Pay Per Click, or PPC, is an online advertising formula, where the advertiser pays every time someone clicks on their ad and is taken to their website. In Pay Per Click advertising, you can choose which keywords or phrases you want your website to be associated with when a search is performed, meaning you have to decide how much you are willing to pay every time someone clicks on the search result. The upshot of PPC advertising is that you are marketing to people already interested in your products or programs.
PPC advertising is being used by many online marketers and commercial websites these days to help build business. As you know, hundreds of millions of people are surfing the net every day looking for what they need. You can actually connect with these online surfers through a single search engine search. When your’re running a PPC campaign and doing it the right way, you’ll have bran new, precisely targeted prospects coming to your website within minutes. Do you realize how powerful it is? More traffic means more sales and profits. Traffic means attention, sales, and then success. It all leads to the financial freedom you are after!
However, Pay Per Click can be a little daunting, especially for those who don’t know the tactics to create a successful advertising campaign. Below is a list of best steps that can help with your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
1. Do your market research:
Industry research can be deemed as the the most important aspect of any PPC advertising campaign. Let’s say you are selling registry cleaner software. You can affiliate with many registry cleaner providers through Clickbank.
Look at your range and decide which ones you want to promote. Then, do some searches on Google and Yahoo! to see which ads come up. Look at which offers your competitors are focusing on and find out how competitive your are in terms of price, service and delivery.
2. Select the right keywords:
Position yourself as your potential customer. Think like them. Ask yourself: “If someone is looking for the product or service I’m offering, what are all the possible keyword phrases they would type into the search engine?”
Base your keyword research on the benefits of your product or service. Always ask what’s in it for your customers. You can use “broad matches” to see what the market is doing and what people are typing in. Use “exact match” after you are sure they are the best keywords to go for.
People like to read reviews, instructions, and unveiled scams before buying something. Append these keywords to create highly targeted keyword phrases. You can get the statistics of how many times a specific keyword phrase were searched on during the previous month by using the keyword selection tool of inventory.overture.com. Wordtracker is also good for finding negative keywords.
3. Advertise in a very targeted way:
Group keywords with common, general phrases together and put them in an ad group, and then write corresponding ad copy for each ad group. Don’t dump all your keywords into an ad group. Goolge, for example, will give you a low Quality Socre for your Google Adwords campaings because of lack of relevancy.
If your website has sections for iPod Nano accessories, classic accessories, and one each for iTouch and iPhone etc. Each one of these sections is a campaign and each must have its own ad group. Also, each type of Nano accessories can be broken down by color and by style.
Use broad and phrase matches with a lot of negative keywords. For example, if we entered “iPod nano”, with a broad match, the results would include ‘free MP3 nano’, or even ‘iPod classic’. Add negative keywords to stop ‘MP3′, ‘classic’, and ‘free’ coming in. This will eliminate a lot of wastage. It’s hard to believe that people don’t use negative keywords.
Rule of thumb: good highly targeted keywords perform much better thatn general ones. Don’t forget that PPC advertising is all about targeting customers. You’ll see increased volume of impressions on your campaigns when you do a good job targeting your ads.
Another good technique you should know is to connect with the right audience by selecting the lanuages and countries you want to target. I exclude the countries where English is not widely spoken and where the general public don’t use credit cards.
4. Determine your break-even point and profibility:
Let’s say you can obtain a hundred clicks for the price of a sale, you can get 100% ROI by 2% conversion ratio. If a product pays $50 dollars per sale and you’re able to convert at 1:50, then you can spend $0.5 per click. The higher the convertion ratio, the better off you are. Adjust your bids on keywords accordingly.
Be flexible in your bidding strategy. Don’t advertise hard, market smart. Top position doesn’t mean best performance. Sometimes #3 or #4 works best. However, Google’s complicated system, for instance, make it impossible to secure your ad postion. Just remember to outperformm, not outbid, your competition.
5. Build specific landing pages or affiliate websites:
Direct linking is sending traffic directly to a merchant’s site. It’s the quieckest way of creating a PPC campaign to test if a market is profitable. But it has its drawbacks in the fact that no pre-sell opportunity is available, and Google, for example, doesn’t allow multiple URL’s under the same search term. Thus, direct linking may greatly limit your marketing potential.
On the contrary, landing pages, or affilate websites (which you can create within two hours using xsitepro), allows you to put personal testmonials, related content/images, and product comparisons on them, thus creating a promising way of pre-selling your products.
Each of your products should have their own landing page, with a very nice description for it. Make sure the keywords you’re targeting mirror the ad, which should mirror the landing page. It only takes people three to four seconds to browse a webpage, so you have to make sure your landing page is quick to load.
6. Ad variation:
PPC campaigns allow you to have different ad variations. You can monitor any buying patterns by creating different kinds of ad to see which one is clicked and which one isn’t. A good strategy is to include the price in the ad to deter freebie hunters. Remove unnecessary words because every word count in an ad copy.
Moreover, use keywords in your copy so that they are highlighted in the search listings. And make sure you call for action in your copy. Examples of call-to-action phrases are as follows:
* Download Now – Free 14-Day Trial.
* Buy today and save $100.00 (that’s 50% off!)
* Shop Today! Our 20% Off Sale Ends Tomorrow
7. Report and analytics:
Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Index Tools to help you look at your PPC keywords. Pay attention to your bounce rates, which is a very important indicator in Pay Per Click advertising. If you are getting a high bounce rate, say 50% or more, but a high CTR rate like over 3% , then you need to work on your landing pages or affiliate websites.
8. Optimize your landing pages or affilaite websites :
Target your landing pages or affilaite websites to your audience. Don’t sell, but pre-sell on your page. Try to be as objective and authoritative as possible even if you have limited knowledge of the product or service you’re promoting.
Always use a call action to motivate your visitors. If you’re an affiliate, you should allow several exits to the merchant’s webpage. Make sure to put product images with hidden affilate links because people are more easily connected to images.
9. Refine Your Campaign:
Online marketing is a very interactive process with the end users. Use Pay Per Click to send people to your landing page and learn what they do after they get there. You’ll learn how to pre-sell your target audience to make the most out of the niche you’re operating in. Keep monitoring your campaign and keep refining it when need be.
The 80/20 rule applies here. Only 20% to 40% of all the keywords may give you real value, that is, sales or sign-ups. So, don’t be afraid to pause or remove Keywords or ad groups that are not delivering a positive ROI (Return On Investment).
In addition, study your competitors’ strategies, copy or download their ads and use them as your ad template. Study their bidding practices and find a way to differentiate yourself from others. A frequently used technique by experienced marketers is to offer incentives that your visitors simply can’t resist, such as offering free e-Books/software with resell rights, free splash page creation service, and a 50% affiliate rebate.
For advanced techniques on PPC advertising, click the image below to see if Beating Adwords is right for you.
