Today we are going to dive into the mother of paid traffic, Pay-Per-Click. (PPC)

MAKING PPC PROFITABLE

A profitable PPC campaign requires:

1. Bidding on the right keyword terms

2. High conversions from impressions to clicks

3. Create several targeted ad listings

4. Create several targeted landing pages

5. Secure the lowest possible per-click cost

6. Convert PPC traffic into profitable sales

HOW PPC ADVERTISING WORKS: PPC for Artists, Content Creators, and Musicians

Advertisers bid on keywords they’d like to display for

Advertisements are triggered to display when user searches keyword

You pay only when a customer clicks on your listing

Benefits include:

• Instant traffic and possibly instant revenue

• Ability to highly target  by geography, by theme, by language, and more

• Cost -effectiveness and ability to control spending

• Instantaneous results / feedback

• Ideal vehicle for testing product names, pricing, landing pages and more with a small ad spend and good analytics

Alright, let’s look a bit closer at how PPC advertising actually works to make sure we’re all on the same page.

When you create a campaign, you’re essentially bidding on specific keywords you’d like to display a listing for. This fast tracks your website guaranteeing instant placement at the top of Google or other major search engines. The only difference between this and regular, organic listings is you’re paying a fee every time a user clicks on your listing.  Your listings appear at the top, orange-shaded portion of the search results and along the right-side where it says “Sponsored Links.”

Your listings are then triggered to display when an internet user searches your keyword phrase or one almost exactly like it.

You are not charged when your ad is displayed. This is called an impression. You are only charged when the user actually clicks on your link and goes to your website.

PPC can be an excellent addition to your search marketing activities because it offers many benefits.

You can start displaying at the top of Google for your keywords in less than two hours

You can easily target your audience geographically with Google’s local search, or thematically by creating an ad group for each keyword or keyword group. This means that your listing’s ad title and call to action are specific to your keyword or the keyword group’s theme, increasing conversion to clicks and sales

You can also target your audience by country, by location, and by language.

You can even control your maximum bid for each keyword, list keyword phrases you do NOT want to show up for, because their conversion to clicks or sales is too low, and you can control your total ad spend per day.

One incredible benefit of PPC that businesses rarely leverage is the ability to test product names, offer terms, buyer hot-buttons, pricing, landing pages, and more by driving limited traffic to your website and tracking results. Google allows you to split test several ads and you can easily create numerous ad groups that link to variations of your landing page on your site. It lets you see exactly what elements perform best. This generates instantaneous results and feedback to make integral business decisions that are now based on your market’s response and solid metrics rather than on guesswork or on whim. For instance, perhaps you’re an author who has written a book about natural medicine. Don’t assume which book title will sell the best. Test it with PPC. Come up with at least three titles and make them the title of your various ad listings. Keep everything else the same – the ad content, the landing page, keywords etc. Then tell google to evenly display each ad variation – this will tell it to rotate your ads and it will record which ad converts to clicks the best. Then you can use its further analytics tool to determine which ad converts into the most sales if you like (you would do this by creating identical landing pages at different URLs on your site and making note of which URL is connected to which ad. If you have 10% more sales for your third landing page, and all elements are identical except the ad title of your sponsored listing, then you know that title should be the title of your book.

Word of caution: A profitable PPC campaign requires a lot more than doing the keyword research, throwing up some keyword terms and ads, and watching the money roll in. Adwords advertising is a fine science, just like SEO. To make pay per click advertising profitable, you need to:

Choose the right keyword terms

Ensure high conversion from impressions – the amount of times your ad displays - to actual clicks on your ad to your site. This is called click-through ratio

Create several ad listings targeted to specific keywords or keyword groups – this dramatically improves your click-through ratio

Create a targeted landing page for each keyword or keyword group to ensure that the information a visitor is looking for is provided and all content is geared towards your visitor’s mind frame based on the keyword used by that visitor in his search.

All this is to ensure you secure the lowest possible per-click cost

Then you need to convert your incoming PPC traffic into sales so that your total PPC cost per buyer is well below your revenue per buyer

HOW  TO  ENSURE  PROFITABLE  ADS

Research the best keywords and identify the cost-per-click for those keywords.

Organize your campaign into tightly targeted ad groups.

Create a unique landing page for each ad group.

Split test at least three ad variations per ad group

Monitor your click-through ratio.

Track which keywords result in clicks AND sales or leads.

PPC’s many benefits can also be very hazardous to your company’s health. 99% of businesses working with PPC have campaigns with very high costs per click, low click through ratios, and poorly targeted ads and keywords. It’s imperative that you follow the guidelines listed here for the sake of your company’s profits and your sponsored advertising.

First of all, use Google’s keyword tool to research the best keywords and get a feel for the cost-per-click for those keywords.

Organize your campaign into tightly targeted Ad Groups. Each ad group should be dedicated to a single keyword theme or even a single keyword.

Create a unique landing page for each ad group. You’ll place its URL into the ad so that all clicks for that ad group go to your targeted landing page.

Split test at least three ad variations per ad group, over time, to increase conversions

Closely monitor your click-through ratio.  Do it DAILY. Especially if you are receiving a lot of impressions every day across all keywords in your campaign. This is one of the single, most important factors contributing to your company’s profit or debt. If you get hundreds of impressions for a particular keyword or ad group, and your click-through ratio is very low, then your cost-per-click will rise, your listing position will drop, and your overall campaign will be far less profitable and possibly spend more than it makes. When you find keywords or entire ad groups that perform far below the other keywords and ad groups in your campaign, delete them. That way, you don’t waste impressions on them and lower your campaign’s overall click-through ratio. Over time, this will increase your campaign’s profitability dramatically.

Track which of your keywords are resulting in the most clicks to your site. These are the keywords you want to focus on and budget for.  The more time you spend daily on a highly clicked keyword the more clicks and hence traffic you’ll get… However, that’s not the best way to ensure a profitable PPC campaign. It helps, and at the least, you can and should do exactly that. But the secret to explosively profitable campaigns is to use Google Analytics or another tracking program to track which keyword results in a purchase or email capture. This is typically achieved by adding a bit of code to your website’s landing page and, or thank you page confirming the purchase or email capture. As we discussed earlier, you may have a keyword that drives hundreds of visitors to your site each day. But you’ll find that other less searched terms convert better. So instead of wasting your ad budget on high-traffic keywords that don’t convert, focus on the money terms that make sales – lowering your overall cost and increasing your revenue at the same time.

The bottom line is that pay-per-click is a definite asset to your business. But ONLY if you do it right. And doing it right isn’t always easy. If you choose to pursue PPC, we recommend that you do further research and get a solid grasp of what you’re doing. Having a good analytic eye for data will also help immensely.

PPC is such a powerful, but difficult strategy to master, so let’s discuss briefly how to outsource it to an expert. We’ll talk about outsourcing as a whole at the end of the day.  PPC is particularly important, and many PPC vendors can easily waste your money.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT VENDOR

Insist on these requirements:

• Keyword research must be approved by you

• Each ad group needs to go to a relevant, targeted landing page

• At least two or three well-written, keyword-targeted ads per ad group

• Daily monitoring of campaign statistics during the first month

• Test and track conversions to leads and sales

Many PPC vendors will promise to “manage and optimize” your campaign. What does that mean? We hear time and again that these firms or experts promise the world only to deliver loosely targeted terms and poorly written ads. To add insult to injury, they simply go with the initial cost per click for each keyword without trying to reduce cost or increase listing position. They do not monitor their campaigns daily or pay attention to click-through ratio to delete or pause keywords that don’t perform. Almost none of them consider tracking keywords that result in sales and leads, and few take the trouble to create targeted ad campaigns and relevant landing pages.

Yet these are all absolutely ESSENTIAL to your campaign and its profitability.  Do not let any of these requirements go unfulfilled.  Insist on them!

First, you want to review the keyword list they choose for your campaign.  Ask to see all ad groups and their keywords before the campaign is activated. Ensure that each ad group is tightly targeted to a specific topic or theme. For example, if you’re promoting widgets, and you offer three different colors and five different sizes, you’ll likely want to see nine ad groups: one for each color, one for each size, and one for general widget terms.

Each ad group should direct to a unique landing page on your website that is written specifically for that theme or topic. If an ad group is about red widgets, your landing page should talk about the benefits of your red widgets and why buying them is a great decision.

You’ll also want to see that each ad group has a well written ad with the main keyword in the title and description, and hopefully in the URL of the landing page. What would be your main keyword? An ad group on red widgets would have several terms that all have “red widgets” as part of the keyword phrase. Your ad for that group should have “red widgets” in the title and also in the description. The more secondary terms you can get the better. So if you have terms that include “red widget tips”, “red widget discount” etc., try to mention “tips” and “discount” in your title or description as well.

Additionally, make sure your expert is testing at least two ad versions for each ad group at any given time, and that they are set up to rotate evenly throughout the day. Don’t let them select the option to show the better performing ad more often as this will skew results. You want each ad to have equal face-time so you can see which one pulls more clicks and more sales. Once your expert identifies the better pulling ad, they should then create two or more variations of that ad to test different headlines, different description copy, and perhaps different landing page elements. This will happen steadily over time and allow you to consistently improve your campaign’s profitability into a finely honed advertising channel.

Demand that your expert monitor and analyze your campaign on a daily basis. The only time this would not apply is if you happen to have such a tightly focused niche or industry that you receive very little daily traffic. At the least, though, they should monitor your campaign every couple of days.

This is most important in the first month or two. The only time you should allow your expert to slack off daily monitoring is when the campaign is finally optimized and profitable. How will you know this?

The easiest way to tell is if your expert has paused or deleted all keywords or ad groups that had a significantly lower click-through ratio compared to the rest of your campaign. You should have seen a steady decline in your cost-per-click and hopefully have more click throughs.

Your daily budget should be well below your daily sales revenue or, at the very least, your monthly average should be significantly lower than monthly revenue. However, if you only have a 10% profit margin, don’t assume that you have a well optimized campaign because you’re making money. Push for 20%. If it’s not possible after doing everything discussed above, that’s fine. But you should test that and find out.

Lastly, you must demand that your expert track your keywords’ effectiveness all the way to point of sale or lead capture. As we mentioned before, it’s not enough to know which keywords get the most traffic. You’re doing this to make money, not to drive meaningless traffic. So the only metric you’re concerned about is amount of revenue and profit generated from a particular keyword. Make sure that the bulk of your budget is put towards those high-profit keywords and taken away from keywords that generate a lot of clicks but generate few sales or leads.

Reverse Funnel

▼ ❑ group keywords into campaigns and adgroups that

• ❑ are most expensive

▼ ❑ golden keywords

• ❑ Buy

• ❑ Model Numbers

• ❑ Purchase

• ❑ Online

• ❑ Selling

• ❑ Coupon Code

• ❑ have the greatest margin return

• ❑ Put them at the top

• ❑ most expensive terms : X Keyword

• ❑ highest return terms : X Keyword

•❑

▼ ❑ Golden keywords

• ❑ Buy

• ❑ Model Numbers

• ❑ Purchase

• ❑ Online

• ❑ Selling

• ❑ Coupon Code

▼ ❑ Silver keywords

• ❑ Review

• ❑ Best

• ❑ Cheapest

• ❑ Recommended

• ❑ Recommendation

•❑

▼❑

▼ ❑ Copy-Based Groupings

• ❑ Combine keywords based on searcher-similarity

• ❑ Quality Scores -- > rule

•❑

▼ ❑ Tools

• ❑ adwords editor

• ❑ adwords reports

• ❑ adwords/analytics tiein

• ❑ adwords account team

▼ ❑ Questions:

• ❑ do you have any method or tool for organizing keywords by priority, or do you just use excel/etc.

• ❑ is it bad ethics to advertise to very niche specific markets for testing purposes prior to product launch - information in particular

• ❑ java script redirect for video/multimedia eCourse