Search engine advertising is, without a doubt, a source of paid traffic that seems to baffle many online marketers. With that in mind, there’s a place for you in this massive search engine conundrum, no matter the size of your business. It doesn’t matter who your product appeals to because search engine reach is extensive. Google is a giant when it comes to search engines, getting about 65% share of all keyword searches as of August 2009. Familiarity with Google AdWords is important knowledge to possess in order to advertise your successful business, no matter if you are new to Internet marketing gold is a superstar entrepreneur. What follows are five of the most important tips for Google AdWords success.

1. Choose keywords that represent your business

Keyword competitiveness is often a good metric for who will see your ad, but it’s not the only metric for which keywords will convert to sales. When running an AdWords campaign, choose keywords that have decent daily search volume and that most accurately characterize your business. If your keywords fail these quality factors, you may lose a large chunk of potential customers.

2. Run mini-campaigns first

This rule represents what all advertisers must do when launching a new campaign. Ask yourself, what is the key purpose of spending my money on advertising? The answer is to convert potential customers into paying customers. If your ads don’t achieve the minimum expected ROI, discard them. Run tests of five, ten, or more ads to see how each one performs. Which ads get the most pageviews and which convert the best? Keep the top performing ads from each test and use them as your standard for testing new ads. You should keep testing new ads with the older tested ads to increase your conversion rate.

3. Ads that don’t convert should be removed

When ads don’t work as intended, lose them. You can’t spend your way out of trouble. If you run several competing ads during a test and say that only two of them give you good results, then you should lose the poor performers. Losers will reduce their profits. Your focus should be on making the ads that work even better and not trying to fix the ones that are broken. As an internet marketer, you don’t have unlimited capital to run massive campaigns, so stick to the small ones that bring the best results. Run with the winners and dump the losers.

4. Post Ads to Gain Research Insights

You need to know what is going to work online and what is not. First, run a test Google AdWords campaign. Choose your top five product names or tag lines, and then write ads that are optimized for each keyword. Each keyword must run in its own ad group to get a high quality score, which can lower your cost per click. All winning ads will have high click-through rates (CTRs) compared to the losing ones. The research data collected from your campaign tests should provide evidence about winning ad and keyword combinations.

5. Perform a profitability analysis of your Google AdWords campaigns

If you run campaigns that don’t convert well, you need to consider whether it’s worth the effort. Time spent on a losing campaign detracts from another campaign, which can be the source of money. Simply put, if the campaign isn’t as profitable as you’d like, close it. If a campaign is only breaking even, then it’s a judgment call whether more time should be spent on improving conversions. It’s amazing how even the smallest of campaigns can eat up your time. Determine how much time to spend to accurately test a Google AdWords campaign before declaring it a winner or loser.