How to use Google Adwords Effectively and Pay Less?

If you have been optimizing your adwords account, like you should, one of the most important tasks you can perform is to modify your landing pages to that they sync with your adgroups. This helps to:

• improve your quality score and thus decrease cost per click on your keywords
• give you a better ranking in the free or organic listings on the search results page - (photo by J Brooks)
  

On many a fine occasion you will certainly succeed in achieving above the fold, first page free rankings for many of your medium to long tail keywords. This begs the question:

Do I discontinue bidding on this keyword, phrase or exact, or do I continue bidding in the attempt to dominate the page, irregardless of the fees for the clicks?

I've read that it is highly desirable to keep on bidding, for many reasons, but I won't discuss that now; I will take the opposite position here, relevant for smaller budgets perhaps.

I just got off a chat with Google Adwords and I nailed down the exact procedure for you here...

• pause the keyword that you are tired of paying for, and has a high organic ranking
• add the keyword as a negative in your adgroup or campaign, either as exact or phrase neg
• you may wish to monitor these paused keywords from time to time to check your rank

The advantage of pausing your keywords versus deleting them...

• if you don't keep a separate file of these keywords, you can easily check the paused keywords for ranking. If they were deleted, you must have a separate file.
• paused keywords, when reactivated maintain historical data, a valuable asset indeed.
  

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