This means that the consumer that one can reach with placing small text ads in search result pages is "better qualified" for our offering. Realizing the obvious benefits many advertisers were quick to set aside large amounts for Google CPC and similar campaigns.

Intuitively makes strong business sense. In fact Google Adwords by all means should definitely be a a part of the scheme of things. However, you may sometimes find your Google client manager trying to "help" you refine the campaign by suggesting you increase your key phrase list and use the content network.

Here's a case study of a similar siyuation we were part of not too long back. Even though we had our own convictions we wanted to see how such suggestions worked out in reality. They did get back to us with a close to 1000 key phrase list against our original list of 200. We also enabled content network.

Three days later we stopped advertising on content network and reverted back to our old key phrase list. Here's our practical guide for anyone looking to use search engine marketing and specially Google CPC

Be very sure you need content network. The impressions served are so large that your budgets can get exhausted in quick time.

It would be recommended to use a click tracking mechanism to countercheck the CTR's reported specially if using content network. You can do this by assigning a campaign number to the content network ads and capturing it from the query string and inserting the same into a database. In recent campaigns where we ran ads on content network the difference between CTR's claimed by Google and the clicks recorded at our end was so large that it took us three days to stop.

Remember that while Google does an "intelligent" match of the copy matter of the page in which it serves the ad to the key phrases chosen, the consumer is not necessarily as qualified as when he is performing a search

When choosing key phrases we recommend that you prepare a list of all the the phrases you can think of. Let it be as large as it might get. Then against each phrase put one of the three states of the relevance index - Strong association, weak association and generic association.

For example if the campaign is for a mobile phone then the phrase "latest multimedia phone" would have a strong relevance whereas "mp3 songs" would have a generic relevance (since the user might be searching for mp3 songs to download and not necessarily mp3 feature in a phone). Similarly a phrase like "cell phone battery" has weak relevance since a visitor looking for a battery is not looking for a phone

Definitely place all your strong relevance keywords in the keyword list and watch the campaign for a few days. If you are getting deliveries below expectation add the generic relevance keywords to your list

The amount you pay for your minimum CPC is a function of your historical CTR. Hence the more generic and weak relevance keywords you add to the list the lower your CTR and the higher you end up paying for your clicks (and Google gets more money)

Remember, it's your business and your campaign. Plan your keywords well and spend your money wisely. We have seen so many clients falling prey to common mistakes and end up abandoning search advertising. Bottom line it works and works well ... remember the fundamentals and you will never go wrong.

Sabyasachi Mitter (smitter@interface.co.in) is part of the Internet marketing and consulting team at Interface Business Solutions. Interface specialises in providing cutting edge marketing and CRM support to global clients like Samsung, UTStarcom, Morphy Richards etc. The online marketing team at Interface Business Solutions manages SEO and SEM campaigns from an end to end perspective. To know more about how to make search engines work for your website contact Sabyasachi at interface.co.in