Most of the affiliate marketers who use adwords often fail with their PPC campaigns. The newbies joining the race in PPC usually start off with an account with some free Google adwords voucher and start bidding high for their keywords and end up losing money on PPC. These guys often scream on various forums that Google adwords is just not profitable anymore.

Google Adwords is a perfect way to get some immediate traffic to your sites or product promotion pages. There is a huge competition in PPC (especially Google adwords) and if you want to ensure profits from your campaigns you need to ensure you are not making these costly mistakes.

1. Having generic words for keywords
2. Not having negative keywords
3. Not tracking statistics
4. Poor landing page
5. Daily Budget
6. All your keywords placed in one Ad Group
7. Turning on the Content Network

1. Having generic words for keywords
Affiliate Marketers usually look for generic terms for the products they are promoting then use Google keywords tool or Wordtracker to build a list of keywords for their campaigns. This approach is fine as long as the niche is not crowded. If you are entering a niche which is very competitive e.g. Weight loss, this may not be a correct approach. You may either end up paying high CPC for your keyword or these keywords may just end up as “inactive”. You need to ensure you find keywords which have a proper balance in terms of searches per month as well as the max CPC.

2. Not having negative keywords
if you do not include the negative keywords in your campaigns, you may be throwing up your money in the drains. The visitors looking for freebies or information are not going to buy hence showing your ads for any terms like “Free”, “Download”, “Crack”, “mp3″, “ringtone”, “movie”, “guide”, “affiliate” will just waste your money.

3. Not tracking statistics
Google provides excellent reports for the adwords campaigns. You should always ensure you are tracking the keywords and overall campaign statistics to ensure you are not losing money on unprofitable keywords.

4. Poor landing page
The landing page relevance with your ad keywords is extremely important for getting good quality scores. Some marketers just create a landing page and stuff bunch of keywords. You should ensure you use the keywords in the ad on the landing page as well. Ideally you should target to create a separate landing page for each of the ad group, this helps you to track the keyword quality and tweak your pages to increase the quality score.

Here are a few good tutorials on building landing pages:

Landing Page Checklist

Landing Page Tutorial

5. Daily budget
it’s extremely important to adjust your daily budget for your adwords campaigns. Some guys are too scared with spending a lot of money on their PPC campaigns and restrict the budget to $5-$10 per day. Though this approach helps to ensure you do not lose huge money in a single day, this also ensures that your ad does not get impressions.

Ideally you should keep your daily budget to $25. But you also need to ensure you are tracking your keywords and weeding out the unprofitable ones, else you may end up spending that $25 without any returns.

6. All your keywords placed in one Ad Group
this is the most common mistakes done by the newbies starting out with adwords. Ideally you should create separate adgroups and only include relevant keywords in an adgroup.

E.g. one of your adgroup may be created only to contain keywords related to discount for the product, another can target the product brand name, and the third ad group may contain keywords related to review of the product. Having such adgroups will help you identify the profitable terms for your promotions and hence will help you target only the relevant ones necessary keywords for making a sale.

7. Turning on the Content Network
Turning on the content network is not exactly a mistake for all the adwords users. Some of the users have reported profitable campaigns targeting only the content networks. But you need to be careful with content networks since you do not get detailed reports similar to the campaigns targeting search placements.

You need to do proper research before you decide on whether you want to have the content network for your campaigns. Who knows, you might just find a killer campaign with content targeting.