Advertising on Google: The High Performance Cookbook: Cracking pay-per-click on Google can increase your visitor numbers and profits. Here are over 120 practical recipes to help you set up, optimize and manage your Adwords campaign with step-by-step instructions.

Keep in mind the following basic terms and concepts discussed in this book:

As you create your campaigns and plan AdWords strategies, focus on relevance by:

Clickthrough-rate (CTR) is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.

CTR (expressed as %) = Clicks / Impressions

Each of your ads and keywords have their own CTRs, indicating how compelling users are finding your ads and keywords. CTR helps you gauge the success of your marketing efforts and it factors into Quality Score.

Quality Score is a measure of how relevant your keywords are to your ads and to your landing pages. It is calculated at the keyword level every time someone does a search for one of your keywords, and ranges from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Quality Score affects your ad position as well as how much you'll pay for clicks. Advertisers with higher Quality Scores are rewarded with lower CPCs and better ad positions.

You likely already have a list of businesses that you consider your key competitors in a particular market. However, they may not all be advertising on AdWords. Armed with a list of websites you consider your competition, you can begin researching their online ad presence.

Start with a search on Google using terms that you consider your main keywords or ways that customers look for your products or services. In the following example, we searched Google for PPC ads to figure out which websites are coming up in both organic and paid listings.

Organic, or natural listings, are on the left below the search query, while the paid ads are to the right and potentially above the organic listings.

Take note of paid ads coming up for your key searches, including how many ads are appearing. Scroll to the next page of search results to see additional pages and websites that come up after the first page of Google's search results. The more ads there are, the greater the competition and the more saturated the market is for those keywords.

The paid ads that we see may not be the same businesses we identified as our competition prior to doing the search. Our competitors may not be advertising with AdWords or our search query may not be triggering their ads at the time of our research. You may also find new businesses that you were not previously aware of that you will be competing against.

It's also possible that your keywords are applicable to different industries and areas of focus. In any case, the ads that consistently come up for your most important keywords in your target locations will be your competition in the online ad auction, and you'll need to better understand their strategies to make your own campaigns successful.

Perform the Google search, as previously explained, multiple times a day and on different days. Each auction is in real time and we'll likely see different results every time we search on Google. Your competitors' ads may or may not show when we perform a search based on their campaign settings, including during what days and times of the day they have set their campaigns to show, or what locations they have chosen to target via their campaigns.

The following are a couple of popular PPC spy tools that will allow us to do basic domain and keyword research for free:

For a more thorough list of keywords and ads that the various domains are using, you will need to purchase a subscription. However, you can do some basic research through the free look ups using one of the previously listed tools.

Use tools such as KeywordSpy and SpyFu to research competition as follows:

Third-party keyword spy tools analyze a domain's behavior over time on various search engines, including what keywords and ads websites are appearing on. Spend data is estimated based on assumptions that take into account ad position and how often ads are appearing for the various keywords. Data may not be available for all countries.

It's important to note that PPC keyword spy tools do not actually have access to other advertisers' accounts, and as such they are not 100 percent accurate. You can use them as a starting point in understanding your competition, but ultimately you should do your own keyword testing to determine what works best with your goals and budgets.