We’re used to hearing how beneficial a paid search program can be for a company. What we don’t hear is how difficult it can be to effectively manage and optimize the program. I’m not lying when I tell you that it can be a full-time job in and of itself. Knowing that not everyone has the time or resources, I thought I’d share with you a few tools that Google offers to help you make the most of your Adwords program.

Traffic Estimator

This tool is designed to help you estimate the costs and opportunity (number of impressions) associated with keywords that you select. This will give you a real sense of how many leads (impressions) are out there and how much it will cost to reach them (budget).
For each Keyword you select, you will see the following information:

- Minimum bid or the amount you’ll have to pay in order for your ad to appear
- Maximum Cost Per Click or the most you are willing to pay in order to see your ads appear
- Predicted Status, the status your keyword will be assigned, based on your CPC bid (active or inactive for search)
- Search Volume or traffic, how many people are likely to search for those terms
- Estimated Average Cost Per Click, what you are likely to pay every time someone clicks on your ad for specific keywords
- Estimated Ad positions, where your ad is likely to appear

Below are detailed instructions from Google on how to use the Traffic Estimator with or without an account.

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the campaign containing the ad group and keywords you want to review.
3. Click the appropriate ad group.
4. Select the Keywords tab.
5. Click Edit Keywords at the top of the table.
6. In the field provided, enter any additional keywords so that each word or phrase appears on its own line. Do not use commas to separate keywords.
7. If necessary, enter the new maximum cost-per-click (CPC) amount in the Default bid field.
8. Click Estimate Search Traffic. You will see all of the estimates for each of your keywords. If necessary, you can adjust your maximum CPC and recalculate your estimates.
9. Click Save Changes to keep the new settings or Cancel to delete them (in which case your original settings will be applied).

You can also access* our standalone Keyword Traffic Estimator this way:
1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click Tools on the Campaign Management tab.
3. Click Traffic Estimator.
4. Enter your keywords: In the field provided, enter your keywords so that each word or phrase appears on its own line.
5. Choose a currency: Select your currency. Then enter a specific maximum CPC for your estimates, or let us suggest a value. Our suggested value should deliver your ads at the top position a majority of the time.
6. Choose a daily budget: Enter a daily budget. Or, let us suggest a value to see the maximum number of clicks that your ads could receive.
7. Choose your target language(s): Select which language(s) you'd like to target.
8. Choose your target location(s): Follow the instructions on the page to select which location(s) you'd like to target.
9. Click Continue when you're finished to see your traffic estimates.
10. If necessary, enter new values in the Maximum CPC and Daily budget field. Click Get New Estimates to see how your statistics change.

*If you don't have an AdWords account or don't want to sign in to your account, you can access the standalone Keyword Traffic Estimator at https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox?hl=en_US.

Edit Campaign Negative Keywords

These are words that you would NOT want to trigger your ad. For instance, let’s say you are selling a service. That service has a defined cost attached to it. If the search contains the word “free” in it, you might not want your ad to appear because he or she isn’t likely to become a customer of yours. To not suppress those searches can only drive up costs and negatively impact your quality score.

Conversion Tracking
Using conversion tracking, you can measure how effective you are at converting leads or getting them to perform certain actions through your paid search program. Conversions could be any number of things, depending on your site: newsletter sign-ups, contact us form submissions, etc. This way, you can not only view the quantity of traffic you are driving to the site but more importantly, the quality.
Once you define a conversion, Google will provide you with code you will need to add to the confirmation page for that defined action. Once you have that in place, you will be able to track how many submissions, sign-ups, or downloads came from your ads.

Below is some more information from Google on how conversion tracking works exactly:

• Our googleadservices.com server places a temporary cookie on the user's computer or mobile device.
• If the user reaches one of your designated conversion confirmation request pages, his or her computer or mobile device passes back the cookie and requests that our server send the conversion tracking text. If cookies are rejected for any reason, the conversions made from that user won't get recorded. Conversion tracking is also not supported if the mobile phone user disables images.
• Google records the conversion event and correlates it with your campaign, Ad Group, URL and keyword.
• At the next report update, you will see conversion statistics from the campaign level down to the keyword level.

Ad Scheduling

With Ad Scheduling, you can determine what days and during what hours your campaigns or ads run. If you only want your ads to appear on weekdays during the workday, you can easily change the settings to change that.
Follow the path below to access Ad Scheduling:
Campaign --> Edit Campaign Settings --> Advanced Options

Delivery Method

This allows you to choose at what frequency you’d like Google to serve your ads. You have two options to choose from:
- Standard or over time (over the course of a day). This may mean that you don’t always see them since they try to space them out
- Accelerated, showing the ads as quickly and often as possible until you hit your daily budget

Ad Serving

With Ad Serving you can choose Optimize and have Google serve up the better performing ads more often or Rotate, and show all ads evenly. For those who don’t have the time to closely monitor their ads, I would let Google do it for you and choose “Optimize”.

Position Preference

This is where you tell Google where on a page you’d prefer your ads to appear. For instance, if you’d prefer that your ads appear when they rank between positions 2 and 4, you can set that and will only try to serve your ad when your able to claim one of those rankings. They don’t guarantee it, but they try. Isn’t that the best we can honestly expect these days? I would only use this once you’ve established a position that works for you.

Utilize some or al of these tools and you’ll likely find a more optimized solution to your paid search quandaries. Your program will reap the benefits and you’ll come off like a genius without having to do any heavy lifting whatsoever.

Happy Optimizing!