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

Keyword reports are a crucial way marketers can learn whether their Adwords campaigns are working as planned, and these should be run regularly. Tools available on the Internet, such as Wordtracker, are invaluable in the creation of keyword reports, and, furthermore, includes a free keyword selector tool. By creating a spreadsheet that includes all relevant keywords, you can also gain insight into the negative keywords for your target audience.

These negative keywords, which, although they are directly relevant to your market and the product of service you are trying to sell, do not seem to have any customer-attracting power, are, in fact, a great tool for use in figuring out what your audience is actually searching for, and which positive keywords to focus on. For example, those selling some sort of software will want to attract Internet users searching for, ‘buy software,” et cetera, but those who are searching ‘free software’ are obviously of no use to you. By considering which specific keywords are not going to result in customers buying your product or service, you can trim your Adwords campaign appropriately, and create advertisements containing only keywords with a pinpoint focus on your target market.

Employing Split Testing Strategies

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.