Results? After a couple minutes of playing with it, pretty good. Although the ad on the side will get annoying, hey, that’s the price for free stuff.

I’ll try to do a few comparisons and see where this one lands vs. wordtracker and the DigitalPoint keyword tool.

Many of the techniques are things anyone should do to try to optimize their conversion rate, whether using the new Google optimizer or not. These are time-tested tips from e-commerce and decades of direct marketing knowledge all rolled up into one page. Great job to the folks at conversion-rate-experts.com!

I’ve started almost a dozen adwords campaigns over the last month and the successful ones all have something in common: They weren’t successful at first. You can use all the research tools you want, in the end, the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t is through trial by fire.

On a new campaign yesterday, I was delighted to see that I Almost broke even.

Today, I made some adjustments and barely made a profit. Tomorrow, I expect enough profit to eat lunch. And that’s how it’ll go.

So if you’ve just started an adwords campaign and you’re losing your ass, congratulations. You’ve just completed step one. Now ask yourself why. Use those stats to learn from, and you’ll see you didn’t lose money at all - you invested it in the knowledge that will help you make money.

If you’re on a daily budget of, say, $10 per day and you’re maxing out every day, then your clicks that don’t convert are costing you more than you think.

There’s the obvious cost of the click, but you have to also take into account the wasted opportunity. On a daily budget, you will only get so many clicks. Every click that doesn’t convert is a missed opportunity for a click that did convert.

There are many ways to find out which clicks aren’t converting:

• Using AWStats, look at your keyword traffic and find irrelevant clicks
• Track your keywords using separate subid stats, so you know which ones are converting. Kill the ones with lower conversion rates, so your budget will be spent on the higher-converting keywords.
• You can also use Google Analytics to see the keywords people are clicking in.

Root out those wasted clicks, the cost is higher than you think!

Sure enough, I found dozens of visits from keywords that were not relevant to the affiliate, and therefore wasted clicks.

These visits/wastes of money came from using broad-match keywords in the Adwords campaign. So, I copied the list of all keyword visits from AWStats, pasted them in a spreadsheet, and marked the ones that were not relevant. Now, all I have to do is add them as negative keywords in Adwords and my ROI should increase nicely!

I’ll log the changes and see if any relevant numbers come out of this, although it may not be a huge difference but rather one that adds up over time.

Still, analytics guide has come into mind many times as I’ve gained insights into analysing and optimizing PPC campaigns, and I do believe that it’s every bit as relevant as a post about Google Analytics.

Matter of fact, my philosophy on analytics has always been that it’s not the numbers themselves, it’s what you make of them and the actions your own critical thinking, guided by the analytics, drives you to take.

In that sense, Adwords is quite possibly the perfect analytics microcosm. Nowhere else can you get so many stats, so quickly. And the fact that each non-converting click equals a loss of profit is a hell of a motivator.

So, I’ll be sharing my adwords insights here. I have many I’ve come across in the last few weeks especially.

So, here’s a bit of background about where I’ve been and what’s working for me:

Today, I have made over $600 PROFIT on an adsense spend of about $200. This is done using CPA affiliate programs and landing pages. How did I get to this number? Well, it happened over the course of about two weeks. I found an offer that seemed to show potential, but of course the income was extremely limited with no optimization.

I set up landing pages, used PHP to track which keywords were clicking through to the offer and which ones were subsequently converting. I tested Adwords ads, landing pages, keywords and bids fanatically for about a week. Every dime I made went back into adwords. But it was all an investment in a successful campaign, and in the last 7 days I have averaged a little over $400 per day profit.

I’ll be adding the insights and results in individual posts so they can be easily read. But I wanted to start with this post, so you understand why a site about analytics is talking so much about PPC campaigns: Because success in PPC is in the analytics, and much of the learning can be applied elsewhere.

So, next time you’re checking your stats, take a look at some of those one-off long tail keywords and remember, analytics should be the catalyst for new ideas, not just the measurement of an old idea’s results.

Just because Google says it’s so doesn’t mean it is, right? Definitely. But, when the general terminology used by some of the most well-regarded webmasters and SEO’s changes, it’s time to take notice.

And that’s exactly what I picked up on today when reading one of Aaron Wall’s recent posts on his blog – It’s titled, “Usage Data Will Not Replace Link Reputation.” Notice he used the term “link reputation,” not “link popularity.” It’s the little things like wording that can make all the difference in how we perceive our world. And here is yet another example. For, whether true or not, Google has again changed the way the SEO community talks, acts, and ultimately, thinks.

P.S., please only link to this blog post if you have never participated in a link exchange program, submitted your site to a directory, and use exclusively “nofollow” tags on all your exchanged or sold links.