If you haven’t used Adwords yet to promote your business, you’ve been missing out. Not only is it one of the fastest ways to advertise (you can get ads up in less than 5 minutes), but it is also one of the easiest ways to reach a massive audience. You don’t need good connections.
You don’t need a big mailing list. You don’t need a massive budget (in fact, you don’t even have to pay for your advertising fees until the end of the month). And you don’t need a degree in computer science to “engineer” a site that ranks well in search engines.
So what do you need in order to be successful with Adwords? First of all, you need an account. If you haven’t started one yet, cruise over to http://www.google.com/adwords and open one.
Once you open an account, you will want to start testing some of Adwords’s features. Try out the keyword tool to find new keywords related to your niche. Use the bid tool to determine approximately how much your advertising campaign will cost. And so on. Get familiar with Adwords.
Once you become familiar with Adwords, you will want to consider making a campaign for your business. But before you do that, you need to understand the following two things, which will help you to structure your campaigns correctly:
1. Google Adwords—and all “pay per click” advertising programs—charge you per click, not per impression, action, or sale. What does this mean? It means it is incumbent on you to ensure that you are a) paying the right price per click; b) purchasing the right keywords; c) writing ads that people will actually click on; and d) making sure clicks turn into sales. Google will serve ads for you, but other than that, it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to get a decent ROI.
2. Two things determine how well an ad is ranked by Adwords (but not necessarily other PPC advertising programs): 1) your bid; and 2) your ad’s click through rate (CTR). What this means for you is quite simple: if your CTR is phenomenal, you can get a high ad position without paying more money per click. If, on the other hand, your CTR is lackluster, you’ll have to pay out the nose to get that same position. So make sure you write an ad people will click on – or prepare to pay.
As a new Adwords user, you certainly have a lot to learn. But if you keep the two things above in mind, you shouldn’t stray too far from making successful campaigns and capitalizing on them.
Now, with that in mind, you shouldn’t forget that there are other pay per click advertising programs available. While Adwords offers high quality traffic in large volume, it also costs more to use (i.e. bids for keywords are higher) than most other pay per click advertising programs.
You may want to consider complementing your Adwords campaigns by creating parallel campaigns with the following advertising programs:1. Yahoo Search Marketing: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com. While Yahoo has a much smaller market share of the search market than Google, it is still formidable when compared to most other search engines. Additionally, many keywords on YSM are much cheaper than on Google.
2. Microsoft Search Beta: http://advertising.microsoft.com. MSN, like Yahoo, receives a considerable amount of search traffic – although still much less than Google. If you want to scalp some cheap PPC keywords, consider checking MSN out, too.
So there you have it: a brief overview of how to use Google Adwords, as well as a list of its major PPC competitors.Pay per click is perhaps the best advertising medium available for Internet-based businesses and for small businesses in general. It allows them to carefully cut the advertising fat by choosing exactly what they will pay for and what they won’t.
They not only get to select the keywords they want to bid on, but they only pay when someone actually clicks through one of those ads and is directed to their site. This is a far cry from paying for advertising on a billboard, which might generate a lot of “impressions,” but few actions.
Unfortunately, though, advertising through PPC programs, such as Google’s Adwords, is no piece of cake – despite what many gurus may tell you during a sales pitch. In fact, it may be extremely hard or even impossible to get a reasonable return on your investment in certain niches using pay per click advertising.
However, if you keep a few basic principles in mind, earning an excellent ROI on your PPC advertising investment is nearly guaranteed. So where do you start? Arguably, the most important part of creating a successful PPC advertising campaign is writing an ad that will increase your click through rate (CTR), so this is a good place to start.
Writing an ad that commands a high ROI can be broken down into the following steps:1. Pick the right keywords for the ad. While this seems like it has nothing to do with writing the ad, it actually is the first and most important step. If you want your ad to have a high click through rate, it must be narrowly focused around a set of keyphrases that all have the same root keyword in common. This will allow you to repeat that root keyword 1-3 times throughout the ad. Whenever someone searches for one of those keywords and your ad pops up, the root will appear in bold, since it is part of the keyword they searched for. This will make it stick out clearly, drawing them to click on it.
3. Avoid fancy stuff in the headline. Here, all you want is a simple description of the product or service offered: “Grand Piano for Sale.” Also, remember to include that root keyword in the headline to make it stick out more. People need to immediately see whether or not your ad is relevant. And the best way to communicate that is to say exactly what you’re selling.
1. Communicate the best feature associated with your product on the first line of your ad (below the headline) or clarify exactly what is you are selling. For example, in the “grand piano” ad above, you could ad something like the following: “Choose Between 700 Grand Pianos” or “Pay Only $500 for Your Grand Piano.”
4. Last, in your second line, communicate a benefit associated with your product. Here, rather than saying something physical about your store or product, you will explain what the product can do for the person. The product might “Save You Hundreds” or “Teach You How to Make Millions.” Make sure it is compelling and relevant. Ask yourself (and possibly a friend) whether or not this is something that would make you take action.
And there you have it: a 4-step blueprint for creating an “attention-grabbing” PPC advertisement. Once you put your first ad up and allow it to rotate, you will then want to start testing competing ads.
The best way to do this is to alter one part of the ad at a time. For instance, start off by altering your headline until you get a better CTR. After that, work on your first line – and so on. After a few weeks of working out changes, you should have an effective, powerful ad.
Bidding to make a profit on Google Adwords might not seem as obvious as the experts tell you. In their 5 minute videos, they’ll show you some quick technique to figure out how much to bid and for what keywords.
You’ll walk away thinking you understand the process. And then something strange will happen: you’ll be absolutely unable to implement their suggestions. No matter what you try, you’ll struggle to break even with your campaigns.
So why is this? Why can’t you experience the success that the experts suggest is completely within your reach? One common culprit is inept bid-setting. Many people who are new to Adwords do not know how to calculate profitable bid amounts. In fact, it is quite simple, but you have to work through it carefully. Here’s a step-by-step process for doing it:
1. Based on past selling experience, determine a rough conversion rate for the product you are selling. For instance, if you can usually convert 4 people out of every 100 who land on your salespage, then you have a conversion rate of 4%. Even if you cannot estimate this perfectly, try to come up with some rough measure before moving on to the next step.
5. Now that you’ve determined your conversion rate, you now need to calculate how much you profit per sale. Don’t get lazy here. If you sell an affiliate product and make a 50% commission, you might be tempted to simply multiply the price by ½. In reality, if you’re using Clickbank or Paypal, they will extract a fee, so you’re not earning 50% per sale. You need to calculate this, too.
2. Next, take the profit per sale and multiply that number by your conversion rate. If, for instance, your conversion rate is 4% and your profit per sale is $50, then you would multiply 50 by .04 and get $2. This means that the maximum amount of money you can afford to spend (if your conversion rate is 4%) is $2 per bid – your break-even point. Spend more than that and you’re actually losing money.
The most important thing to observe here, however, is the relationship between all of the variables.For instance, think about what increasing your conversion rate means. It means that you would either profit more (without changing anything else) or it means that you could increase the amount you could pay per bid without exceeding your break-even point.
I.e. if you cannot break into profit with your current conversion rate, you may have to improve your sales page.
Additionally, if you increase the price of your product (and it doesn’t decrease conversions significantly), then you can afford to bid more without exceeding your break-even point.
Let’s say, for instance, that you will earn $50 per sale on a product that has a conversion rate of 4%. Given the keywords available, you can bid $1 per click and get 700 visitors per day or pay 30 cents per click and get 300 visitors per day. Which should you choose?
In the first instance, you would sell a total of 28 units and make $700 ((28*50)-(700*$1)). In the second instance, you would sell a total of 12 units and make $510 ((12*50)(300*$1)). Even though you are spending more per click on advertising in the first instance, you will still profit more, which means you should select this option.
At first, using this entire math may seem unnecessary, but it isn’t. Without tracking these variables and making decisions based on them, you will have no idea how to set bids; and will suffer as a consequence.
You’ve heard the wild-eyed “experts” raving about it: “You have to test and track”, they’ll tell you. They’ll rattle on, pontificating on the virtues of tracking and testing. They’ll tell you that you can never have a successful business without testing and tracking.
They may even tell you that, if you’re not already wealthy, it’s because you’re not testing and tracking. But is this all hot air? Or is there something vitally important about testing and tracking?
When it comes to business, being able to track the effects of all of your decisions actually is vitally important. The experts may not track and test as much as they urge you to, but their exhortation is nonetheless correct: you should test and track.
When it comes to pay per click advertising, you have the unique opportunity to test and track everything. While you might not be able to test and track your other forms of advertising as easily, PPC is relatively easy to track; and, for that reason, you should consider doing it, so you can constantly improve your campaigns.
So what does testing and tracking consist of with PPC? There are several levels. The first level is testing and tracking the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. For instance, out of every 100 people who view a certain ad you’ve posted, how many are clicking through? This is your conversion rate; and you should know this, so you can compare several ads to determine which is best.
In the aforementioned situation, the “tracking” component involves looking at conversion rates. The “testing” comes in when you slowly tweak the headline in your PPC ad, testing out different elements to determine which performs best. Eventually, you should come up with an ad that you cannot improve on significantly – and this will all be determined by tracking and testing.
Next, you will want to track and test your sales page. Again, here, determine your conversion rate. How many sales do you make per 100 visitors? Also, are there significant differences in conversion rates for each advertising campaign? Are people searching for certain keywords and clicking on certain ads more likely to buy than people searching for different keywords and clicking on different ads?
If this is the case, then you may be able to afford to spend more money on certain ads; or you may want to reword other ads, so that you can weed out traffic that isn’t likely to convert.
Even if you’re already running profitable PPC advertising campaigns, you can still probably improve your profit margins; however, in order to do that, you need to know where the deficiencies and break-downs are in your system. Are they on the sales page? Are they in the ads? Did you select the wrong keywords? Did you pay too much for certain keywords? Are certain ads not converting as you expected?
Whatever the case may be, you need to figure it out if you want to increase your profit margins. Luckily, if you’re advertising with Adwords, Google provides a whole host of tools you can use to track and test your PPC campaigns.
Not only can you monitor your PPC campaign statistics, but you can also insert a piece of code in your sales page, which will allow you to track visitor behavior, so that you know everything visitors do from the point in time when they view your ad to the point in time when they buy (or don’t).
Testing and tracking may not be simple, but it is necessary. Even if you’re running a profitable business already, you should consider testing and tracking as a means to increase your profit margins.