To run a successful adwords campaign and realize a profit is much more work than most marketers want you to believe. It is not a simple job of taking a word and putting together a little three-line ad and build a campaign around it. (Who hasn't thought about getting paid big bucks for writing those little bits of copy?) The responsibilities are much more complex than that. You have to watch the bids and how many sales you are getting, keeping the costs and expenses in check, and watch constantly the ads you have working and see if they need changes to keep them working efficiently.
The pivotal point in an Adwords campaign is where the ad shows up as compared to the competing ads that use the same keyword. A search can deliver 100+ of pages of results especially the more popular ones and that is why there is a scramble for the upper positions.
The only way to make a profit is to draw in the greatest possible pool of buyers, and the only way to draw in a large number of potential buyers is to ensure that an ad is in a visible location.
Web surfers have an extremely short attention span, meaning they will only look through the first 5 or maybe 10 pages of search results/ads. This means the most desirable place for an ad is on the first 5 pages.
Because nearly every keyword has at least two ads listed on them the one that is first on the list is going to be the one whose author will pay the greatest amount for a click. (Any keyword that doesn't have more than one ad is probably so way-out-there that it is not worth bidding on as the chances of getting a click is remote. Who would think of using it?)
Putting bids on keywords can be tricky to do. The marketer has to keep in mind not only how much money the competition is spending per click but the total amount of money they may have in their budget.
A ppc ad campaign that uses general keywords and gets placed in the top spot in the Sponsored Links section is most likely to attract more false leads between good profitable leads.
The ends must justify the means.
If clicking on an ad one hundred times brings you to the limit of your budget then the probability is that you will only get ten sales. Those ten sales need to cover the expenses of your ad campaign and give you a profit also. If it can't do that then it is not enough.
Careful tracking of the number of successful leads brought in by an ad is important as well.
If an ad is attracting a good amount of traffic but it is not profitable traffic (meaning no sales are made off of it) then the ad should be taken out of the campaign and changes made to either the format of the ad or the keyword list.or maybe both.
In any case, micromanaging is what you want to be doing to make your campaign a profitable venture.
