I have been gone for awhile working on the launch of my new product, Well I would like to allow everyone to view a small part of my 270+ page E-Textbook on Internet Marketing. This is Chapter 7. Recently I have been getting lots of emails bascially saying that I need to post more information so here we go.
Chapter7: Pay Per Click Short cuts
What you will find in this chapter
» The technical stuff about PPC and why you should consider it.
» Simple methods to use with PPC that will increase your earnings.
» How to rack up traffic to your website from your PPC campaign.
A) PPC in a Snap
This is a broad subject so before we jump into it lets have an understanding of the terminology.
Click fraud: Occurs in PPC (pay per click) advertising when a person or a computer program deliberately clicks on ads for the attention of delivering a low-blow charge to the advertiser. This is actually considered a felony in a lot of jurisdictions. Who would do such a thing? Who else. Most likely the competitor of the advertiser. When the competitor clicks on the ads they are not benefiting from it directly, but they are causing the advertiser to lose their money in advertising, eliminating competition. Click frauds is easy to spot, if its occurring from one geographic area than that could raise some suspicion. However, if someone is using a program than it could be a little harder. It’s also hard to prove in court what the person’s attention was.
Content-placement ads: A PPC ad on the content page as opposed to the search results page. Con also be referred as contextual advertising.
Conversion rate: The amount of people that carries out a particular act. Either people that visit your site and purchase something from you, or provide lead information.
Conversion ratio: The mathematical computation of how well you “cover” visitors. If you get 1 person out of 100 visitors to click on your ads you have a 1:100 (1 percent) conversion ratio. If one out of 200 visitors purchase something you have a 1:200 (0.5 percent) percent conversion ratio. If you don’t calculate your conversion ratio, you can’t tell if you’re winning or losing this advertising battle.
CPA: Acronym for Cost Per Acquisition (not certified public accountant).
CPM: Acronym for Cost per thousand impression
CTR: Acronym for Click through rate. Measures the number of people that seeks out a particular ad and clicks on it.
For example, if your ad was delivered 200 times, and three people click on it. The equation looks like this: 3/200=.015 .015*100=1.5. Your clickthrough rate=1.5%
1. Cost per Sale: How much you have to spend on advertising to generate a sale. If you spend $200 dollars on advertising, and made one $50 dollar sale that that’s not good, re-evaluate your advertising methods.
• Geo-targeting: Ads targeted for geographic purposes.
• Impression: An ad placement on a webpage.
• Keyword matching: Methods for matching keywords that are associated with your ads with the words people place in the search engines.
• Landing page: The page visitors come to after clicking an ad.
• Negative match: A method in picking keywords, except that this keyword is never matched with the associated ads.
• Organic search results: Search results that are not paid for; comes up when you do a regular search.
• Pay per call: Similar to PPC, except the advertiser pays when a visitor makes a call.
• Phrase match: A keyword matching system in which an ad is matched with the same exact keyword phrase, give or take a few words.
• PPA: Acronym for Pay Per Action. An advertising method in which the advertiser pays after a particular action is done, such as a sale, or after someone filled out an e-mail form.
• PPC (Pay Per Click): An advertising method in which the advertiser pays after someone clicks an ad.
• RDI: An acronym for return on investment and is extremely important for the advertiser to calculate. It means how much money you make after a particular advertising campaign.
• SEM: An acronym for search engine marketing, and are strategies that are for generating traffic and sales through search engines.
SERP: An acronym for search engine results page. It’s the page that search engines show after you search.
The 3 PPC Gurus
Google Adwords: www.Adwords.com
Yahoo! Search Marketing: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
MSN Keywords: http://advertising.msn.com/microsoft-adcenter/how-adcenter-works
Google and Yahoo! And some various other search engine systems have content-placement (contextual) ads.
Quigo http://www.quigo.com/adsonarexchange.htm
adMarketPlace: https://www.admarketplace.net/kiwisearch/servlet/kiwisearch
Health Central Direct (formerly known as GoText): http://www.healthcentraldirect.com/
Kontera http://www.kontera.com/
Vibrant Media: http://www.vibrantmedia.com/site2005/index.html?www.vibrantmedia.com
More PPC systems (not as popular)
Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com/
Mamma http://www.mamma.com/
LookSmart http://search.looksmart.com/
PageSeeker http://www.pageseeker.com/
BlowSearch http://www.blowsearch.com/
ePilot http://www.epilot.com/
Turbo10 http://turbo10.com/
Pay per Click, for the strong and the courageous
From many marketers I heard a lot of hype, and a lot of let downs about PPC advertising. I was scared to try it when I thought to myself, “hey someone has to be making money with it or less it wouldn’t still be there.” PPC is so much more effective than the classic banner advertising. I placed banners on countless of websites and forums and didn’t experience any success at all. (Maybe it was because my ads were dull and not catchy?) You must understand some basic sociological characteristics of people. When people are on forums they are discussion a topic and are just chilling. If you see a banner advertisement on a forum it’s like getting interrupted at your dinner time with a telemarketer calling in at a inappropriate time, or if a salesman ringing your doorbell. It’s annoying! At least with pay per click people are searching for something and you may just have what they are looking for. With PPC you are not paying for a guarantee that you will make money, if that was the case everybody will be doing it. I will tell you the truth. There are businesses losing lots of money with this. You are paying for a result, a “click of a chance” that someone will buy what you’re selling. The good news is you pay nothing if no one clicks.
B) Here how it works
“You” the advertiser join a PPC search engine program and load up you account with dinero. Some companies place MAD money in PPC per month, some in the trillions! Just kidding some in the millions though.
You make a text ad (usually small) sometimes you can include an image, but that’s a different story.
You place the keywords in which you think best fits your ads.
You specify how much you can afford for someone to click on your ad.
Hopefully someone comes to the search engine, types in one or more of your keywords and search.
Search engines find ads relating to that keyword and place them on the results page.
Searcher clicks on the ad, and is taken to your website.
That’s pretty much the basics, but there is a lot to learn. I would not recommend content-match ads to start out with. No one is typing in a search; the ads appear when a page is opened.
Bidding
PPC ads can vary from little to a lot. On the 3 big ones you can pay from a minimum of 1-10 cents per click to $10-$200 or possibly more depending on the keywords.
Highest Bidder 35 cents
#2 Bidder 20 cents
#3 Bidder 18 cents
#4 Bidder 17 cents
#5 Bidder 15 cents
In any auction bidders are always trying to beat everyone else, so the bidders can fluctuate greatly. When you bid on a keyword you are basically saying this is how much I’m willing to pay if someone clicks on my ad. If you bid $20 on an ad, and someone clicks on your ad FIVE times that that means you are paying $100 bucks, so make sure that it’s really worth it. It’s a tad bit different from online auctions such as EBay. If the top bidder bids 25 dollars for an item and wins that means that they will pay $25 plus shipping. However, if the top bidder in a PPC campaign bids $25.00 and the #2 bidder bids $15.00 while the highest bidder pays $15.01 per click, not $25.00. But wait, if the #2 bidder takes the top position than they will pay $25.01 per click.
This is the common scenario for the major pay per click search engines. The smaller search engines may have a different scenario. I will always recommend starting out in the middle when bidding; it’s a lot more risk if you’re the number one guy to beat. PPC search engines are good because you have the power my friend. With them you can:
It’s interesting to note that Yahoo! sometimes mix PPC advertisements in their organic search results without informing the person!
Set the max you’re willing to pay out of your virtual wallet.
Can specify how much you’re willing to spend on your ads per day, week, or month.
Decide which keyword or words can trigger the ad-you can pick one or in the thousands.
Change the copy-you can change what the words of the ad say anytime.
Specify the geography-you can specify if you want the ad to appear in NY, California, Florida, or Texas.
Google Adwords is a little more technical but they are my favorite PPC campaign. It is not a guarantee that the person with the most money gets the top position. The position is indicated on how well the ad performs, or basically how many times your ad gets clicked. That’s why it’s crucial to get the most out of the text that you place in your ad. The more your ads get clicked the more it gets a charged up the search engines, even-though you can be paying less per click.
PPC gives you a lot of options. It allows you to control, manipulate, and test your options, everything a savvy Internet marketer will need. It also allows you to track the keywords the people used to get to you. Sometimes you will be completely shocked and wonder how the heck they ended up at your website with those keywords, but there is never a set in stone answer.
PPC might work and it might not, but if it doesn’t work, you better find out why and fix it! ASAP.
PPC is a lot quicker to pick up than search engine optimization.
PPC SHOULD NOT be your only advertising medium, it should be one part. Most entrepreneurs are trying to build multiple streams of income, so why can’t they apply the same thing to their advertising?
The Smaller PPC
Please take advantage of the smaller PPC campaigns because they are a lot cheaper. Of course the disadvantages is that it’s a lot smaller so you will be receiving a lot less traffic, but a lot of tiny things can add up to one big bang!
The best content match system in my humble opinion is Quigo. They place ads on popular sites such as http://www.cars.com and http://www.usatoday.com/.
Something else to consider for contextual ads is marketadplace: https://www.admarketplace.net
PPC and EBay
If you’re big on selling on EBay than you can place PPC ads throughout the site as well, both text and images. Check out the website for more details. https://ebay.admarketplace.net/ebay/servlet/ebay. Most EBay keywords are intended to get traffic to an EBay store or listing, not really a website outside the system.
C) Keywords
Don’t jump into a panic and forget to put much time into your keywords. In my opinion keywords and a really catchy ad are the most important in PPC advertising. Keyword picking is a science in itself.
Why you should analyze Keywords?
Understanding keywords can help you discover keywords that other advertisers may miss, allowing you to get the biggest bang for your penny, nickel, dime, quarter, or buck.
You can increase more visitors to your website by working with a variety of keywords and then filtering which ones don’t concert well. Just think of it this way. If you new that for every quarter you spend on advertising you get one dollar back, would you keep using that method? Of course, so you should do the same for your keywords. Make a huge list of keywords, I say at least 75 and test them one by one. Yes, this is very tedious but you will find out how to get the best bang for your buck.
You can avoid ambiguous keywords because some terms are associated with different meanings, even in the United Sates. In some parts of the United States people may use “pop” and others may use “soda,” and others may just use soft drink. What’s the difference? Exactly, nothing. They all are basically synonyms so I will highly advise having a thesaurus out. If you don’t have a physical one, you can always go to this free website here:
http://thesaurus.reference.com/
Here’s another helpful tool: Misspelled keywords generator:
http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/docs/misspell.php
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://searchenginez.com/keywords.html
http://search.rightnow4you.com/
http://googspy.com/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.ultrakeyword.com/ (Handy tool for getting alternative meanings for keywords)
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
Imagine if you are the searcher
Never think like yourself, think like your potential customer. If you were your customer-what would you type into a search engine if you were looking for something?
Some extra things to remember about Keywords
Some keywords are seasonal, if you are using Wordtracker than keep in mind that it only tracks the last 130 days, it may not represent a full year. Some people will search heater in the winter, and fan or air conditioner in the summer. Some can also be influenced by Media such as something happening in Hollywood such as celebrity gossip for one.
D) You got to make them look
When you are using any of the major three PPC campaigns you get a small amount of space to write on so you have to make every single word count. You have to stand out from everyone else, and a good way to do that is stir up emotions, a classic technique that was used in tragedies, except we can play with it a little more. Get people to become interested or disturbed by your ad and you will get a higher click through rate as odd as this sound. Beat the system, and figure out what you can say that won’t be breaking the rules. Be vulgar if you have to! Grab your prospect customer from your computer and make them click and read your salesletter.
Note, this is for Adwords. Know all the rules and bend them.
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html
Chapter review
PPC search marketing is something an individual should add when releasing a new product. The PPC system that is prefer in this book is known as Google adwords. Rather then giving the top ad to the individual with the most money, Goggle adwords award those who ads are clicked on most frequently. Besides for using great copywriting to make your ad appear different, an individual should spend a lot of time testing which keywords would pull better results and then stick with those keywords.
