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How would you like to have less competition, and at the same time lower the cost of your Google pay per click campaigns?

Google Pay Per Click Marketing: The Old Way

If you follow what everyone else is doing (eg, bidding on the same keywords), you will most likely get the same results. But, it may cost you more and if you can’t afford it, then you have to drop out of the game.

Google Pay Per Click Marketing: The New Way

In order to get different (ie, better) results – without breaking the bank – it’s time to try something new. Following is a plan for getting better results.

1. Go for Long-Tail Keywords: Instead of bidding on the same keywords as everyone else, bid on long tail keywords. You’ll most likely have less competition for these keywords, which mean they cost less. But, the brilliance in bidding on these keywords is that they can convert better than shorter, more popular phrases that all of your competitors are bidding on.

The reason is, when web surfers are serious about purchasing, they tend to get very specific (ie, use more words) to find what they’re looking for.

2. Optimize Landing Page with Original Keywords: Optimize your landing page using the shorter, competitive keywords everyone else is bidding on.

By “double dipping” in the long-tail and short-tail keyword waters like this, you gain traffic from organic searches, as well as higher-converting, lower-cost traffic from your Google PPC marketing efforts.

Last week at PPC Summit in Los Angeles, the Search Marketing expert trainers shared a wealth of Pay Per Click knowledge with the 100+ marketers attending the event. Keyword targeting is always a hot topic and the use of long tail keywords was one of the tips discussed.  

In our last post, Long-Tail Keywords In Pay Per Click Advertising Works, we covered the value of using long-tail keywords. Today, we want to continue this discussion, highlighting how to get more value out of the long-tail keywords your visitors may already be using to find you.

How to Get More Value Out of the Long-Tail Keywords Visitors Are Already Using to Find You
Many pay per click marketers don’t realize that a lot of their traffic may already be coming from some long-tail keywords. This presents a golden opportunity to get even more traffic and sales. How?

Quite simply, your web presence already has good search engine juice (ie, good organic rankings) for this term. However, it may not be ranked as high as it could be, since you have spent any time specifically optimizing it for that/those specific long-tail keywords.

Once you do this, you can exponentially build on traffic you are already getting. Following are two ways to do this.

Write More Content: Writing and distributing articles is one way to optimize a site quickly for popular long-tail keywords. This will give your site higher visibility quickly, especially if you distribute the content far and wide (eg, article directories).

Put Together More Offers: If a popular long-tail keyword is bringing you more traffic, look to see if you have any special deals, discounts, or other offers that can convert this traffic into sales. If not, put together one (some).

These are just two ways to make your pay per click campaign pay off with traffic you may already be receiving. 

In the post, Pay Per Click: How to Use Google Trends to Capitalize on the Slow Summer Months, we alluded to how and why things slow down during the summer months. So right now, sales may be a little sluggish.

But, the busy season is right around the corner. As many pay per click marketers set their pay per click campaigns and forget them, now’s the time to give your site a pre-season tune up. Following are three areas to assess to.

1. Does my site load quickly enough? When was the last time you checked this? It would suck to spend money on a fantastic PPC campaign, only to have visitors clicking away because your site loads too slowly.

2. Can browsers easily find what they want on my site? Prospects should have to click no more than two or three times to find the product/service they’re interested in. If it’s more, you need to simplify your site.

Beyond this, a rule of thumb to live by in pay per click marketing is to direct prospects to what you promised them in the ad.

For example, let’s say you owned an online clothing boutique. You carry apparel for every member of the family. If a surfer clicks on a “cheap children’s shoes” ad, then that’s the page they should land on, not a generic home page with your.

3. Keyword Research: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is mercurial; not static. When was the last time you evaluated your keyword choices. Are they still the best keywords for pay per click campaign? Do you need to add more local keywords to the mix to gain more of this traffic?

By paying attention to areas like these, you can significantly increase your pay per click results with little or no further investment. 

Many pay per click marketing consultants speak of keywords as a monolithic group. They’re not. Here, we discuss two types and why you should know about them: branded and non-branded keywords.

What are Branded Keywords? Branded keywords are those keywords associated with a particular brand, eg, Nike, Gatorade.

What You Should Know about Branded Keywords to Improve Your Pay Per Click Results

While branded keywords are most often used towards the latter part of the buying cycle, how and when you use them will depend heavily on your business model.

These are usually the highest converting keywords – and have the highest value.

Note: Don’t use branded keywords just for the sake of pulling in traffic. You could be wasting money if they don’t convert. So, make sure that it fits within your marketing model.

What are Non-Branded Keywords? Quite simply, these are keywords not associated with a brand. They are industry-specific. For example, if your company produced a well-known electric car, say the GreenMobile I, then some non-branded keywords for that would be “electric car” or “energy efficient car.”

What You Should Know about Non-Branded Keywords Increase Your PPC ROI

Non-branded keywords are an excellent way to bring in “inquiring minds,” or potentially first-time customers. They allow you to build your brand. This is because if someone doesn’t know your brand specifically, by using non-branded keywords, they can find you via terms that relate to your industry.
If you’re not using non-branded keywords, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

Non-branding Keyword Research Tip: To find the best ones, research the language that your target audience uses when conducting searches. Knowing this will allow you to choose high-traffic, high-converting keywords.

The bottom line: Branded and non-branded keywords are important to your pay per click marketing efforts. Knowing when to use which can significantly increase your PPC results.

Choosing the right keywords is vital to success as a pay per click marketer, as we discussed in the post, Create Pay Per Click Keywords that Get Results. The advice dispensed in this post gives you everything you need to think about when putting together a keyword list.

Here, we want to add one more thing to this list – how to choose “buyer” keywords.

What Are “Buyer” Keywords?
Our definition of these is keywords where prospects are looking to buy (NOT investigate, compare or anything else).

“But,” you may be thinking, “how do I know what these are?”

It’s relatively easy. In last week’s post, Classify Your Keywords for Better Pay Per Click Results, we discussed categorizing keyword phrases according to where they should be used during the sales process.

Use Google’s Keyword AdWord Tool to Choose Buyer Keywords
Almost all pay per click marketers use Google’s Keyword AdWord Tool to find the best keywords for their PPC campaigns. But you should take it a step further and choose actions over objects. Let’s explain further using an example.

For example, let’s say that you ran a pay per click campaign for your company, which offers bike tours through Central Park in New York City. You’ve done your keyword research and see that “bike tours NYC” is a popular keyword phrase.

But, this is a noun (“object”). A more effective keyword phrase may be “book bike tours NYC”. A person looking to who types in the keyword phrase “bike tours NYC” is more likely to be interested buying now that a person who types in “bike tours NYC”.

See the difference?

And, this is what we mean by choosing “buyer” keywords for your pay per click marketing campaigns.
 

Every pay per click marketer knows that the success of any campaign depends on the keyword selection. But, it goes a step further than simply choosing the right keywords. Once chosen, keywords should be classified.

What Is Keyword Classification?
Keyword classification is where a pay per click marketer categorizes keyword phrases according to where they should be used during the sales process. For example, let’s say you have 75 keywords that you want to use in your pay per click campaign. You would go through and group your keywords by which action they are likely to cause prospects to take.

In the beginning of the buying process, you’d probably want to use keywords that generate qualified traffic and interest. The types of keywords you’d use during this phase are broad.

For example, let’s say you were selling affordably priced laptops. Some keywords you’d use might be cheap laptops, discount laptops, etc. During the middle part of the buying process, consumers want more information. So key phrases used during this phase might include those that lean toward things like product reviews and consumer feedback (eg, cheap laptop reviews).

During the final part of the buying process, consumers are usually focused on specifics. So, your pay per click keyword phrases might include specific products and brands (eg, Dell Inspiron Mini 12).

The key to any pay per click campaign is planning. Hitting small goals along the way will ensure that you convert more prospects overall.

A successful pay per click campaign begins and ends with effective copy. After all, it’s the words that drive prospects to click, or not. To get high click thru rates however, you need more than good writing, you need effective search engine optimized (SEO) copy. Following are three SEO copywriting tips that will help to increase your pay per click campaign results.

Headlines: Some internet marketing experts say that headlines are the most important part of your PPC campaign. It’s usually the headline that gets noticed first. Your headline should always, always, always contain keywords. Add to it an effective qualifier, eg, free, discount, cheap, easy, etc., and you are well on your way to increasing your click thru rates.

Landing Page: An effective headline will get your prospect through to your real workhorse; your landing page. Your landing page should also include keyword phrases sprinkled throughout the copy.

The best places to put your keywords on your landing page are in the headings and subheadings. Other SEO copywriting tips for your landing page are to:

• Leave lots of white space on the page
• Use bullet points and numbered lists of points; and
• Use your main keyword phrase in the last paragraph of the page.

The running thread through all of these tips is that keyword placement on the page is as important as the keywords themselves.

Use Google AdWord Keyword Tool: When it comes to keywords, you shouldn’t repeat the exact same keyword phrase or you could get banned by the search engines for spamming. This is why learning to use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool is important. It will give you alternate phrases you can use in place of your main keyword phrase.

These SEO copywriting tips should be employed in all of your pay per click campaigns; in fact, in all of your internet marketing efforts – to get maximum results.

It seems that everyone has their own method or tactics to get ranked higher in the search engines or to promote their products. But, the truth is, it all comes down to common sense. Pay Per Click advertisers — especially those new to the game — are prone to making mistakes that not only waste time, but a significant amount of money. 

Following are a few common mistakes many make when running Pay Per Click programs. Are you guilty of any of these? 

Using Untargeted Keywords

Avoid the keyword craze when setting up your campaign.  It’s not the quantity of keywords you choose, but the quality of them.  It is important that you use keywords specifically related to your niche, so that you attract targeted traffic.  More means less when it comes to untargeted keywords – as in – less money you can make.

Not Adding Keywords

When creating copy, it is critical that you include keywords in your title and within the body of your copy.  You want your ads to be direct and to the point, so your visitors will know exactly what they are getting without all the fluff. Remember, web surfers are primarily looking for information. Give it to them.

Directing Visitors to Your Homepage

Many online businesses don’t give a second thought to directing visitors to their home page.  If a visitor has read about an incredible product and they want to purchase it, direct them to that page on your site – not the generic home page. They may not take the time to try to locate the info for themselves.  

A few minor changes can go a long way to converting clicks – which is the goal of every pay per click campaign. Avoid these common mistakes to increase your profit potential.

Did you know the PPC Summit search engine marketing experts are coming to New York on May 13-14? Learn more here www.ppcsummit.com

Most of us don’t pay much attention to our pennies. When we’re checking our wallets for cash we don’t count pennies; when checking our bank statements, we focus on the dollars and not so much the cents.

But, did you know that you can use your pennies to beat the AdWords competition? It’s a huge, cost-saving search engine marketing strategy that can mean the difference between being the highest bidder for a particular keyword and losing the AdWords bidding war.

When marketers set up an AdWords campaign, most of the focus is on the even numbers, ie, $0.10, $0.20, $0.40, $1.00, $1.20, etc. Why? No one really knows, but one the fact is that if you focus your bids on odd numbers (eg, $0.11, $0.21, $0.41), you significantly increase your odds of winning the bid for a keyword without breaking your budget.

Here’s an example: Let’s take the keyword “marketing.” The average CPC or Cost-Per-Click is $3.88 (Google AdWords Keyword Research). If you bid just one cent above, you would be the winning bidder at $3.89.

Now take a moment to review the average cost per click on random keywords. You will quickly discover that more times than not, the majority of the bids are even numbers. While you may not have the budget to bid $3.00 on a keyword, know that this method applies to all keywords, in all of the AdWords programs.

If you’d like to learn about other winning AdWords strategies like this, join the AdWords experts at the upcoming PPC Summit Chicago or New York. They have the knowledge and experience to help make your AdWords campaign a success.

As every Pay-Per-Click campaign manager knows, there are many elements that make up a successful PPC campaign. Following are two mistakes many make. Unless and until you know better, you’ll probably make them too? What are they and how can you avoid them? Read on.

Keyword List: Your keyword list is the foundation of your PPC campaign. Many define it too broadly, which leads to less than targeted traffic. This raises cost and lowers profits, which cause many to think, “Pay Per Click doesn’t work well for our product/service.”

Many PPC campaign managers are so afraid of excluding prospects that they include unprofitable ones.

The lesson here: Hone your keyword list as tightly as you possibly can. No matter how much it goes against the grain, force yourself to remember that less traffic is a good thing – if it’s bringing in more targeted traffic.

Ad Group Sharing: Many PPC managers take a “set it and forget it” mentality to pay-per-click marketing. This is especially true when it comes to adgroups, as in, most campaign managers will only use one.

The lesson here: You can – and should – have many closely related ad groups. This allows you to test, retest and tweak ads; something we advocate for every PPC campaign.

You can never test an ad enough because customer wants, needs, methods of searching and a host of other factors are constantly changing. This is why testing, retesting and tweaking ads is the only surefire way to improve your pay-per-click campaign results.

Learn more about this and much more at the upcoming PPC Summit (April 22-23) in Chicago, register now and save $400!