Archive for the ‘PPC Marketing’ Category:
This is the third post of the series “how to increase your search ad CTR”. The technique I’m going talk about in this post applies BOTH for search and content ads. I’m going start by showing these two ads first.
Men Luxury Fashion Trend
Save 50-75% on High End Men Sweaters
100% Authentic Stylish Luxury Wear
VS.
Men Sweaters
Classic Sweaters and Accessories.
Shop Our Wide Selection Now!
I ran a search on Google with the key phrase “men sweaters sale” and saw the two ads you see above with bunch of other ads. The two ads you see above are totally different from each other. How?
Simple. The 2nd ad only tells me they got a bunch of sweaters whereas the first ad tells me they have a heavy sale on men’s sweaters (more interesting) . Now, if you were looking to buy men’s sweaters online, which one of the ad would you have clicked on? Exactly! The first one is more appealing because a buyer’s interest is to save money, so the numbers in the first ad not only attracted our attention but also told us we can save between 50-75% there, which is exactly what anyone with the buying mode would be interested in.
Furthermore, the first ad is using numbers and % sign to gain advantage by not only attracting our attention but also giving us incentive (sale) to click on the ad.
Using digits, symbols and signs in search ads
We now know that, anything other than normal text is going make the ad more stand out. We’re only allowed to use certain symbols, signs and characters in our ads. One of them is the $ sign and the % sign. Using these wisely will definitely increase your CTR.
How do I effectively use numbers and signs in my ads?
You should definitely not clutter your ads with bunch of digits and dollar signs. Use them once or twice (I only recommend once) and use them wisely. Check out the example below to get an idea of a good ad.
Buy Men Dress Shoes
We Have 45,700+ Men’s Shoes.
Men Dress Shoes on Sale!
The 2nd one is even better. (This was an Amazon ad but I tweaked it a bit to make it look for appealing).
Buy Men Dress Shoes
4000+ Brands at up to 40% off.
Free Shipping on Men’s Shoes!
Ad click through ratio can make a world of difference in your overall revenue and profits. Today I’m gonna show you a trick that I’ve used in the past to improve my ads click through rate.
Lets use an example
Imagine you’re promoting an ebook that teaches people how to effectively use adwords system for their business. Now, you may have 100s of keywords split into dozens of ad groups.
Side Note: Remember, to get a good quality score on search network, it’s important to split your keywords into targeted ad groups. This applies to both Adwords and YSM.
Say one of those ad group is called “adwords guide” and you have the following set of keywords in this ad group.
[adwords guide]
“adwords guide”
adwords guide
[google adwords guide]
“google adwords guide”
google adwords guide
Tip: Yes, I normally add all match types of the the same keyword in the ad group. I do this to test the keywords. I pause the ones that don’t perform well after a few days of testing.
Now compare the two following ads for this ad group. Notice the differences?
Your Copy:
Google Adwords Guide
Adwords Secrets Guide Revealed.
Double Your Revenue In Just Days!
My Copy:
Google Adwords Guide
Learn Adwords Secrets in Minutes.
#1 Selling Google Adwords Guide!
Which ad caught your attention? Certainly the 2nd one, right. Not necessarily for it’s language and tone but for the choice of keywords used and how the keywords were placed in the ad.
Why 2nd ad gets higher CTR:
1. Keyword presence
Our keyword adwords guide or google adwords guide appears in the 2nd line at the end. Having the keywords at the bottom line in this way has a higher chance of catching user’s attention.
2. Higher visibility
Notice the number of bold keywords between ad #1 and ad #2. Ads with more bold text are usually more noticeable. In the 2nd ad we have bold text in all three lines of the text ad. It creates higher visibility for our ad.
3. Better quality score
Having the search keywords in the ads results in higher quality score. With better quality and competitive bids, your ads will appear higher in rank, resulting in more clicks and higher CTR.
This trick I have used in almost all of my campaigns so far ever since I first discovered it accidentally. First I noticed my ad started getting higher CTR. Then I figured out what I did to get that and I saw my ad was using this technique.
I can’t make any guarantees that this will have either good or bad affect on your ad CTR. There are lots of variables here for an ad to succeed or fail. It depends on the niche, keywords, demographics, age, user’s mind set and so on. But it never hurts to try this. I think, it will definitely have some positive effect as I’ve experience myself. Good luck!
-G
So you start a new campaign and you wonder how much I need to start my bids at in order to profit from it? Without putting too much thought into it, you just take an educated guess and start bidding without knowing if it’s too much or too little. Well, I usually bid randomly too when starting out but recently I sat down and came up with a way of determining how much my initial bid should be for me to earn profit. Actually it’s too not bad knowing what the bids should be to be making profit because you need to figure it out anyway. Why not without dumping money into it, we figure it out before hand 
Note: This post is just for sharing some stuff I came up with. This is by no means should be a rule used on your PPC campaigns. (I thought should say this before you guys start pointing fingers at me… )
Now that’s out of the way, let get into some details.
Every 2 weeks I get an excel sheet containing “top” offers by revenue and eCPC emailed to me from my affiliate manager. If you’re an affiliate with Azoogle (click here to apply) or CX Digital (click here to apply), you probably get the same sheet emailed to you as well. This report basically contains a list of offers with their network wide conversion rates, eCPC and payouts. If you pick any offer in this list, using these three pieces of data, we can come up with an average bid for any offer.
Before we start with an example offer, I’m going throw some formula out there for you to see.
Conversion Rate: # of leads/# of clicks
Profit = Revenue – Ad Cost = (# of leads x lead payout) – (avg. CPC x # of ad clicks)
We’re going to assume that # of ad clicks and as # of clicks to the offer page are the same. In other words, every person that clicks your ad and lands on your landing page also goes through to the offer page. Basically, I’m saying, the CTR from your landing page to the offer page is 100%. We have to make this assumption since, we don’t know what the actual CTR from your page to offer page is going to be.
Example:
So, now we can get into some practical math stuff. (Do you like math? I kind of do sometime. Only when I know what I’m doing…hehe 
).
Moving forward….In my previous offer report I got from my AM, I saw an offer which had a conversion rate of 20.42% and the payout per lead on the offer was $5.30.
Now, say you want to know how much I need to bid in order to profit with this offer? That’s easy! But how much profit are you talking about? Give me a number? K. So, again, we’re going to assume few things. Say you want to drive $100 profit a day. For this example we’re going to assume you drove 50 leads to the offer. That’s $265 (50 x $5.30) in revenue. Now to drive $100 profit from 50 leads, we just take the numbers we have so far plug ‘em in.
Going back to the formulas above, we had above…
Profit = Revenue – Ad Cost = (# of leads x lead payout) – (avg. CPC x # of ad clicks)
=> $100 = (50 x 5.30) – (avg. CPC x # of clicks)
But wait, we don’t have # of clicks. How do we come with this number? Well, we can figure this out using the conversions rate (which is roughly 20%) and plug it in the formula as shown below.
Conversion Rate: # of leads/# of clicks
=> 20% = 50/# of clicks
=> 20/100 = 50/# of clicks
=> # of clicks = 250
So, to drive 50 leads at 20% conversion rate, we need 250 clicks to the offer page. Now that we have the # of clicks, let’s plug this back into the above formula.
$100 = (50 x 5.30) – (avg. CPC x # of clicks)
=> $100 = (50 x $5.30) – (avg. CPC x 250)
=> $100 = $265 – (avg. CPC x 250)
=> – (Avg. CPC x 250) = $100 – $265
=> – (Avg. CPC x 250) = – $165
=> Avg. CPC = $0.66
Finally, the average click per cost is $0.66. Now you have a good idea as how much need you bid at roughly to get it profit. This is enough is useful before actually dumping money into a new campaign. Now without taking a random guess your can you bidding at roughly $0.65 to $0.75 range. From there on, you adjust bidding as your gather data.
Hopefully this post was somewhat useful. Even if it wasn’t, I hope I got you to at least thinking about doing some affiliate math….hehe
Did I mess up anywhere? Let me know if you spot anything weird.
This month I had my campaign die out. I started a new one in a different niche shortly after. I ran it and tested it for a week. Spent close to $2000 dollars but ran a loss of -$1500 at the end. My goal was to get bids low enough in a week to start turning profit from the campaign. But I couldn’t get the bids low enough to profit. At the end, I lost 1.5k. It’s not a bid deal because I learned quite a few things about the offer and the niche itself.
1. Bidding on high traffic obvious keywords is not the way to go. Bids are high and competition is fierce.
2. Conversions and eCPC was low. Turns out, it is like that for all affiliates. Even the ones doing four figures from it. But they must be doing something different…hmmm.
3. The offer itself is good but converting is trickier.
So, after all this, I’m going try to do something unique, which is, send high volume cheap traffic to the offer and hoping even with low conversions I will hopefully be able to profit a bit.
Basically, the idea is to pick a unrelated niche where clicks are cheap and somehow enticing the user to convert to the offer. I’ve seen affiliates do that with a lot of different offers in lot of different niches. Ring tones is one of them where people will bid on keywords like Rhianna or Usher or TV shows like American idol and send traffic to ring tones offers. It worked in the past but don’t try it now. People have caught on to it and it’s not profitable anymore.
In the next few posts, I’m going to document the steps I take to launch a new PPC campaign. I will try to share with you every bit of information, technique, tricks and steps you may need to take.
What I will Share:
1. Market Research
2. Keyword Research
3. Landing Page Techniques
4. Keyword Groupings
5. Creating Ads
6. Launching Campaigns
7. Tweaking Campaigns and more
What I will NOT Share:
1. My Niches, my offers, my landing pages, etc.
Note: Please note that I don’t claim to be an expert at PPC and what I’m about document are NOT the definite steps to take to launch a PPC campaign. This is just something I found that works for me.
So, now that’s out of the way, let get into the nitty-gritty. Shall we? I’m going to try to keep the posts short and concise.
Market Research
The first thing you should always do before taking on a new campaign is to do some initial research into the market to see…..
1. How much demand there is?
2. How much competition there is?
3. What products/offers people are promoting (CPA, CPL, etc)? The commission on those products/offers to get an idea on the return.
4. What people are doing to promote these products/offers? For example, are they using one landing pages, min-websites, squeeze pages and or something else. Because what works for others will probably work for you. So you should learn form you competition . Don’t try to be different or creative when you are new or starting out.
5 Lastly, Can I easily scale the campaign? Meaning, are there more related keywords or sub-niches I can go into later? This is important because, if you make $100 profit form your main campaign, chances are you can make another $100 by expanding your keyword list or venturing into sub-niches by using the same techniques you used for the first successful campaign.
Finding Demand and Competition.
Demand and competition both go hand in hand. The competitive the niche, the demanding it is. You can simple do a search on the popular keywords to know if the niche is in demand. Also, the number of offers on a network will tell you how demanding the niche is. Look at dating for example; there must be over 50 offers on it on Azoogle.
Picking converting offers?
One sure way of finding what offers are converting in the niche you’re interested in promoting is to contact your AM and ask him to send you bi-monthly or monthly offer report. This report will contains the offers, their payouts, conversion they are getting and network wide eCPC on those offers. This will give you a good indication of what offers are converting better on the network. Your AM can also simple tell you what offer to run.
What landing pages will work?
Again, for this, look at your competition. What kind of landing pages are using for the offer you like to promote. Is it a simple bridge page, or one page landing page with reviews or mini site with articles? Follow their lead and get a landing page done from professional. I recommend elance.com
Scaling the offer.
If you picked a demanding niche then scaling will be easier once you find the winning formula. Scaling an offer is important once you have at least one campaign making you profit. You can simple take the formula that you used to make the first campaign successful and apply it to other sub-niches or offers. For example, from general dating you can go into specialty dating offers.
Final Words.
If you’re just starting out or trying to find your first successful campaign, don’t pick a niche which doesn’t have demand. One way to get a hold of PPC affiliate marketing is to get into demanding niches. Why? Because this way you can test things faster since you have traffic in abundance. Researching keywords will be easier also. Think about it. If you’re getting 100 clicks a day on your campaign vs. 1000 clicks, don’t you think it will be much quicker for you to find out what keywords are converting. Right?
Do you usually get discouraged seeing those nice graphic rich landing pages when you’re probably doing your keyword research or something? You probably say to yourself, “how the hell am I going to make those nice looking pages? There is no way I can compete with these guys with an ugly looking landing page that I have because I can’t never make a landing page as good as that“.
Wait! How do those top affiliates do it? They make their own landing pages? Are they really good at doing eveything?
How the big affiliates do it!
I’m sure you heard of the term “outsourcing” but have ever thought of outsourcing? You think these affiliates actually make their own pages? You would be surprised to know that most top affiliates are NOT tech savvy. What do is, outsource almost all their work to other people who specialize in their own field. They hire designers, programmers, SEO specialists, content writers, etc…basically a whole team of specialists to put together their website. All they are left to do at the end is to do the keyword research and launch their campaign and that is exactly what affiliate marketer should only be doing and that is why they’re are on top. They spend more time doing the real stuff while most other affiliates are scrambling to put together a half-assed looking landing page, scrappy content, incomplete keyword list and the same time worried about how much money they are going to spend this time around on PPC?
This is not how you do PPC. This is a real business. You need to start treating this as a real business, if you haven’t already. You need to start thinking big….yea, just like that guy in the picture here
Elance: The Outsourcing Portal
So you wonder now, where can I find graphic designers and programmers to make me those nice looking landing pages for cheap. The place is called elance.com.
Elance is a site where you find professionals like graphics designers, programmers, content writers and so on looking for work and buyers looking to hire these processional to do their work. Basically, Elance will manage your project and payments with the service provider. The process is simple.
The process in a nutshell…
1. First, you create a project (it’s free) in there, which is quite simple as writing a post.
2. Once the project is posted, people will start bidding on your project.
3. You then choose a bidder and award the project to your chosen bidder/professional.
4. They start the work.
5. When they are done they present the work to you.
6. If you’re satisfied, then you pay them through escrow.
The whole process is easy, safe and secure.
How cheap is outsourcing at Elance?
You can find professionals who will make a good landing page for about $100 or so dollars. This price is nothing compare to the headaches you will be saving. Moreover, you can easily find web content writers for $10 an article. Basically, you can have a landing page done for less than $200 and that my friend is a bargain because you know you would make that back very quickly.
If you don’t like the sound of that or if even that is too expensive for you, then I can suggest another place where you can actually buy already built landing pages. It’s called lptemplates.com. Landing pages here are as cheap as $10. The only trouble is, they are generic and you may end up with the same landing page as the next guy (edit: A single landing page is only sold 10 times and then replaced by another fresh one, which is good). It’s a still a good place if you don’t like to go with a custom solution.
At the end, the success of your campaign boils down to how much time you spent at doing the real stuff, that is, keyword research, niche research and later on tweaking your keywords and campaign for maximum profits. Isn’t that what the affiliate should be doing in the first place rather then spending countless hours learning how to make graphics or trying to understand CSS, PHP and other crap.
So, you are putting up campaigns after campaigns and can’t seem to generate a lead or more than few leads every time? One good rule of thumb is, you should do your keyword research before you do anything else…
These steps might help…
1. Compile a big list of what I call different “root” keywords. These root keywords are one to two words keywords from which you can compile a sub-list of 100s or possible even 1000s of more keywords.
Example: Say you are running a credit score/repair offer. You should have a list of all possible related and lateral “root” keywords like…
credit check
credit report
credit score
credit repair
credit help
credit fix
credit consulting
credit management
credit problems
no credit
poor credit
bad credit
etc
Amit Mehta of superaffiliatemindset.com has a more detailed process of how you can build this keyword list. Check it out here.
2. Take each keyword in the list (as your root keyword) and generate a list of keywords off of each keyword. Now each sub-list becomes a separate ad group in your campaign.
Hint: No, you don’t need any paid keyword tools for this. The free Google keyword tool should be enough for now.
3. Now create your customized landing pages related to you adgroups you created.
4. Create at least 2 ads for each adgroup.
5. Plug your keywords and ads in adwords or YSM.
6. Important: Set your bids higher than normal. Depending on the niche, when starting out always set your bids high.
If you don’t set you bids high then most likely half or even more than half of your keywords will NEVER show up on the first page, resulting in low impressions, low clicks and eventually poor quality score.
By bidding high, you are knocking off all the people on high positions. This gives you room to test your keywords, ad copies and landing pages. You accumulate enough data quickly to know what combination of keywords, adcopies ad landing pages are working. And that’s name of the game. Test Test Test. If you don’t bid high and lose money initially, you’ll never be able to figure out why things didn’t work.
7. Once everything is setup, let your campaign run for few days.
Advice: Stop checking your stats every 5 minutes. Forget about your campaign for few hours and find something else to do. When you check your stats every 5 mins. you are setting up yourself for disaster. Every time you see yourself losing money, you’re going to let your emotions/fear take over your brain. STOP altering your campaign like lowering your bids, deleting keywords or adgroups all together and messing up everything before you even have any stats to analyze the results. So let your campaign run for 4-5 hours on the first day before checking in. It is better to actually let it run at least 2 days before start altering anything.
8. Once you have enough data, clicks, leads, etc. go though each ad group one at a time. Look at the keywords that are costing you money. Do you think those keywords belong to another adgroup, may be those keywords need a separate ad group and separate landing pages. Try doing this before deleting those keywords.
9. Now look at the keywords that are making you money. Do what with them? NOTHING. Just leave them. With the combination of your ads and landing pages, they made you money for the first 2 days, chances are if you leave them they will stay keep making you profits. So you don’t have to do anything with the “good” keywords. What you should do is, compile more keywords similar to your winning keywords, create separate ad groups for them and test them the same way.
Final words…
So, now you tweak your campaign one adgroup at a time, weeding out bad keywords and expanding on winning keywords and keep testing. The whole process may take you one month, 3 months or more. My advice never, never rest, keep improving and expanding. Think of ways you can get your ROI higher. Nothing is instant, everything needs time so have be patient and do things the right way form the start and you’ll do fine.
Hope this was helpful.
If you keep your campaign running long enough on adwords with consistent CTR, conversions and good quality score, you should expect to see a boost in traffic from Google.
This is what I have been seeing from last few weeks now. I have had my campaign running for 2 months now. My traffic started from less than 100 clicks a day to almost now over 1000 clicks a day. After tweaking my campaign for few weeks in the beginning, I have done almost nothing to it in the last month or so other than monitored my stats.
My latest daily earning screenshot -
Earnings almost up by $150/day overnight. Thanks to the sudden increase in traffic:
Why did I get this boost in traffic and how?
The only explanation I have is that if you have your campaigns running for sometime with consistent data, that is, good ad-clicks relative to your ad positions, good quality score and so on, Google gradually lowers your ad positions (say from position 6 to position 3) and lower your CPC, resulting in more traffic and better cost/conversion over time.
Obviously this is my speculation and of course, some of you have seen this happen with almost all your successful campaigns.
Your thoughts on this?
How many times have you started a campaign just to see it fail in few days?
You may ask yourself – Now, why do my campaigns fail in the first place? The answer is simple. It’s a combination of fear of losing money, fear of failing and matter of giving up quickly before realizing its full potential.
The recipe of creating successful campaigns in any niche is basically the same when you look at it from the outside. Yes, every niche is different but the process of creating your PPC campaigns in adwords, Yahoo or MSN for almost every niche and offer is the same. Here’s what I mean….
Steps to take before launching a campaign:
1. Research Stage
Before blindly hammering keywords in adwords, research and compile a big list of ALL possible related and lateral keywords to your offer or niche. For more information, check out Amit’s post on keyword research.
2. Setting up adgroups
- Split your keywords into logical groupings/ad-groups – It doesn’t matter how many keywords you have in your ad group. Forget what you read on the internet about “only keep few keywords in your adgroups”. You just need to make your ad groups as tight as possible. It could mean 150+ keywords or 5 keywords. I have adgroups with 150 keywords and with as low as 5 keywords. It all depends on you niche and offer.
- Test all match types – Add broad, phrase and exact types in your adgroup. You need to test all match types. Broad match type will give you tons of traffic and in some cases it may also turn out to be more profitable as well. I have few adgroups where broad keywords are the lifelines of my campaign.
3. Keyword Tracking (most important step)
Before running your campaign, setup some kind of conversion tacking on your keywords. Yes, you need this. Don’t even think about it. Just do it!
4. Last Step – Running your campaign
Run your campaign for at least a week before you have substantial amount of data to analyze the results. Look at the keywords/adgroups that are costing you money. Take those out immediately. Keep the ones that are making profit and then compile even more keywords related to the winning keywords. Now just keep tweaking your campaign until you are satisfied with the return.
So, there you have it, a successful recipe in a nutshell for creating profitable campaigns from the get-go. Let me know your thoughts?
Nothing gets you more angry then some doosh-bag taking your landing pages and coping them word-to-word and starts running them beside your ads.
This happened to me recently. I came home from work one day and saw my eCPC dropped drastically. At first I didn’t know what happened. I literally froze for few seconds. I quickly fired up my browser, opened my YSM and adwords accounts to see what was going on. I saw nothing had changed from yesterday except the conversion rate, which had gone down dramatically. For the first time in 2 months after launching my campaign I was losing money. It just didn’t make sense. I knew something fishy was going on.
I saw one of my adgroups which had always performed well was doing really badly. I quickly went to Google ad-preview tool to see if my ads were running fine. What I discovered just blew me away…
I saw a similar ad above my ad worded almost exactly as mine with a similar looking domain name, only the order of the words changed. This was the highlight of my day. I don’t know how long this guy had been running his ads like this but it was really pissed off to see what I saw.
Next, I went to his site and just couldn’t believe what I discovered – this guys basically downloaded my landing pages and uploaded them on to his server under his domain. It was an exact copy! With exact keywords, ad-copies and landing pages as mine, this guy was taking a big chunk out my revenue. I was absolutely furious as I should be.
How I dealt with this cheapskate copycat affiliate?
So you ask, what do I do when someone steals my stuff? You simply report to your affiliate manager or the network right away. I called my AM @ Azoogle, had a chat about what was going on and sent him his domain name shortly after. My AM immediately shut his affiliate link and in few hours his ads were down.
Networks will work with you to rectify situations like these because they don’t want to lose your business. First of all, this is a fraud – someone copying your sites is the stupidest thing they can do. They are asking to be shut down. No affiliate is going sit ideally and let this happen and networks will take action.
You can also report them to Google. I didn’t have to do that in my case because he ads were taken down without me raising the issue to Google. But I would imagine they will also take this seriously and shut his ads down.
How to prevent yourself being copied?
Apparently copying and stealing stuff outright is very common in the affiliate world but I think you can take few steps to prevent this to happen to yourself…
1. Don’t append keywords to your landing pages. In another word, don’t use PHP conversion tracking where you append the keywords to your URL using PHP code for tracking purposes. Instead use keyword pixel tracking. It’s fast, efficient and safe.
2. Avoid naming your images same as your keywords you’re bidding on. I can run a keyword search say “online dating sites” on http://images.google.com and get links to literally 1000s of landing pages. Your landing pages are sensitive data. Don’t let other affiliates see that.
3. Lastly, don’t share any info regarding your niche, keywords or domain names with anyone out there. Once they discover your secrets, this will simply copy you word-to-word. Why not? Less work for them. Right?
So protect your work. When you do catch someone taking your stuff, report them to your affiliate manager and your network right away.
