For those of you who have conversion tracking enabled, here’s a great way to increase your profits:

Ok, everyone knows that with Google AdWords you can receive traffic from just about anyone in the world.  If you’re smart, you will only advertise in countries where you feel people will buy the product you’re promoting.  Unfortunately, before you start advertising you cannot tell 100% which countries will make you money and which countries will not make you money.

But, once your advertisements have been running for a few weeks (maybe more depending on how many sales you’ve made), there’s a very easy way for you to find out which countries are making you money and which countries are costing you money.  To do this, go to your reports section in your AdWords account and run a geographical report for a specific campaign/adgroup.  This report will give you traffic data for each country/region/and city.

How does this increase your profits?

Easy!  With a report like this I can see that Mexico is not producing enough widget sales to cover advertising costs, so i de-select Mexico from my campaign settings.  I can also see that Australia is producing a lot of sales for widgets, so I add the country New Zealand to the list of countries I’m advertising in.  I can even take it a bit further, I could see that New York was buying a lot of widgets, but New York City was not.   To fix this, i could tell Google to show my ads in New York, but not New York City.

These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of this report.  Remember, don’t target every country in the world, you’ll lose a lot of money if you do that.  If you’re starting off and don’t know what countries to advertise in, use Google’s Insights for Search Tool.

Unfortunately I have recently learned that pausing older text ads can effect the quality scores of the keywords in that particular AdGroup.  I’ve done testing over the past few months that prove this.  In each of my tests I found that whenever I paused an older text ad that was being out-performed by new text ads, it would cause my keywords to drop in quality score.

Here’s why this happens:

• Older text ads have a more established history, which means most (if not all) of the keywords in that adgroup have triggered that text ad to be displayed
• Your keyword’s history is used to help determine your quality score, so by pausing that text ad, you’re removing the history that text ad has for all your keywords

Here’s what to do:

• First off, don’t let this effect major changes to your account.  If you have a text ad that is losing money, you need to pause it.
• If you need to pause a text ad that’s older and more established, make sure you have several text ads in the adgroup before you pause it.
• Try to have two or more text ads in the adgroup that are out-performing the text ad before you pause it.

Remember, if you do pause a text ad and notice a decrease in quality scores, I learned that if you simply re-activate the text ad it will increase your keyword’s quality score once more.