of the ad.

5. Where the keyword was longer than Google’s maximum of 25 characters, substitute a default headline, automatically, that had been prepared in advance.

6. ‘Explode’ the whole campaign so that it could be loaded directly into Google’s Adwords Editor in minutes without any fuss.

7. Very clear tutorials and an excellent help desk

Then the unpleasant business of money raised it’s ugly head, one at $399, the other $147, did the huge price difference mean a big difference in quality ?

With some concern I went for the cheaper one, after all it did have a thirty day guarantee and the people involved with it had a very good reputation. I used Ad Grenade once and was hooked, it worked beautifully and for someone as technically challenged as me that’s saying a lot.

Making real money online when PPC advertising is involved can only be achieved by tightly controlling large campaigns and that can only be realized by adding top quality PPC software to the mix. I now wouldn’t even know how to set up and run a campaign without Ad Grenade, why not watch how, a campaign is created – it’s fascinating !

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