Creating highly effective ads on Google Adwords is an ongoing process, and you’ll probably spend weeks and months tweaking analyzing your strategy as you build your campaign. Still, you don’t have to settle or a trial and error process every step of the way, especially when it comes to increasing your clickthrough rate (CTR). Internet marketing strategists such as Perry Marshall and countless others have already harnessed the power of Google Adwords by employing several strategies that generate results from the start.

Interested in how you can increase your clickthrough rates? Read on to learn about two proven strategies that, used properly, offer a foolproof path to Adwords success.

Figure Out Which Keywords Don’t Work

Running keyword reports on a regular basis is vital for your success with Google Adwords, and there are several free and paid keyword selector tools available online. Wordtracker is one of them, and offers both a free keyword selector tool and a paid subscriptions service. You can populate a spreadsheet with all relevant keywords and key phrases, but these are also a valuable resource for identifying negative keywords for your specific market.

Negative keywords and key phrases are those that are related to your specific niche, product or service, but do not offer immediate value. After identifying what your ideal customer may be searching for, you’ll be able to conjecture the specific key terms (positive keywords) they may use to find you. For example, if you are selling referral tracking software, you want to identify customers who are typing in key phrases such as ‘buy referral tracking software’, ‘using referral tracking software’, etc. Those who might type in ‘free referral tracking software’ do not fall under your target market radar, and need to be eliminated. You can employ this strategy with every niche and keyword list, paring it down until you have a very refined, highly targeted listing of keywords that apply only to your ideal customer.

Split Test to Create More Effective Adwords Ads

The strategy of split testing is not a new one – companies sending out mass mailings, for example, will create two versions of the mailing to be used in tandem, and then analyze the results to determine which version has proven more effective in reaching the target market, and internalize this information to create an ideal marketing campaign.

Just as in traditional marketing media, split testing proves a valuable ally for marketers developing a Google Adwords campaign. Once you’ve decided which keywords you should and should not employ in your attempts to reach the ideal audience, you can then turn your attention to the specifics of how these keywords are used, testing slightly different phrasings in Adword ads and seeing which are most effective.

Split testing with your Google Adwords campaign is one of the best ways to maximize your online marketing efforts and steadily increase your clickthrough rate. Perry Marshall, a Google Adwords educator and online marketing strategist explains that this is one of the most effective – if not the most effective way – to increase your clickthrough rate over a short period of time. By continually split testing ads against each other, you’ll start to see a noticeable traffic increase and can eliminate the poor-performing ad early on in your testing phases.