Entries Tagged 'Pay Per Click' ↓
April 28th, 2008 — Pay Per Click
I’ve been running a campaign for about a month now in an up and coming industry. The search volume is pretty low, but increasing, and I’ve been adding a few leads a week into my Aweber list.
Twice now I’ve logged into my Adwords account and noticed that my impressions had suddenly shot way up. Both times I went and checked under Campaign Settings and the Content network had been enabled, not by me I might add.
What is this Google Adwords ghost that keeps turning on the content network and dragging down my CTR?
February 4th, 2008 — Marketing Analysis, Pay Per Click
Does success followed by a question mark really mean success? I guess it depends on how you measure success.
The good news is I launched my first profitable pay per click campaign about a week ago, the bad news is I’m only up 3 bucks. Here is my earnings report from Neverblue Ads:
I don’t have very many keywords at all, this is really just a test to figure out how things work. I used what I learned from Zac’s Guide to PPC Marketing, Paul’s Uberaffiliate Marketing Guide, and the Super Affiliate Accelerator run by Amit from Super Affiliate Mindset to put together a basic campaign to learn the ropes.
Observations
I only have two adgroups A & B, and A brought in 5 out of the 6 conversions. Ad group A’s keyword statistics are shown following my observations:
The keyword with the highest number of impressions has brought in the highest # of conversions, which makes sense. However, its click through rate isn’t fantastic, I should split test more ads on that keyword to increase CTR.
The keyword with the third highest impressions has one of the poorest CTR’s, I need to optimize that ad as well. It has brought one conversion due to the high number of impressions, better ads should hopefully result in higher CTR -> conversions.
The ad group not shown, B, has more than double the cost per conversion as the adgroup below, A. If I had not been running adgroup B, expenses would be 29% lower and profits only 16% lower. Needless to say ad group B is not profitable.
Ad group B avg CTR is 1.9% while Ad group A avg CTR is only 1.35%. Yet the conversion rate for Ad group B is only 4% and the conversion rate for Ad group A is 10.20%. They both point to the same landing page, my ads for Ad group B must promise something other than the landing page offers. It may be that those keywords don’t convert as well for this offer. I’ll add more relevant ads to see if I can improve conversions.
CTR of 1.28% and up gives a Great quality score, anything less only has OK quality score.
The average position for ad group A is 4.4 and for ad group B is 2.1. I could consider dropping my current bid on some of the keywords by about 30% to lower my costs and see what effect it had on conversions. I’ll hold off on these changes until I’ve optimized my ads so I know which changes are actually having an effect.
So how am I going to improve my ad copy? Upon the recommendation of Amit, I bought the book, Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples and am part way through it now. I’ve picked up some great information, I’m going to use some of the formulas from the chapter on writing headlines to improve the ads I’m using.
January 7th, 2008 — Pay Per Click
Zac Johnson has done it again! His most popular article to date is the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing where he goes step by step through setting up a Google AdWords campaign to promote affiliate offers. Several months before I signed up for and went through Amit’s Super Affiliate Accelerator program I stepped through Zac’s guide to get to know AdWords.
Now he’s put together a great tutorial article on getting started with pay per click marketing on Microsoft AdCenter, the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing on Microsoft AdCenter. He even points you to a signup offer that can give you $50 to get started. Thanks Zac!
January 6th, 2008 — Finances, Information Products, Internet Marketing, Outsourcing, Pay Per Click, Time Management, affiliate marketing
Ever feel like you could make more money if you just had more time! That’s how I feel every day. December was tough with the holidays and long hours at my day job but I still managed to accomplish a few things.
Business Finances – I figured out my books for the business for 2007, happy to say it was a profit! One crazy thing, I just got my annual performance increase at my day job and my business earnings for 2007 were more than three times the amount of the increase. I can’t wait to get rid of this job so I can spend all my time growing my business! I still need to pay my estimated taxes for Q4 2007, due here in a week or so.
Affiliate Relationships – One of the things that Amit recommended was to build a good relationship with your affiliate manager. So I called up my affiliate manager at Never Blue Ads and had a productive first phone call. I got some insight into which campaigns to promote in my niche. One of the things she mentioned was that the Earnings Per Click numbers you see as you’re browsing campaigns factor in all different types of marketing, Web/Email/Search. When I told her my niche and that I was going to be promoting offers with Pay Per Click she gave me EPC numbers that were just from PPC traffic.
Pay Per Click Campaign – I used the techiques I learned from Amit’s Super Affilate Accelerator course to setup, upload, and launch an Adwords campaign for one of the offers my affiliate manager pointed out. I’m monitoring its progress now and will tweak as needed.
Information Products – I completed my first information product, Easy eBay Business. I’ve been working at it off and on for a while now so it was nice to get it finished. I haven’t begun promoting it yet, I’ll probably use an Adwords campaign once I have time to build one.
I also started exploring a partnership for an information product with one of my online buddies who is a subject matter expert in the niche. He’s going to write a free report to give away, I’ll build a landing page and create an Adwords campaign and we’ll see how much demand there is.
One of my business advisors and friends recently finished an information product that should see demand sky rocket due to a new government policy. I spent some time on some content promoting their product and will likely set up an Adwords campaign there as well.
Time Management – I got my FreshBooks account back up and running again. I set it up at the beginning of the year but didn’t use it much. My only New Year’s resolution at this point is to make better use of my time since I tend to try and work on too many things at once. I’m tracking everything in FreshBooks now and every two weeks or so I’ll go over how I’m spending my time.
I tried out Mechanical Turk to outsource some basic tasks to help get content on a new site for a niche I’ve been wanting to move into for some time. I listed the same task on both Mechanical Turk and eLance and so far the bids on Mechanical Turk have been much more reasonable and in line with the scope of the job.
Next Month – Not bad I guess for a busy month at work and the with holidays. I’m going to continue to balance my multitude of project for January, then revaluate with some numbers from FreshBooks at the end of the month to see which projects to put on hold and which to pursue.
December 21st, 2007 — Mailing List, Pay Per Click
Marketing expert Jay Abraham points out that there are 3 ways to grow any business: sell to more customers, increase the dollar value of each transaction, and increase the frequency of customer purchases. As I reviewed my latest Adwords stats I realized his advice could be applied to pay per click marketing.
1) Sell to more Customers
- Optimize Ad Position (Quality Score, Keyword Bid, Keyword Research)
- Increase Click Through Rate (Specific, Targeted, Enticing Ad Copy)
- Optimize Landing Page Conversions (Split Test & Tweak)
2) Increase the $ Value of each Transaction
- Choose Higher Margin Products/Industry
- Promote Multiple Offers
- Upsell
3) Increase the Frequency of Customer Purchases
I don’t know the statistics of capturing repeat buyers through PPC marketing but I’m guessing they’re pretty low. Once someone clicks through to your landing page, the best way to increase your chances of getting a recurring sale from them is to capture an email lead with a tool like Aweber. Learn the optimal ways to build a relationship with your leads and offer them products they want.
Business Growth
As Jay points out, if you can improve one of these factors you can grow your business in a linear fasion, improve a combination of them and you can grow it exponentially. Of course in PPC marketing each person landing on your sales page costs you money and you want to at least cover the cost of the click by making an affiliate sale. If you can find a way to make the sale and then upsell or capture a lead without effecting your conversions, you could potentially increase your earnings exponentially.
What I’m learning is that the trick to finding the method that works best is to measure and then test like crazy. Thanks to Jay for pointing out the business theory, now we just have to figure out how to apply it!
December 4th, 2007 — Lead Generation, Pay Per Click
I’m a cheapskate so I hate the thought of spending money on traffic for a one-time shot of making money. I decided to make my first foray into pay per click advertising with a landing page whose goal was to attract newsletter subscribers rather than just make one sale. The idea is that my initial PPC investment buys subscribers I can promote products to on a recurring basis over time.
Pay Per Click Setup
Since the concept of Affiliate Whispers is to learn and apply methods that other successful marketers use I leveraged the following resources when building a small pay per click campaign:
Thanks to those guys for putting together the great resources! Better yet they’re all free, with the exception of Super Affiliate Accelerator which I think is well worth the cost.
Landing Page
A simple Wordpress installation was perfect for hosting my landing page, associated articles, contact page, privacy policy, and about page. A free theme from Internet Marketing With Blogs gave me a great foundation for a sales page, I used Aweber to place a newsletter signup form above the fold and also at the end of the sales page.
I wrote my own copy, trying to take as many lessons as I could from CopyBlogger so we’ll see how that goes. Two theme appropriate images were used to help pull their eyes down the page and I stuck the first lead capture form close to the first image to help draw their eyes to it. One thing I debated was using eLance to create the articles for the site but ended up spending a few nights writing those myself as well.
Quality Score
Apparently the articles all inter-linked with the contact page, privacy policy, and about page did the trick for quality score. Thanks to Zac I knew how to check my quality score once I got my campaign loaded up and it was a green “Great”.
Domain Name
I’m not sure how great my domain name choice was. Since I’m not promoting a product on the sales page but rather an “end result” I tried to go with a name that would make people visualize that end goal. The thought is they’ll sign up for the newsletter with the intent of reaching that goal. It’s only a two word domain name with no dashes so it’s kind of brandable, if that’s a word.
The Offer
Who’s going to sign up for a newsletter without a little prompting right? I offer a niche specific free report for anyone that signs up. I also offer to point them to a bonus of a free product trial upon signup. I tried to work in some potential conversions right off the bat. Once they’ve confirmed their subscription they get access to the free report which is also a teaser for a Clickbank product and the free trial offers which are leads from Never Blue Ads.
Campaign Reflections
I just kicked off my Adwords campaign so we’ll see what my CTR, minimum bid, and newsletter signups turn out to be. Perhaps I tried to do too much for my first attempt at PPC marketing, I could have just tried Google Cash to get the hang of it, but Amit makes a good point when he discusses the research and patience required for a successful campaign.
It took me about two weeks of evenings after my day job to get the research done and the domain, articles, sales page, auto-responder, offers, and Adwords campaign setup. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, I learned a lot just going through the steps. I probably have more questions now than when I started; all part of the learning process.
Paying for Leads
As I setup my keyword bids, one thing I thought about was how it’s too bad you have to pay to learn. That’s one thing that I like about Jim Cockrum’s Silent Sales Machine, the prospect pays you (by buying something on eBay) to become a lead vs. you paying for a chance to market to them like with Adwords.
I guess one major thing that separates Adwords lead generation from eBay lead generation is the much larger volume that Adwords can drive, in addition to the fact you actually need to have your own product in order to generate the lead on eBay. We’ll see how my first test of PPC lead generation goes, stay tuned.
November 25th, 2007 — Pay Per Click
According to Ed Dale, you can now survey and market to your core audience for chump change with Facebook. In an audio recording with Yanik Silver, Ed raves about how you can target Facebook users in a very specific manner and gives some strategies for affiliate marketing on Facebook.
If I wasn’t in the middle of learning the ins and outs of Google Pay Per Click I’d rush over and jump into Facebook marketing tonight. I have to resist internet marketer ADD and focus on one thing at a time but I’ll be sure to checkout the marketing opportunities on Facebook very soon.
One thing Ed talks about are the differences between advertising with Google Adwords and on Facebook. Apparently there are some things you have to watch out for to avoid having your account shutdown. The first time I read about advertising on Facebook was from Paul Bourque who managed to get about 500 different accounts created and banned. Now two months later Ed Dale has had time to play around with advertising on Facebook and offers some good insights into it’s potential.