Pay Per Click StrategiesBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

Sometimes internet marketing experts get so wrapped up in dispensing the latest advice on all the cool new gadgets and tricks of the trade that we forget to remind webmasters of the basics.

So because spring has sprung and most of us are having a hard time focusing, this week we’re going to remind you of a few basics about internet marketing. So here’s part information and part inspiration to get you on the road to pay per click marketing success.

 3 Things You Can Do Today to Achieve Pay Per Click Success

1. Start: Most of us put off starting until we know how to do x, y or z. Don’t! If you’ve been wanting to run a pay per click campaign, put one together and let it run. You don’t have to spend a huge amount of money (in fact we suggest that you don’t if you’re new), but do start a campaign. Sometimes, just seeing your ad pop up will get you excited about the next step, which is . . .

2. Familiarize Yourself w/ PPC Tools: You can start by reading the tutorials on Google. The keyword adword tool and the search-based tool are excellent places to start. They will show you how to get the best keywords for your campaign, as well as host of other information on how to run a successful pay per click campaign.

3. Study the Competition: This is perhaps the best thing you can do to ensure PPC success. You can severely shorten your learning curve by looking at the competition to see what’s working – and equally as important – what’s not.

It’s understandable to be a little lax this time of year. After all, the flowers are blooming and the sunshine is calling you outside. But, take your laptop, sit in your favorite café, sip your latte and get these PPC basics down pat. Then, when it’s time for you to really put the pedal to the PPC metal, you’ll go from 0 to 60 in profits in no time.
 

Running a Pay Per Click campaign can help your organic search results. Many are surprised by this because internet marketing is usually divided into two camps – paid or non-paid results.

What are Organic Results?

If you’re new to internet marketing, the phrase “organic results” may elude you. Organic search results are simply non-paid results that pop up when you conduct a web search.

What are Paid Search Results?

Paid results are those across the top and to the right. They usually appear under a heading like “Sponsored Links,” or in a shaded box at the top. Advertisers have paid to be put in these positions.

Both are highly effective forms of internet marketing, but knowing which method to focus on, when, and how to combine them to produce the best results can be confusing – not to mention expensive – if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pay Per Click and Organic Search: The Perfect Internet Marketing Strategy
The short answer to why the two strategies work so well together is time and links.

To explain, pay per click campaigns can start to deliver traffic to your site immediately. If you have done your job on the content end, then those visitors who find you via a pay per click ad will then start to link to relevant content on your site. The more one-way links your site has, the higher it moves up in organic search results.

Organic campaigns like article marketing can take weeks or months to show measureable results. By getting that initial influx of traffic via pay per click marketing, you jumpstart your online marketing campaign.

If you’ve ever wondered what your competition was doing, you can easily find out. Knowing specifics like who is bidding on what keywords and how much they are spending can help you boost your PPC campaign results.

SpyFu: The Pay Per Click Campaign Equalizer
Spying on your competition to better your PPC campaign is possible with SpyFu.com. This neat little tool allows you to see what your competitors are paying for specific keywords. Some say this tool straddles the black hat marketing fence, but you can use it in an ethical way, ie, to garner information that can give you a competitive edge.

How SpyFu Works
By typing in a keyword or a domain name, you can quickly determine the cost per click for a specific keyword or domain name, how many people are clicking on these keywords daily and even track the keyword’s ad history.

Let’s take the term “internet marketing.”
>The average cost per click is $0.96 to $13.20.
>The average clicks/day is 120-129.
>The cost per day is $97.33 – $1.71k.

If you move further down on the page, you can see that Google dominates this keyword with a daily ad budget of $45.43k – $112.81k. If you are just starting a pay per click campaign you can see that this would cost you a significant amount of money to compete with Google, so you can search for other keywords that fit your budget.

Using this PPC marketing tool can help you plan which keywords are out of your price range before you even set up your campaign, saving you the trouble of testing and tweaking keywords you can’t afford.

Now that’s internet marketing done smart!

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.

You can have a killer AdWords ad, but still not be getting the conversion rates you want. It’s at this point that many pay-per-click advertisers start to shake their heads, wring their hands and tweak their ads. Don’t. Stop!

You’ve forgotten to do one thing. What is it? Take a look at your landing page. Remember, your AdWords ad and your landing page are like a married couple – it takes the two of them working in concert to be effective.

If you’re getting lots of clicks on your AdWords ad, but you’re not converting those clicks into sales, then your landing page may be the culprit. Following are some landing page areas to assess to increase your pay-per-click ad results.

Landing Page Areas to Assess to Increase Your AdWords Conversion Rates

Copywriting: Many times, PPC advertisers will spend hours and hours on the 130 words or so of an AdWords ad, but they spend practically no time on the few thousand words that can make up a landing page.

For example, does your landing page deliver on the promise of your AdWords ad? Does it boldly state the benefits? Does it differentiate your product/service from your competition? All of this needs to be present before customers will part with their hard-earned dollars.

Don’t Oversell: What we mean by this is, don’t try to sell a prospect on every product or service you offer. Remember, confused customers don’t buy. If you’ve gotten them to click through, deliver on the promise in the ad they clicked on.

Ease of Payment: Does your site make it easy for prospects to purchase? If not, change it. This is a simple fix.

Your landing page is every bit as important as your AdWords ad. The two work together to make the sale for you. So if your AdWords ad is doing its part, make sure that your landing page is also.

Learn more at the upcoming PPC Summits in Chicago (April 22 – 23) or New York (May 13-14)! Register now and save $400 at www.ppcsummit.com.

In the post, Pay Per Click Headlines: 3 Ways to Change It and Increase Your ROI, we discussed how what may seem like small little changes to your headline can produce big results. Continuing in this vein, we will discuss the most powerful words in the English language – and how you can use them in your body copy to increase your ROI.

In his book, How to Make Presentations that Teach and Transform, Garmston references a Yale study on words. He writes:

. . . the most powerful words in the English language are those “that affect us most directly.” They include you, easy, love, free, save, discover, health, success, proven, guaranteed, results and new. They are powerful because everyone is concerned about health, safety, relationships and security. 

Now that you know what the words are, how can you use them to increase your Pay Per Click ROI? Perhaps the best way to explain it is to tell you the best thing not to do. 

Don’t Try to Sell Every Benefit

This is one mistake many Pay Per Click marketers make. It’s ineffective because it can muddy your primary message. Remember, the goal of an AdWords ad is to get qualified prospects to click. State one or two benefits that you think will appeal to your target audience – and marry it with one of the above words. 

For example, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. An effective ad using two of the seven most “powerful words” might read something like: 

Valentine Roses: $18.95
Free Shipping If Order Recd by 2/13
Guaranteed, On-Time V-Day Delivery
www.xyzrosesite.com 

The benefits stated in this ad are “free shipping” and “guaranteed delivery.” These are two critical benefits that appeal to someone who really wants to send roses to their special someone on Valentine’s Day. 

Don’t delay, register now and get huge savings for upcoming PPC Summits in Chicago, New York and LA! 

In the post entitled, Are You Making This All-Too-Common Mistake with Your PPC Campaign?, we relayed two reasons it’s critical to constantly monitor, tweak and analyze your PPC campaigns.

One of the reasons was that customers become blind to your ad, eg, they gloss right over it because they’ve seen it so many times. At this point you may be thinking, “But what do I tweak? I don’t want to mess with a successful ad?” And we’re not telling you to. What we are saying is to change ads that are underperforming. Sometimes, something as minute as changing the punctuation in an ad can skyrocket your results. 

How Important Is the Headline in a PPC Ad? 

Industry experts say that five times as many prospects read your headline as opposed to the description line. As the headline is the most important part of any PPC ad, here will give you three tips on tweaking it that could help your ads to perform better, ie:

>  Spark curiosity by making it a question, eg, Want to Make $100 Today?

>  Mention a benefit, eg, Eliminate Dry Skin Today

>  Add a negative qualifier, eg, May Bahamas Cruise: $559+ (there are two negative qualifiers here – the month and the cost. This weeds out those who are, for example, looking for a fall Bahamas cruise for under $500).

PPC Marketing Fact: Specifics Sell; Generalities Repel
 

What we find most often is that many ads are too general. Most PPC advertisers are so afraid of scaring off prospects that they cast too broad of a net.

Making money on the web is about niche, niche, niche, ie, specifics, specifics, specifics. While your clickthrough rates may decrease, your conversion rates will increase the more specific you are in your ads.

Note: PPC, as with every other type of marketing is a test, test and retest form of advertising. When you change ads, you always run the risk that they will perform worse. But the only surefire way to get them to perform better is to tweak them.

Marketing – any type of marketing – is not a “set it and forget it” strategy. As for Pay Per Click (PPC), one of the most common mistakes many online marketers make is failing to continuously and consistently tweak their campaigns.

Seven Do’s and Don’ts For Google Adwords Campaign Success:

#1 Make sure your unique selling proposition distinguishes your product or service from the competition - try to incorporate benefits into your ad.

#2 Conduct market research - understand the search habits of your target audience and analyze your audience demographics.

#3 Set budget limits for your campaign costs (daily, weekly or monthly) - don’t spend more than 10 percent of your average sales amount.

#4 Bid on keywords that your target audience uses - don’t make the mistake of bidding too high for popular terms. 

#5 Build extensive keyword lists – review where/how your target audience searches, analyze your website traffic and study your competition. Use online keyword generation tools to save time.

#6 Give viewers a reason to click on your ad – copy should include a ‘call to action’ and create a sense of urgency to move the viewer. Use your search terms in the headline and/or ad text and make sure to test multiple ad variations. Incorporate product/brand names, discounts and free trials into your ad message when possible.  

#7 Create optimized custom landing pages – make sure your ad copy is relevant to the keywords on the destination page. 

And remember to always monitor and analyze your ad results - check the conversions/click through rates of your ads and keywords often.