MLM Online Training Resource

The PPC Optimization Process

Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by admin.

PPC optimization is an ongoing process.  There are certain things you are going to do in a circular type pattern, meaning you start back over every week refining your ppc campaign, performance, and refining your results as well as testing everything out. Optimization requires setting it up and measuring it against your business objectives. The following week you go back in and refine again.

Optimizing ppc campaigns is circular in its nature; you are looking for what has changed. This is the essence of ppc optimization.  You are only looking for what has changed, at one data range to another and one date range to the next.  You are looking for what has changed because the internet is always changing.  In addition, there are always new competitors entering the market.  Such changes also include new keyword trends that emerge.  For instance, about 25% of all search queries every day are brand new.

The internet is expanding. There is more meaning implied in keywords which can shift at any given moment.  For example, say you have a campaign that you have had for a little while and one of the keywords is “income”.  Initially, this seems pretty obvious; income is income. But, when spring time comes along, suddenly, income is related to taxes.  Thus, most people doing search queries on income or anything related to income, 80% of the results are going to have something related to taxes.  Thus, the meaning of the word “income” has shifted to mean taxes. What this should tell you is, if you are not watching your campaign performance, you will start to receive unqualified traffic and your campaign will no longer be targeted. This damages your ROI and profitability due the attraction of non-targeted traffic to your site.  You have to watch your campaigns so you can catch any shifts.

Even Google’s algorithm changes often.  Everything moves at a lightening pace.  The reason you optimize and the reason you do optimize as a process is because it allows you to stay on top of any changes that take place.  Plus, there is the added benefit that optimization, if done correctly, improves your performance.  You will continue to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are presented to you.

First Step In PPC Optimization:

The first step to optimization is to continually test new markets.  Testing is included as part of the circular pattern in optimization.  Twenty five percent of all keyword queries are new.  Keywrod trends affect the outcome of everything. Thus,  if you are not watching to determine what the market is doing today, you are probably missing new markets or new ways that people are searching for your products or services.  You may even be missing out on  new opportunities and locations of where markets are gathering in online social communities and blogs.  These are areas where you could be doing content advertising.

There is always going to be a new opportunity and the only way to continually get more market share and to get more traffic, more leads, sales, and profits out of Google, is going to require that you test new markets and expand out into these new markets.

In a brand new ppc campaign, you are doing a lot of unknown things; such as, using keywords that you have done some research on, but you are not sure whether they are going to work.  For example, you have a new website and you have no idea how the landing page is going to convert; this is an unknown factor.  This is why it is essential that you are always testing these factors and unknowns to find the knowns and continue with your progress.

A brand new Google campaign is going to require a huge amount of testing, even if it uses branded keywords, because you are still going to have to test all of the measurements we stated above.  You are going to test to see where the traffic spots are. You are going to test to observe your competitors.  You should be testing the whole system.

The second step in optimizing ppc is going to require that you monitor your campaigns on a daily basis.  You especially want to monitor you test campaigns.  Test campaigns are going to be the most prone to bleeding ad dollars.  The reason being that if they are brand new and you are testing, 90% of what you are doing, is not going to work.  This is because with keywords, which is true of any kind of direct response marketing, which Google is, is similar to direct mail.  With direct mail, you are looking for a 3% conversion rate.  This is also very similar on keyword search.  If you put a lot of keywords in, some will drive traffic and sales, while others won’t do anything, some will not have any market, and no one is searching for them.  Others are going to be very competitive.  This could lead to you having to take your time in order to get market share. There are also going to be keywords that will cost too much.

Second Step In PPC Optimization:

Step two is going to require you to be in your campaigns every day, monitoring your campaigns and determining which ones are working; especially in a test campaign.  The newer the campaign, the more frequently you should monitor it. When you are monitoring your campaign, you are looking for action.  You are looking at your campaign to gain some insight so you can take some action.

Now, the question you may have is what type of action is required?  You can’t do much on a daily basis except stop what is bleeding your ad dollars.  So, when you go into your campaign, you are either pausing or killing the keywords and ad groups on a daily basis in a test campaign that has 20 or 30 clicks.  Usually, the keywords or ad groups are  experiencing terrible conversion rates, a high cost per conversion and they are not producing a lot of leads. Quite possibly, they may have a terrible CTR that you should pay attention to where certain keywords are getting a lot of impressions, but not a lot of clicks.  Later, you will need to work on your ad copy, but you could be experiencing a situation where, although you have been optimizing your campaign and you still are not able to get your metrics up. In a situation like this, you have no choice but to shut it down.

But, most times on a test campaign, you just want to look at the conversion data daily and plug all of the wholes that are bleeding ad dollars on the keywords and campaigns that are not converting to leads and sales opportunities in your pipeline.

Third Step In PPC Optimization:

So, now when you move past, testing, monitoring, and plugging the holes, the third step in optimizing ppc campaigns is to evaluate what is working and what is not once a week.  This is when we return to the performance metrics.  To get the performance metrics that are meaningful, you need a significant amount of data. This step can not be completed off a couple of clicks, impressions, or conversions.  The more data you have, the more concise you insights are, the more likely that the known is no longer an educated guess.

You can get performance data daily if you have a very high traffic campaign, ad group or keyword.  Improving the performance data is a daily activity.    But if you are looking at overall improvements, which include landing pages, ad copy revisions, and are improving the metrics rapidly, you need to do this once a week.  Again, on high traffic terms, when you trying to burn in a position or do something else aggressively, you should be monitoring your performance on a daily basis. It is only if the data provides you enough insight that helps you to know what to do next.

Your entire account should be optimized once a week.  At the account level, you should be looking for all the key performance indicators mentioned in this article. Of course, you first step should be reviewing you key metrics once a week.  This includes improving your CTR, conversion rates, and finding new keywords and new markets.  These actions should be done every week. The keywords that are converting to the most leads are the ones you should use to find new keywords and new markets.

Once a month, you should be looking at your Return On Investment (ROI).  This is key because your ROI determines your business success. When monitoring your ROI, you are looking for ways to make more profits.  The third ste is a different process.  Like your performance indicators, this step requires that you have a lot of data.  It has to be conclusive data.  Once you see that a campaign has converted to 20 or 30 leads per day, then you have some pretty conclusive data that the campaign is a lead generator. We refer to this step as profit mining.  You mine out the top performing keywords by re restructuring your campaigns to separate you highest converting keywords and placing those high performing keywords into their own campaign, thus allowing you to optimize them to get the most out of them.

Just for the keywords and ad groups that have proven to produce leads, you want to remove the terms, keywords, and ad groups, text ads, and capture pages and place everything into a separate campaign.  Once you move them into a separate campaign, you can then increase the budget and increase the amount of time you spend optimizing.  This allows you to invest your time in the right place, but more importantly, you can put your money into a campaign that is a lead generator or money maker.  These campaigns, which are known to convert, are labeled and assigned a much higher budget.  By increasing your budget on you top performing keywords and ad groups, you are increasing the ability to generate more leads and more money because you have already optimized the key metrics for traffic, cost, and quality.  These are also campaigns where you understand their behavior.  The campaigns could be a buying behavior or converting behavior and with such behaviors, you want to maximize how much money you spend in that campaign. You want as many conversions as possible.   Again, this is a step that should be done once a month.

In essence, by doing this, you are creating different high performing campaigns that are separated based on their behavior.  For example, you could have a high converting campaign for leads  Another one for sales and sales ready leads, who are leads that are calling you and following up with you.  You could have several campaigns in the sales funnel for your introductory sale or low price sale and your top tier sales, which have the highest profit margin.

This way you are tracking which of your campaigns are producing the most results and this is done by separting those key performers into their own campaigns where they can be optimized and maximized.  This is a big part of the overall ppc optimization process.

After this step, you then want to track these high producing campaigns at least once a month.  As you can see, the ppc optimization process does not happen in one day or one week, or one month.  This is why optimization is often referred to as a system of testing, monitoring, and evaluating.  Improving your campaigns is a circular pattern over days, weeks, months and then returning to step one where you compare the two date ranges and look for gains or losses, so you can continue to determine the appropriate actions to either stay on track or get back on track.

Master PPC Optimization

PPC optimization requires study and much practice.

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Cash and Pay-per-click Affiliate Programs

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by admin.

Millions are paying to get a ride on the Information Super Highway everyday. Now, it is widely known that the Internet is an accessible resource of many income-generating activities. Whether you belong to a private sales company or you are just interested in internet marketing, PPC affiliate programs can be a powerful venue to make money from the Internet. A partnership with an affiliate merchant is a win-win situation for the merchant and the affiliate: sales are soaring because of exposure and traffic while the affiliate is earning good cash.

To make things much simpler: the affiliate merchant provides a strip of advertisement and pays you when someone clicks on the ad’s link. You can get a commission of $0.10 to $0.30 for every click, but it sometimes it can go higher depending on your merchant affiliate. Sometimes, merchants require a quota ($1.4 for every 1000 clicks). Plus, you can get discounts from your merchant affiliates if you happen to like their products too. You can just kick back and relax while your website is generating cash. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What is PCC Affiliate Program?

PPC means pay-per-click, wherein you get in partnership with an affiliate company that literally pays you for every click. There are actually two types of PCC affiliate programs – those who pay a commission based on the number of clicks and the other based on the sales. The pay-per-click scheme is much more popular than pay-per-lead because the affiliate gets paid by just clicking the ad, regardless of whether the visitor buys from the affiliate merchant or not. Plus the chances of a visitor purchasing something from the affiliate merchant are not really that high.

In choosing an affiliate program, read the fine print carefully – some pay-per-click programs get the ratio of the number of people who went to your site and the actual people who clicked on the ad. If you have a heavily targeted website, this can hurt your earnings.

How do I start?

Of course, you need to have a website. Depending on your target audience, choose the best affiliate merchant that is most related to your topic. For example, your website is about Carpentry then you can search for affiliate programs that sell tools used in carpentry.

However, if you don’t have a website, that’s not a problem. You can put up a content site about absolutely anything under the sun like ‘Taking Care of Dogs’ or ‘Decorating your own Home.’ But wait, its not over yet. We are faced by a dilemma – on how to increase traffic! You first need to get internet surfers to see your website, then the ad.

How do I increase my traffic?

First, design your website in such a way that it will attract internet users. A user-friendly site is always recommended so that the customers will know which one to click. Take into consideration the look and feel of the advertisement. If it doesn’t look professional, most likely, users will just ignore it. Place the ad on a strategic location – one where users can see it clearly. Visibility of the ad is always important.

Another way is to post a link to your website in forums, web communities, ezine articles or bulletin boards. However, this method requires a lot of effort – that defeats your purpose of getting easy money in the first place! The key is to do something once and forget about it. It’s like putting your business on autopilot. To maintain you pay-per-click business, be sure to track down site activity, so you are updated on how much money you are making.

Can I make more money?

If you think you can go to the next level, you can try a two-tier affiliate program. This gives you the power to recruit affiliates. Other than the money you get from your website’s clicks, you will also get a percentage of what your affiliate generates. Some companies give 30% to a soaring 50% commission on all referral sales.

Remember, you should be able to manage and monitor your affiliate program. If you can recruit more affiliates, then you can get paid more without even moving a finger! Choose affiliates that can most likely attract more internet users and bring more traffic. You just have to know the right people.

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PPC Advertising for Maximum Web Promotion

Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by admin.

Engaging in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has its own benefits and drawbacks. But what exactly is PPC advertising and what it can do to your business?

Business nowadays is doing different kinds of austerity measures when it comes to advertising their products and services. This is because of high rates of placing ads on print and on television. But there is a fast growing approach that businessmen can utilize to bring their services closer to the people and that is through Internet Marketing.

One tool that is causing internet marketing popularity is PPC advertising. This is a technique used in search engine marketing that requires one to pay a fee every time someone clicks an ad on your website. Usually this placement is done through a bidding process. If you are a top bidder for your keywords/phrases, you are sure to be on the number one spot on all search engines. Just be sure of the effectiveness of your ad copy to get the most number of clicks you need for your business.

Here are the benefits of PPC advertising are:

Cons of PPC advertising includes:

1.    Fixed payments every month to the search engine you choose.
2.    Pay for each click received by your website. At times, visitors are just competitors or people playing pranks on search engines. This hassle wastes money you put in to this advertising.
3.    Inability to pay for the fees next month would mean removal of your website on the paid listings.
4.    This advertising can only be used temporarily because it is difficult to handle in the long run.
5.    Pay-per-click pricing can be costly for long periods of time, therefore, this should be stopped after an ad campaign.

But how exactly PPC advertising can increase traffic, leads and sales?

PRE-QUALIFIED TRAFFIC. All visitors of your website are already considered as a qualified consumer or buyer of your product. PPC advertising leads your customers to you for a lesser cost.

INSTANT EXPOSURE, IMMEDIATE PROFITS. PPC search engines enable you to get your desired results fast. They will have your website live within just a few hours which means immediate increase in sale.

CONSISTENT TOP LISTINGS. This is to get your website on top of the sponsored search results for free. You just have to choose the keywords related to your site and business and place them within your web pages. After this, you are done.

PPC advertising enables advertisers to control their advertising campaigns. Advertisers have effectively targeted their audience and set their own price per click. PPC advertising networks provide the platform to identify the desired audience by geographic setting, topic and industry.  These networks have a list of websites of the publishers where the ads will be placed.

Tools are provided by the networks to check how the pay per click limit is working for a certain advertiser. If its still competitive, would it be even listed among the paid search lists or does it generate sales? Of course, if the advertiser made the highest bid, the better chances the ad will be seen in the search engine. These networks too provide protection for the advertisers against click fraud. This advertising set-up allows advertisers to set a daily budget for his ads, thus, less spending for unnecessary clicks. Advertiser will never go over his budget.

In PPC advertising, what are important are the keywords and phrases. You have to select at least ten “very specific” keywords that would give you the best traffic in the search. Then, write the ad creatively but straightforward. Tell the truth about your product or service and do not lie. Good thing if your product or service will not disappoint those that are relying on your ad’s promise – but what if it did otherwise? Important too is the clarity of the ad. Do not use very vague languages. Include important details like the price.

You should also remember to budget your bids. Do not go overbidding because you will only lose your money and do not go so low that your ads will never get the chance to show up. Check your profit against your spending. If you see no progress then most likely you have to drop your ad campaign.

More and more advertisers have been using PPC advertising and it will continue to grow faster than any online advertising techniques. From revenues of $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, cost per click will dramatically go up as well from $0.29 to $0.36.

PPC advertising is new in online marketing and it is going to continue in the years to come. For advertisers, this means increase revenues with fewer advertising expenses, savings, more sales, good return of investment (ROI) and effective ad campaigns in the days to come.

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PPC ADVERTISING: HOW TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS “CLICK”

Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by admin.

PPC stands for Pay Per Click – a popular advertising technique on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the advertiser’s web page.

In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results and listings. Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services – the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will find the ad (and click on it) to go to their websites (this is why some people call it “keyword auctioning”). Advertisers would then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through the website.

PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:

·    Pay per placement
·    Pay per performance
·    Pay per ranking
·    Pay per position
·    Cost per click (CPC)

PPC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:

1. Setting up an account and/or deposit funds.

2. Creating a keyword list.

3. Choosing (and setting up) an account with a PPC search engine.

4. Bidding on the ad placement, including the search result words or phrases.

5. Writing out an ad copy.

6. Setting up the ‘landing pages’ for your ads.

7. Placing the advertisement in the search engine.

There are many benefits to Pay Per Click advertising, making it an effective way of promoting a business ‘online’. Some of them are listed below:

·    Get launched immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly – they can go ‘online’ within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.

·    Obtain specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic. PPC provides you with a quality or a well-targeted traffic. Visitors are narrowed down into ‘qualified’ people who are actually looking for specific products and/or services that you offer – those who are more likely to become a ‘lead’ (a convert) and complete a transaction (either by buying your product or subscribing to the service that you are offering.

·    Widen your reach. PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from the natural or “organic” search engines.

·    Track your investment. PPC advertising makes use of a tracking system that will determine exactly who comes to the website and what they do once they arrive – the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who are converted into customers or leads).

Below are some important things to consider when planning on a pay per click campaign:

1. Know your product. Take an inventory of the product and/or services that you have to offer (before anything else).

2. Stay within the budget. Determine your daily or monthly budget; and stay with it. This means keeping your budget in mind, avoiding bidding wars if possible.

3. Bid just right. Know how to bid right – a bid that is too high can exhaust all of your money, while a bid that is too low can make you lose that spot.

4. Watch the bottom line. Measure your profit margin against your spending or expenses. Know when to stop and terminate your PPC program – if you spend more on advertising but have little or no sales at all.

5. Find the right keywords. Decide which keyword phrases to opt and bid for. Do some keyword research, either by actually looking at existing search terms or with the use of online keyword suggestion tools, to know which terms are mostly used when searching for items that are related to your business. Focus on specific keywords, not on general ones.

6. Write effective ads. A good PPC ad is that which can persuade and move a searcher. There are several approaches to this:

·    Discount offers
·    Testimonials
·    Celebrity/famous endorsers
·    Money-back guarantees
·    Free trials or sample offers
·    Freebies
·    Reverse psychology
·    Major benefits (“Lose weight”)
·    Direct instructions (“Click here”)

7. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. The website should be simple – designed in such a way that it will be easy for visitors to navigate and load. Include contact details to create a good impression among potential customers.

Done properly, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool that will maximize the return on your investment.

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