First position is the best place to rank… Right?… Wrong! Being in position 1 does not necessarily mean success, especially in Google Adwords. The funny thing is not everyone clicks on the first advertisement, they often click on lower positioned ads depending on how relevant they perceive the ad to be.

This is great news for you because it means you can save a ton of money on your bids.

You will come to realize there can be, and often is a big gap in the cost per click of a position 1 to 3 advertisement and a position 3 to 5 advertisement in Google Adwords.

This is a good cash saving technique; Let your competitors fork out top dollar to rank number 1 to 3. By practicing this method you will not only save cash on your PPC costs, but you could possibly end up getting more traffic by being further down the list of search results.

A good feature of Google’s keyword tool is the cost per click option in the search results. Simply choose for the cost per click column to be displayed and you will see a small box above the search results where you can input a (hypothetical) maximum bid price. All of the keywords in the search result will then show you what position your maximum bid will buy you. You now have an idea of what bid price you will have to pay to be in a particular position. Simple stuff that can save you some dollars in the beginning stages of a campaign.

To help you achieve success with you Google PPC campaigns, I urge you to study your competitors. Lets say your advertising an affiliate product using Pay Per Click, you will no doubt have other affiliates promoting the same product, therefore competing against you for the same traffic. Take a look at the type of landing pages they are using and there ad copy. If they are running their ads over a long period of time, more often thn not this would suggest they have a profitable campaign… (or like losing money) So study your opposition.

There are ways you can do this manually, but you’d be crazy too… There are a lot of software and PPC tools out there to make your life easier. Everything from campaign builders to spy software. One of the best PPC spy tools I know of is Google Cash Detective 2. Without going into detail, Google Cash Detective 2 saves you time and money by taking out the guess work when setting up a campaign. Simply an awesome bit of gear, I will never set up a new campaign without it.

Google Cash Detective 2 or similar “spy” tools gives you an inside look at what your opposition is doing: Are they using a squeeze page to capture leads, or do they direct traffic directly to the product sales page?

This is where you usually can separate the amateurs from the pros. Affiliate marketers who stay in the game have learned to use squeeze pages to capture contact information to build that all-important list.

The number of people that buy the first time they turn up to your site… well let’s just say… not so many! Follow-up is therefore vital to converting your pay-per-click traffic. On average, they say it takes up to 7 contacts before people purchase.

It’s up to you if you choose to try and capture leads with your PPC campaigns. The benefits of continued marketing is in my opinion well worth the small amount of effort it takes to set up a squeeze page. Capturing contact details gives you two bites of the cherry, and that little bit of effort can be the difference between being a successful or a failing affiliate marketer.

Well, there you go, some winning strategies for running your PPC campaigns, go get em!