Pay Per Click Web Advertising

I wanted to touch a bit on some PPC lingo today. Everybody knows what pay per click is but not everyone knows how to make it work correctly. When you are dealing with pay per click web advertising, you have to take into account a few things. The first of them is your target market. Who are you trying to sell too? Do these people actually want what you are giving them?

When you are managing an Internet advertising campaign, you have to plan what you want before you get knee deep in bid costs. Pick the the keywords you are going to test, write your ad copy, and make sure to focus on tight knit ad-groups. Small, focused ad-groups always outperform their broader counterparts. I can think of one or two exceptions to this rule, where you would be advertising on cities, states, and counties, and you could use dynamic keyword insertion (cannot make 50,000 ad-groups in 1 campaign). But you get the idea.

The big three advertisers are of course Adwords, Yahoo, and Adcenter. However this presents an interesting scenario in light of the PPC industry. With the Yahoo/MSN deal going into effect by the year 2012, what are you going to do about your campaigns? Are you a big fan of Yahoo or Adcenter? The way I understand it, is that Adcenter will be managing the paid ads on Yahoo’s platform. So essentially we have two competing rivals instead of 3.

In my opinion, this not only makes the pay per click market more competitive, but it also streamlines the process. It is my guess that the cost per click will rise substantially on Adcenter as a result of this merger. In turn, it will also help newcomers because quite frankly, Adcenter is much easier to deal with then Yahoo’s paid advertising interface. Even if MSN only gets a tiny percentage of web traffic – I have found it to convert to leads and sales rather well – on par, if not better than Google. I didn’t see as many great results with Yahoo but this of course depends on the markets you are in.

The conversion ratio could potentially go down because of merging Adcenter into Yahoo’s search but on the flipside, it will allow users to reach a much bigger audience with less hassle. So one has to weight the negatives versus the positives. One thing that bugs me about Adcenter is the need to copy your adgroups and repost them, targeting them to a different country. They should really streamline that feature and allow you to choose the countries you want all from the same adgroup.

How Much Should I Pay Per Click?

When it comes to pay per click advertising, there is a lot that one needs to learn. When I first got started in the PPC game, I spent a lot of money on wasted keywords, ads, and campaigns to say the least. I remember one day I woke up and I had spent $300 on worthless keywords. I was shocked to say the least. Back then, $300 was the mother-load. It was that simple fact that put me off from pay per click for a while.

Getting back into it took some time, but I gradually learned to enjoy it more and more. I think PPC is an art that definately takes time to master. Browsing around Internet forums from time to time, I see a lot of people asking questions about bid prices and CTR. It’s amazing how obessive this can be. Almost as bad as PageRank in my opinion. Anyways, how much should I pay per click? This is the exact question you should be asking yourself when you setup a new campaign or adgroup.

The “formula” for this is to actually take your EPS (earnings per sale) and divide that in half. Then take that number and divide by 100. So let’s say you earn $50 per sale. The formula would be:

• $50/2=$25
• $25/100=$0.25

Thus, if you are making $50 dollars per sale, you should be looking to spend .25 – .30 cents per click, on your key-phrases. Remember to go long tail, and to also go horizontally in your advertising. Super affiliates separate themselves from the noobs in this very tactic. Look to expand your campaigns instead of just digging for the highest searched keywords. You will start to see your profits grow once you master this technique.

The 1 Big Secret of Pay Per Click You Cannot Live Without

The internet is a cash machine, no joke. The problem with the mindset of most folks though, is that this cash machine should operate like an ATM. It’s a bit shocking to “us” marketers who have “been there and done that”. If there was one thing I could say about the internet, is that it most certainly does NOT throw out cash like an ATM (when you are getting started).

So how does one get over the hurdle of this withdrawal limit? Easy. It’s something known as a virtue. It’s the “P” word. Can you guess it? OK I’ll just tell you – it’s patience. If you can sustain an online business AND have patience – you are off to the races. This is especially true in the pay per click industry and I’ll touch on that in a minute. It is also true in many other areas of life.

You see, the 1 big secret of pay per click is that even though it is instant (and yes that’s great) – testing takes time. Sure, you put up your ads and they are live within the half hour (95% of the time) but what about the rest of the process? Surely you don’t base your business on that alone?

A lot of people become discouraged with their pay per click efforts mainly because they lose money. It’s a given fact that most people will lose money when they try to advertise. The reason? Well, there are lots of reasons on that one. The two biggies are guidance and patience in my opinion.

Pay per click is an art of marketing. It takes TIME to figure out what works in regards to the combination of keywords/landing pages/ etc… You can’t just throw in the towel after 4 days of advertising, 40 clicks, and no sales. It happens every day, all day long, believe me. Don’t you want to stand out from the crowd? Give your business TIME to grow but do it slowly.

Building an online business slowly is the way to go. Use that motivation you have but learn to keep it bottled up and just let it out a bit each day. If you are advertising for golf clubs, don’t go bidding on the key-phrase “golf clubs”. You will be left wondering why you lost $300 and didn’t even make a sale. Go small and go hard.

Go for the brands, the types of clubs, the style, the material, this is the “stuff” that will bring you visitors. When people are looking to buy a car, they don’t search the yellowpages for “wheels”. They search for local dealers, brands, etc…

The answer then, is that patience and targeting your market is the winning combo to this so called “ppc” game.

What Do You Think Of The New Google Adwords (beta) Interface?

Well what do you think? I personally find that the new interface takes a bit of getting used to. I found my eyes wandering around the page for a bit when the new layout was first loaded, and I got a bit “dizzy” looking at all the keywords in one slot. After some time though it seems to be a decent “upgrade” over the previous campaign management screens.

One of my favorite new features is the fact that you can see your click thru rate history in a graph format. Come on now, we all love graphs and charts – don’t you? This actually goes into more detail than one might think. By looking at your CTR history, you are able to get an eagle eye view of your ad copy’s performance. This in turn will allow you to adjust your sales promotions accordingly. Remember, when it comes to AdWords and PPC, it’s all about testing and more testing. Try to improve on your previous adcopy and get a better ROI.

While the features of seeing all of your adgroups and keywords in one panel is nice, I still prefer to view them in a single fashion, so I’m glad they included an option to just view by singular campaign. I just find it easier to look at a few groups rather than scrolling through hundreds or thousands.

One other thing – the indented “tree” menu is great! It is much better than the old layout and I think that 90% of Adwords advertisers would agree. Based on what I have seen so far, the switch seems to be moving towards an “eagle eye” view of everything. Faster, easier, more streamlined clicking is where it’s all going…

Managing Pay Per Click Keywords

When it comes to search engine marketing and paid advertising, a lot of people have trouble managing pay per click keywords. For one reason or another, many people seem to fall into a certain school of thought. In beginners especially, this way of thinking leads people to believe that pay per click advertising is one giant mystery. It doesn’t have to be. When you are first getting started with pay per click marketing, you should be focusing your efforts on niche markets and niche adgroups. If you don’t know what those are, you really have a lot of reading to do regarding paid advertising, before you start throwing money down the tubes.

The way you go about managing your pay per click keywords, is to organize the words you are advertising on into appropriate groups. These groups are known as adgroups. Within each adgroup you will have a set of words that is somewhat related. Let’s take for example the dog training market. Now if you wanted to advertise on dog barking keywords and dog biting keywords, you should put all of the phrases that contain the word biting, into the biting adgroup. Next, all of the phrases that contain the word barking, into the barking adgroup.

The reason for this is quite simple. When designing your landing pages to send the visitors too, you want your page to be as relevant as possible. Now, the bigger your adgroup becomes, the less possible it is for your landing page to be relevant to that user. If you were only using one landing page to send all of your visitor traffic through from dog barking, to biting, whining, scratching, etc… it wouldn’t be nearly be as targeted as if you were to send them each to their own landing page. By specific targeting, you could talk about the one problem those people were having.

Managing pay per click keywords is all about organization and theme relevance. This in turn will get you a higher return on your investment, a lower cost per click on your advertising, and a better business overall. If sales do not increase after you have grouped your keyphrases accordingly, then you need to begin looking at other factors. Is the design of your website adequate? What about the words you are advertising on?

Are the words you are advertising on relevant to your topic? Just because you have appropriately categorized your particular keyphrases, doens’t mean you will make money. You need to make sure those words will actually produce sales. Are they phrases where people are looking to purchase? Do they have buyer intent? These are the things you should be looking for when creating your pay per click campaigns.

Speed PPC

So what can Speed PPC do for you and why should you invest in it? Let’s get something straight here. I do NOT recommend Speed PPC if you are new to online marketing. This is a tool for advanced marketers only. You have plenty of other things to worry about when first getting started online. This software has a big learning curve and is more useful for pay per click campaigns that involve a large set of seed and expansion words. If you don’t know what those mean, then this isn’t for you.

This ppc software is undoubtedly the best thing to come along since sliced bread. PPC management is extremely difficult for the average user. It gets even more complicated once you start to have many campaigns and thousands of keywords. I know this because it can be difficult for me at times as well. So what is one to do?

Well this program is a “push button” program, but it still takes a little bit of work to setup. You cannot just turn on Speed PPC, hit a button, and have a full fledged campaign with 30,000 keywords. You have to input the data you want first and set up a landing page as well as input your campaign details, but once that is set up it save you many hours of work.

Jay Stockwell put together a great piece of software here and it will certainly change the way pay per click is conducted. I think the main advantage of using this software is the fact that it can give you thousands of highly targeted adgroups. It is a time saver to say the least. It can also be thought of as a money saver. Want to know why? If you have tight-knit adgroups, this increases your quality score with Google, thereby reducing your adspend. As you know already, quality score is the one thing you do not want to screw around with when it comes to pay per click marketing. Your quality score is your livelihood.

As an advertiser, one of the most important things you need to be aware of is relevancy. You need to make sure that your landing page is specifically targeted to the keyword in which the user searched for. Speed PPC dynamically matches your landing pages with the keywords. This is a win-win situation. Imagine a campaign of 20,000 keywords, all with minimum bids and a great quality score. Can you scream profit?

The software wouldn’t be practical for small campaigns. I suggest you only get the software if you want to start a campaign that has over 500 keywords. It excels in large quantities because it decreases the amount of time it takes to put it altogether. Another reason for the software to be used is if you wish to utilize the power of long-tail keywords. Let’s face it, most keywords are long tail. There are only a limited number of topics in the world, but the amount of words used to search each one of these topics is mind bending. Interested at all? For more information, click here.