successful PPC

Google Adwords

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.

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Challenges

Wrapping Up the PPC Challenge

ppc final stats

Today is the last day of the PPC challenge over at Matt Levenhagen’s forum and my last update. It’s going to be a short, one, as I haven’t been able to add any more campaigns this past week.

Taking a look at the image to the right, you’ll see :

Impressions: 87,922
Clicks: 889
CTR: 1.01%
Cost: $182.17
Commission: $115.82
Profit: – $66.35

So, I ended up spending more than I made, but that’s OK: now it’s time to go back and analyze things and make adjustments. As a matter of fact, I already paused a few ad groups.

During this challenge I found some amazing merchants that I want to explore/promote further: some I realized would do better with video promotion, some with bum marketing, and some by even creating sites around some of the products. In the end, that is the reason I blasted in the first place: to find merchants and/or products to promote.

Am I disappointed I didn’t reach my goal of 50? Yes, a little. But honestly, my first inclination was to set a goal of 20 blasts (one for each business day of the month), knowing I was going on vacation, and would miss some time. And I ended the challenge with 23 blasts.

Now it’s time to pick a challenge for the month of April, and I am not sure what to do. Here are my options:

– create sites for my existing domains just sitting there (probably 25 or so). This would be intense, but the results would probably be awesome!

– organize some of my PLR and use it to update several sites I have but really neglected for the past several months

– work on creating links and revenue for 2 sites I have and would love to flip, but not in their current state, as I want as much as possible for them.

Any thoughts? What would you like to see me do? Please comment below.

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Google Adwords

5 Things You Can Do to Make Your PPC Campaigns More Successful

This is a Guest Post by Gagandeep Singh

A pay per click campaign is a great way to get some quick quality traffic for your website. Just create an account with Google or any other advertising network, put some money in your account, bid on keywords, write ad copy and you are set. But is it that simple? Unfortunately, no! A successful PPC campaign with a good conversion rate and positive ROI demands lot more than that. Here we’ll highlight five important things which you should do to make your PPC campaign more successful.

Highly Relevant Landing Pages – The success and failure of your online campaign depends completely on the success and failure of landing pages. The more relevant landing page is, the higher the conversion rate & quality score and  less you have to pay for the same amount of traffic. The traffic you get from PPC campaigns is always looking for some specific things, so make sure to make your landing page relevant to the ads you are using to attract traffic. Try to use the same keywords in title and body of your landing page which you’ve used in your ad copy so that your visitors can get the feeling that they are in the right place.

Highly Targeted Ad Groups – Google allows you to have 2000 ad groups per campaign. Split your keywords in to more targeted ad groups according to their theme and create separate ads for each ad group targeting that specific group.

Broad Match is Not Always Bad – If you are already using Adwords or studying about it then you must be aware about all three keywords matching options – broad, phrase and exact. Google uses broad match as the default option, which means if you are targeting keywords “blue widgets” your ad will be shown for search queries like “ How to create blue widgets” , “ I hate blue widgets” etc. On the other hand, in exact match you ad will be shown only when somebody search for “blue widgets” specifically which means that it will not be shown for queries like “ cheap blue widgets” “buy blue widgets” etc.

Although, most of the traffic you get from broad match is not as relevant as you get from exact match it sometimes helps you to identify some hidden gems keywords which you had ignored earlier.  Just make sure that when you use broad match you use lots of negative words.

Negative Keywords Are Very Important – Time and again, we see the companies putting lot of effort in doing keyword research but completely ignore the negative keywords. Negative keywords are the words that will stop your PPC ads from being shown if they are present in the search query. Let’s day you sell blue widgets and are using broad match option in your campaign. Now your ad would be displayed for queries like “I hate blue widgets” or “How to sell blue widgets” or “Free blue widgets” etc which will affect your CTR (click through rate) and eventually will reduce your quality score. So the best solution to this is to put such keywords like hate, sell, free in your negative keywords list.

Geo-targeting is Important – Geo-targeting can save you a lot of money if your offer is localized. Geo-targeting your campaigns will help you to show your ads only to the users from specific locations based on their IP information.

Okay. These are the five things I feel should be done to make PPC campaigns successful. Do you think there are other must-do actions you must take to achieve PPC success? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments below.

Gagandeep Singh is writes for Invesp about affiliate marketing, landing pages and conversion rate optimization.

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