ppc marketing Archives - My Online Business Journey

How to Double Your PPC Results Without Spending an Additional Penny

step-by-step affiliate marketing with AdWords

There are two ways to double your PPC results:

1. Double the amount you spend daily by performing the following calculation and entering it into the daily spend box. (s = to your current daily budget; b represents your future daily budget):

double adwords spending

2. Double the effectiveness of your Adwords campaign. Here is your formula (c = conversion rate, p = future conversion rate):

increase conversion rate

Doubling your conversion rate gives the exact same effect as doubling your PPC spend. It also gives you the upper hand…

Pushing your competition out of the PPC market

Imagine getting double the results your competitor gets for every dollar you spend. It would allow you to drive prices up and allow you to still make a good profit. However, your competition may not be so fortunate. If they can only spend $2000 per month, and they have to double their bids to compete with you, they will have to have downtime where there ads are not running. Eventually it will become too costly to compete and they will be forced to find business in other venues.

Your competition will have no idea what hit them, especially since only 11% of companies use conversion rate optimization. More than likely, they have never even heard the term.

Google Website Optimizer

All though there are many software solutions out there for conducting conversion rate optimization, I have found Google’s Website Optimizer to be everything that I need. Plus, it’s free.

Google offers two types of testing:

multi abtest optimizer

Google divides up your visitors across the different pages or page combos (multi-variate testing) and monitors how many conversions each produces. At the end of the test, the page with the most conversions wins and you can roll that out onto your site.

Combining Google Website Optimizer with Google Adwords

Inside of your Google Adword account click on Reporting -> Website Optimization and you can get started with Google website optimizer. The experiment will be a part of your Adwords reporting and give you more details on what is working and what doesn’t.

adwords optimizer

When most people start optimizing their website, they get tunnel vision on their site’s content and graphics. However, to really get the best results you should run several tests from different ad groups.

Page x may not perform well with the ads in ad group 1, but perform super well with ad group 2. Typically the reason for this is that the page meets the expectations the ad gave the visitor.

Finally, you will need to run the tests again with the best ad group and best pages, but with different keywords to see which keywords perform the best for each ad and page.

Sounds complicated, but it really is not that bad. Here is a mind map to explain the process. We will use multivariate testing for this mind map, but the principle is still the same for a/b split testing.

ppc optimizer

Once I have completed the above process, I like to go back and micro-target the ads for specific keywords with different combos to see if we can get even more of a conversion rate increase.

Jason Capshaw is founder of MyWebTronics, an Atlanta internet marketing firm. He resides in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

04/21/2010 by Adriana | 1 Comment

Challenges, Google Adwords

PPC Challenge: How Am I Doing After 3 Weeks?

It’s time for another update on my PPC challenge. Last week I was on vacation in Jamaica, so no I made no progress in adding more campaigns, but my existing campaigns continued to run.

So, let’s see how I am doing.

So far, I started 15 campaigns

– 1 to a landing page

– 8 direct to a merchant on CJ

– 6 direct to merchants on SAS

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 56,342
Clicks: 435
CTR: 0.77% (this went up a little bit since my first week, but it’s still to low)
Cost: $99.68
Commission: $72.34
Profit: – $27.37 Yep! I am in the red, but that’s normal during the blasting. As I learn more about what my market is looking for, I’ll add more negative keywords, remove key phrases that are not performing, etc.

What is important is that out of 15 campaigns, I had 4 sales: 2 from the same campaigns, and one each from two other campaigns. this means I have 3 winning campaigns, which I can tweak and improve once my blasting is done.

My 3 FaceBook ads are yet to get a click, but I received an email from them, with suggestions for improvement. I didn’t have time to apply their suggestions yet, but it’s on my list for this week.

Also for this week: I need to step up my blasting, or I won’t be able to do 50 campaigns. I am going to try 15 campaigns this week, and I’ll be back next Monday with another update.

If you’d like to learn how to successfully learn PPC marketing, check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report.

03/22/2010 by Adriana | Comments Off

Challenges, Google Adwords

PPC Challenge Update

As promised in my original post about this PPC challenge, this is an update on what I’ve been doing to meet my challenge goals.

Just as a reminder, I am shooting for 50 PPC campaigns before March is over: that means 2 campaigns a day, 5 days a week, and this past week, I haven’t met that goal. I did 7 campaigns:

– 1 to a landing page (I purchased some domains a while ago for specific products, and never did anything with them, so built one small site and I am directing some traffic to it with PPC). This page is monetized with a specific product from Amazon.com

– 1 direct to a merchant on CJ

– 5 direct to merchants on SAS

My ads are getting too many impressions, and not so many clicks, which makes for a very low CTR (see image above). That’s not good, and it means I probably have to tweak my ads.

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 19,427
Clicks: 96
CTR: 0.49%
Cost: $34.52
Commission: $61.18
Profit: $26.66

This week, I need to get more serious, and start even more campaigns, as next Sunday I’ll be heading to Jamaica for a few days, and the following week I won’t be adding any campaigns.

I’ll let you know how I am doing next week.

If you’d like to join me and others in this challenge, there is still time: check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report before you get started: it will save you from making many mistakes.

03/08/2010 by Adriana | Comments Off

Google Adwords

Pay Per Click Basics

Pay Per Click or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.

The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for very specific keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low (you can always adjust it), create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

03/04/2010 by Adriana | 5 Comments

Google Adwords

March PPC Challenge

This month I am participating in Matt Levenhagen’s Blast Challenge 11. What is that, you may ask? Every few months, Matt challenges the members of his campaign blasts forum to challenge themselves and do 100 PPC blasts/campaigns in a span of 5 weeks.

It’s an intense 5 weeks, but the results are usually incredible. As a matter of fact, the very first blast challenge I participated in helped me find my first wildly successful PPC campaign, and I only did about 10 campaigns, not 100. Here is a snapshot of that campaign:

successful PPC snapshot

This month my challenge is to do 50 PPC campaigns (even though I participate in Matt’s challenges, I am in the group that only do what we can). I’ve never done 50 campaigns in a month: my highest was 35 I think.

So, here is what I will do: every Monday for the duration of this challenge, I’ll post my progress here: how many PPC campaigns I did so far, what network I used (CJ, SAS, etc.), if my campaigns are direct to merchant or to landing pages, and my results for that week.

I’ll also concentrate a lot of my blog posts on how to succeed with pay per click this month.

I hope you’ll follow along with me, and if you’d like to try a campaign blast of your own, try out Matt’s blast guide and forum: there are no contracts, and the knowledge you’ll gain from doing a blast challenge may change your life. Come on: join me!

03/02/2010 by Adriana | 11 Comments