Which Adword Keywords are Profitable for You?

With AdWords there is one REALLY IMPORTANT thing you need to know: which keywords are profitable for you?

All the other keywords will at best break even, and at worst cost you a lot of money.

You might think you know which keywords are profitable for you, but if you think Google Analytics or Google AdWords is telling you, then you're wrong (unless you've take some additional 'intermediate-level' steps).

Google Adword's reports don't give full keyword performance information, but they can tell you which ads are making you the money (note that's *ads*, not *keywords*). To do that you need to use conversion tracking which tracks the goals of your website, like making a sale, or someone viewing your 'contact us' page. I'll expand on this another time, but for now just follow the 'conversion tracking' steps from your main Campaign Management page. This will give you a little bit of script code to insert onto key 'conversion' pages of your website. Once you've done that you can track 'conversions' from your main AdWords account pages. A similar thing can be achieved in Google Analytics by setting 'goals'.

Google is *not* very helpful at identifying the actual keywords that are profitable for you. You can't get this information from AdWords: the reports do not give full detailed information on keyword performance. If you turn to Google Analytics, that will tell you what AdWords keywords were triggered, but not the *actual* keyword that were searched.
It's a subtle difference, but a very important one.