Pillar #5 – Paid Advertising________________________________________________________________________
Paid advertising is an essential part of most internet marketing campaigns. I
would like to focus on two key paid advertising methods, both of which I consider to be an essential part of any internet marketing campaign.
1) Pay per click advertising - using services like Google AdWords
2) Major directory submissions – getting your website featured in major directories such as the Yahoo! directory.
Although there are hundreds of different pay per click networks, I’d like to concentrate of three of the biggest…
1) Google AdWords
2) Yahoo Search Marketing
3) Microsoft AdCenter
Google AdWords is by far the largest pay per click network – it has access to the largest amount of prospective customers, so it’s the best place to start.
In order to use Google AdWords, you need to create a Google account – it’s free to do this. Once you login you will be able to view instructions of how to get going with your campaign. In the sign up wizard you will be able to target your advert to a specific country, area or town (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 – Google AdWords
Starting your Google AdWords campaignWriting your advert
After selecting your location and language, it’s time to write your advert. However, before you do this you should consider your target market and the keyword phrases appropriate for your campaign.
Using the Wordtracker service discussed in Pillar #1 Keyword Research, you need to obtain a list of keyword phrases suitable to describe what you are going to advertise.
Your landing page, hence your advert should be targeted towards a very specific market segment, giving you the best opportunity to convert your visitors through to your particular goals for the campaign.
Maximizing your conversion ratesYou will maximize your conversion rates by designing a unique landing page for each area of pay per click focus. Once you have designed your landing page and are comfortable with your keyword phrases, you need to ensure that the correct landing page URL is used with each PPC (pay per click) ad.
Setting your budgetAfter researching your keyword phrases using Wordtracker, you then insert these in the box titled ‘Enter as many specific words or phrases as you like, one per link’ (Figure 5.2). Next choose your currency and set your budget. It doesn’t have to be a significant investment to begin with, but it’s a good idea to start a campaign wit your budget spread throughout the week to try and determine optimum conversion periods.
Figure 5.2 – Google AdWords
Selecting your keywords in Google AdWordsCalculating your maximum bid
Your cost that you will have to pay per click in order to have to appear on the first page of pay per click results will vary considerable depending on what industry with are wishing to target.
One industry sector that’s notoriously costly is finance where you may even have to pay more than $10 per click for certain keywords.However, bear in mind that you may be paying an exorbitant amount to take the top listing. I often find that you get best value for a decent volume of traffic by aiming to appear in the third position.
Three Essential AdWords TipsRunning a successful pay per click advertising campaign can take a great deal of time, but there a few things that you can be doing to move ahead of the competition.
1) Use square bracketsI recommend placing square brackets around all of your keyword phrases – at least until you can prove that your campaign is reaching your initial objectives.
e.g. [luxury cruise to mars] instead of luxury cruise to mars
Without the square brackets, this example advert will appear for anyone that types in any of the luxury cruise to mars words into a search engine.
However, with the square brackets you are aiming for a much more specific market, as the advert will only appear when people type that specific phrase into Google. Using the square brackets will narrow your focus and allow you to aim your campaign at a very specific market segment. This should help to optimize your conversion rates.
Only once you have started to create a profit from your ‘exact match’ keyword phrases then you can test moving towards more of a ‘broad match’ option. A broad match advert will bring in more traffic, but it will be less targeted traffic. That’s the reason that there’s no point in getting a broad match campaign up and running unless you can make a profit out of an exact match keyword campaign.
2) Test your ads constantlyThere’s no point in assuming that just because you’ve got an advert which is generating high enough conversion rates to give you a decent profit that there still aren’t any improvements that you can make to your Google AdWords campaign.
Google AdWords has a built-in functionality (A:B split-testing) which lets you split-test different parts of your adverts with alternative versions in order to determine the optimum version of that advert.
You are able to split-test your ad title, description and URL – and it’s important to test all 3 aspects of your advert at different times in order to develop your overall winner.
Testing your ad titleStart with your title. When you’re testing your ad title, you need to ensure that your description and URL is the same in all version of the ad that you’re testing. You’d be surprised at how such a small change can make such an incredibly large difference to your conversion rates. For example, something as simple as a question mark at the end of your ad title has the power to significantly alter your ad click-through rates.
The tricky thing about your ad title is that it can be no more than around 25 characters in length. This significantly impacts what you can say – and the chances are that you won’t be able to say as much as you want to. This limit in length makes it even more important to ensure that you’re maximizing the potential of this little piece of sales space.
When you are testing one ad against the other – and all you are changing is the title, you may well be shocked at the differences in click-through rate percentages. The Google AdWords software will provide you with all the stats and control measures that you require in order to determine which of your ad titles you should choose to use over the longer-term.
The important thing when you’re doing your testing is to absolutely make sure that you change just the one variable. That way you’ll be 100% sure what is having the impact on your click-through rates.
Testing your ad descriptionAfter you’re comfortable with your ad title, the next thing to work on is your ad description. Again, just like the title, there aren’t many words to work with. You’ll be luck to manage to squeeze in 10 words, so these 10 words will have to be thought over very carefully.
Because you are so limited by space, it’s important not to think that you have to have perfect English. The most important thing is conversion rates, so just because your description doesn’t work as a sentence, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth testing. Doing something as simple as swapping round the first and second lines of the ad description can increase the click-through rates enough to turn a loss-making campaign in to a profit-making one.
Another significant aspect of running the most efficient PPC campaign possible is to have an additional focus on Google’s quality score.Google wants to ensure that although it’s making money from its PPC service, its users feel that they are getting value from the PPC adverts – in other words the adverts are for what they claim to be. In order to try to ensure that the adverts are as relevant as possible, Google will consider the quality and relevance of the landing page in addition to the quality and relevance of the advert as well as the bid amount and click-through rate in order to determine where to position the advert in their listings.
Because of this, you should try to include the keyword phrase that you are targeting in your description – and ideally in your ad title and URL as well.Testing your URL
Once you’ve tested your ad title and description, next in line is your ad URL.
One of my website addresses (URLs) is www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com. However, that’s not necessarily going to be the best website address to use in a Google AdWords advert.
Although this Purple Internet Marketing website address includes the words ‘Internet Marketing’ it isn’t from a country-specific TLD (top-level domain – i.e. the .com part). It also doesn’t indicate what type of internet marketing service that the company specializes in.
Alternative options to test would include using a country specific TLD like .co.uk if the service was tailored towards that particular UK-based market segment. Another possibility would be to have a domain name which specifically describes the service being offered (e.g. emarketingseminars.co.uk).
Although testing different website addresses in your advert is the last thing that you should be testing, and you should only bother testing a different website address if you’re already happy with your conversion rates from your existing advert, it is certainly worth bearing in mind that the URL that you are displaying underneath your advert could be significantly impacting your conversion rates. Just because you’re already making a profit from your campaign doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be making more money by further improving your clickthrough rates.
3) Use negative matchesIt’s also worthwhile testing descriptions to include reasons not to click on your advert. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it pays to remember that you’re looking for customers – not clicks!
For example, if somebody is specifically searching for something for free, there is very little point in encouraging them to click on your advert if all you offer is paid products. Including a price in your description may reduce your click through-rates but it will probably increase the quality of those clicks. This means that you aren’t paying as much for your traffic (as you’ll be paying for fewer clicks).
This strategy does however have to be used in conjunction with analyzing the effect it is having on your Google AdWords quality score. The lower your clickthrough rates, the lower position that Google is likely to show your ad.
To test a negative match strategy, all you have to do is include a negative symbol in front of the keyword that you don’t want your ad to appear for if they type it into a search engine.
For instance, if you don’t want your advert to appear when somebody includes the word free as part of their web search, then you’d include –free in your list of Google AdWords keywords.
Note that this strategy does not apply for exact phrase match campaigns as will already have chosen the specific phrases for which you want your ad to appear.Google AdWords summary
Because it’s the biggest and can drive you the most quality traffic, Google AdWords should always be your first port of call when it comes to pay-per-click marketing. Only once you’re confident that you’re driving as much PPC traffic from Google AdWords as possible should you start trialing other services found at http://www.13pillars.com/resources/pillar5.
If you are struggling to make money from Google AdWords, then you should revisit whether or not you’ve thoroughly tested all the different aspects of your campaign to try to improve you conversion rates. Google AdWords works for millions of businesses, and the chances are that if it doesn’t work for you then it’s something that you’re doing wrong, not something that’s wrong with Google AdWords!
Major DirectoriesAnother form of important paid advertising that is major directory submissions. Search engines like Google crawl all the major website directories, and if your website features in a relevant major directory category then this will enhance your website’s reputation in the eyes of the search engine.
There are many significant directories getting your website listed in. However many you choose to try to get listed in will depend on your budget and time. Four major directories that I would always advise trying to get your website listed in are DMOZ (The Open Directory Project), Yahoo Directory, Business.com Directory and Best of the Web (BOTW.org).
DMOZDMOZ (the Open Directory Project – Figure 5.3) is the biggest free-to-get-listed website directory. However, free often has its downside. On this instance it’s the fact that the editing and publishing of these free submissions are made by volunteers. This means that submissions have taken a very long time to get published in the past – sometimes over 6 months and some editors have been accused of being less than neutral when it comes to deciding which sites to publish.
Figure 5.3 – DMOZ.org
DMOZ – The Open Directory Project
All in all with DMOZ, the best thing to do is to make sure you find the correct category, write and independent website description and submit your website. Then forget about it. It may get listed, it might not. You can’t do anything more about it after you make your submission, so once you do so, just move on and start to concentrate on other directories.
Yahoo directoryThe next major directory that you try to get your website listed in should be the Yahoo directory. Although there is a free submission option with Yahoo, in reality if you do that there’s hardly any chance that you’ll manage to get your website listed.
The best thing to do with the Yahoo directory is to forget that the free submission option exists and pay the $299 annual fee for guaranteed review within 7 days.Just bear in mind that if they decide not to list your site you will not get your money back. In my experience as long as you are not overtly selling in your title or your description of your website, and your website does what it says in the description, and it belongs to the category you submit it to then you should get it listed without any problem.
Submitting a website to the Yahoo directoryUsing the fictitious case study of Freddy Faldo with his golf equipment shop - he would use the Yahoo directory and browse to find his initial category - Sports.
Figure 5.4 – The Yahoo! directory
Finding the ‘Sports’ sub-category in the Yahoo! directory
He would then browse through the various sub-categories within the sports category, browsing his way through ‘Golf’, ‘Shopping and Services’, ‘Equipment’ and ‘Retailers’.
By browsing all the different sub-categories within the Yahoo! directory Freddie takes the time and effort to ensure that he has chosen to submit his website to the most appropriate category for his business. This, along with ensuring that his website title and description is accurate and contains no hype should mean that Freddie shouldn’t have any problems with getting his website listed in Yahoo.
Although getting listed in the Yahoo directory should help your website’s search engine rankings, the traffic that you get directly from the Yahoo directory should justify the listing fee alone, assuming that your website model is revenue-based.
The Business.com directoryThe Business.com directory (Figure 5.5) is another extremely popular website directory which is well thought of by search engines.
However, as the name suggests, it is a website directory which largely focuses on businesses, which means that if you offer a business-to-consumer services, it probably wouldn’t be worth your time or money submitting your website.
Figure 5.5 – business.com
Business.com – more aimed at business-to-business servicesBest of the web directory
The last major directory that I’d like to cover in this segment is called Best of the Web (botw.org – figure 5.6). Again, in a similar manner to getting your website listed in the Yahoo Directory, it’s important to browse through the site and select a website category which is particularly relevant for your business in order to get your listing approved.
Figure 5.6 – botw.org
Best of the web – another worthwhile directory
At the time of writing Best of the Web charges either a one-time review fee of $249.95 or an annual fee of $99.95. Links to all the above directories and many more up-to-date directory resources can be found at
http://www.13pillars.com/resources/pillar5.
• Google AdWords should be your primary initial focus for pay-per-click website traffic. Only when you’ve mastered AdWords should you move onto other services like Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter and Facebook Advertising.
• When creating your Google AdWords ad, use square brackets to get an exact match of your keyword phrase. Always test your ads to work out which strategies work best by remembering to take advantage of the Google AdWords A:B split testing functionality.
• It’s incredibly important to optimize your ad landing pages as well as your pay-per-click adverts. In an ideal world you’ll have a landing page which has been designed with a specific advert in mind.