How to Double Your PPC Results Without Spending an Additional Penny

Guest post by Jason Capshaw

There are two ways to double your PPC results:

1. Double the amount you spend daily by performing the following calculation and entering it into the daily spend box. (s = to your current daily budget;  b represents your future daily budget):

2. Double the effectiveness of your Adwords campaign. Here is your formula (c = conversion rate, p = future conversion rate):

Doubling your conversion rate gives the exact same effect as doubling your PPC spend. It also gives you the upper hand…

Pushing your competition out of the PPC market

Imagine getting double the results your competitor gets for every dollar you spend. It would allow you to drive prices up and allow you to still make a good profit. However, your competition may not be so fortunate. If they can only spend $2000 per month, and they have to double their bids to compete with you, they will have to have downtime where there ads are not running. Eventually it will become too costly to compete and they will be forced to find business in other venues.

Your competition will have no idea what hit them, especially since only 11% of companies use conversion rate optimization. More than likely, they have never even heard the term.

Google Website Optimizer

All though there are many software solutions out there for conducting conversion rate optimization, I have found Google’s Website Optimizer to be everything that I need. Plus, it’s free.

Google offers two types of testing:

Google divides up your visitors across the different pages or page combos (multi-variate testing) and monitors how many conversions each produces. At the end of the test, the page with the most conversions wins and you can roll that out onto your site.

Combining Google Website Optimizer with Google Adwords

Inside of your Google Adword account click on Reporting -> Website Optimization and you can get started with Google website optimizer. The experiment will be a part of your Adwords reporting and give you more details on what is working and what doesn’t.

When most people start optimizing their website, they get tunnel vision on their site’s content and graphics. However, to really get the best results you should run several tests from different ad groups.

Page x may not perform well with the ads in ad group 1, but perform super well with ad group 2. Typically the reason for this is that the page meets the expectations the ad gave the visitor.

Finally, you will need to run the tests again with the best ad group and best pages, but with different keywords to see which keywords perform the best for each ad and page.

Sounds complicated, but it really is not that bad.  Here is a mind map to explain the process. We will use multivariate testing for this mind map, but the principle is still the same for a/b split testing.

Once I have completed the above process, I like to go back and micro-target the ads for specific keywords with different combos to see if we can get even more of a conversion rate increase.

Jason Capshaw is founder of MyWebTronics, an Atlanta internet marketing firm. He resides in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

Head Keywords – Applying the 80-20 Rule To PPC Campaigns

This is a Guest Post by Justin Freid

Certain keywords get searched more times than others; knowing which keywords these are can help you use your valuable time and focus on keywords that will provide you the best return on your investment. What is known as the 80-20 can be easily applied to paid search, 80% of your traffic is going to come from 20% of your keywords. So wouldn’t t it make sense to spend 80% of your time on that 20% of your keywords?

These keywords often represent a significant amount of your traffic along with most of your conversions and generate the most revenue. It makes sense that your eyes and time should be focused on these keywords more than your long tailed keywords.

While growing a list of quality long tailed keywords through query mining can be beneficial and provide very targeted visitors to your site, the low volume of searches and revenue related to these keywords does not justify a significant time investment.

With that in mind, keeping focused and fine tuning the ad groups that contain your highest grossing keywords is extremely important. It presents you with the best ROI for your time investment. In another post I addressed the practice of keeping branded keywords separated in their own campaign. This would allow for your other campaigns with head and tail keywords to not have their data skewed by your high CTR and converting branded keywords.

Following this methodology, keeping a common structure throughout your other campaigns can be extremely helpful as well. If possible and relevant to the ad copy, try to keep like head terms together within ad groups. If you are consistent with your set up if segmented and relevant ad groups, reporting will be more clear and you will be able to make more justifiable decisions regarding your head and tail terms. This practice should lead to optimizing your account for clicks and cost reduction.

Justin Freid is the founder of Justin Freid Media, a paid search and search engine optimization agency. Justin also runs an internet marketing forum to help others learn and implement SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing.

PPC Challenge Update – Week 4

It’s now been 4 weeks since the beginning of the PPC challenge, and the end is in sight. While the month is almost over, the challenge will go on for another week.

Let’s see: blasting new campaigns is not hard, but finding the time to sit down and do it, is another matter.

Last week I said I was going for 15 new blasts, and I ended up doing 7. My total count as of now is

- 2 to  landing pages

- 12 direct to a merchant on CJ

- 9 direct to merchants on SAS

And here are my stats:

Impressions: 72,301
Clicks: 631
CTR: 0.87% (it  went up a little more again. BTW, some of my ad groups are getting as high as 4.85$, but some are not getting any clicks))
Cost: $129.90
Commission: $115.82
Profit: - $14.08 I am still in deficit, but I am confident that once the blasting phase is over, and I go into the account and remove those keywords and phrases taht are getting lots of clicks and no sales, I will be in profit.

I made a total of 6 sales from 4 campaigns, and that is pretty good.

This week I went back and got reacquainted with the AdWords Editor, which I’ve used a lot in the past, but forgot how to use it, since I haven’t done much PPC in the past year or so.

My FaceBook campaign is also getting some action, after I increased my bid amount. No sales yet, but I am seeing clicks from there.

Nest week I’ll wrap up this challenge, and will probably give a follow up update in a month or two.

Do you need help stating new campaigns? Do you have questions? Post below and I’ll be happy to help you. Here is to PPC success!

PPC Challenge: How Am I Doing After 3 Weeks?

It’s time for another update on my PPC challenge. Last week I was on vacation in Jamaica, so no I made no progress in adding more campaigns, but my existing campaigns continued to run.

So, let’s see how I am doing.

So far, I started 15 campaigns

- 1 to  a landing page

- 8 direct to a merchant on CJ

- 6 direct to merchants on SAS

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 56,342
Clicks: 435
CTR: 0.77% (this went up a little bit since my first week, but it’s still to low)
Cost: $99.68
Commission: $72.34
Profit: - $27.37 Yep! I am in the red, but that’s normal during the blasting. As I learn more about what my market is looking for, I’ll add more negative keywords, remove key phrases that are not performing, etc.

What is important is that out of 15 campaigns, I had 4 sales: 2 from the same campaigns, and one each from two other campaigns. this means I have 3 winning campaigns, which I can tweak and improve once my blasting is done.

My 3 FaceBook ads are yet to get a click, but I received an email from them, with suggestions for improvement. I didn’t have time to apply their suggestions yet, but it’s on my list for this week.

Also for this week: I need to step up my blasting, or I won’t be able to do 50 campaigns. I am going to try 15 campaigns this week, and I’ll be back next Monday with another update.

If you’d like to learn how to successfully learn PPC marketing, check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report.

5 Things You Can Do to Make Your PPC Campaigns More Successful

This is a Guest Post by Gagandeep Singh

A pay per click campaign is a great way to get some quick quality traffic for your website. Just create an account with Google or any other advertising network, put some money in your account, bid on keywords, write ad copy and you are set. But is it that simple? Unfortunately, no! A successful PPC campaign with a good conversion rate and positive ROI demands lot more than that. Here we’ll highlight five important things which you should do to make your PPC campaign more successful.

Highly Relevant Landing Pages – The success and failure of your online campaign depends completely on the success and failure of landing pages. The more relevant landing page is, the higher the conversion rate & quality score and  less you have to pay for the same amount of traffic. The traffic you get from PPC campaigns is always looking for some specific things, so make sure to make your landing page relevant to the ads you are using to attract traffic. Try to use the same keywords in title and body of your landing page which you’ve used in your ad copy so that your visitors can get the feeling that they are in the right place.

Highly Targeted Ad Groups - Google allows you to have 2000 ad groups per campaign. Split your keywords in to more targeted ad groups according to their theme and create separate ads for each ad group targeting that specific group.

Broad Match is Not Always Bad – If you are already using Adwords or studying about it then you must be aware about all three keywords matching options – broad, phrase and exact. Google uses broad match as the default option, which means if you are targeting keywords “blue widgets” your ad will be shown for search queries like “ How to create blue widgets” , “ I hate blue widgets” etc. On the other hand, in exact match you ad will be shown only when somebody search for “blue widgets” specifically which means that it will not be shown for queries like “ cheap blue widgets” “buy blue widgets” etc.

Although, most of the traffic you get from broad match is not as relevant as you get from exact match it sometimes helps you to identify some hidden gems keywords which you had ignored earlier.  Just make sure that when you use broad match you use lots of negative words.

Negative Keywords Are Very Important - Time and again, we see the companies putting lot of effort in doing keyword research but completely ignore the negative keywords. Negative keywords are the words that will stop your PPC ads from being shown if they are present in the search query. Let’s day you sell blue widgets and are using broad match option in your campaign. Now your ad would be displayed for queries like “I hate blue widgets” or “How to sell blue widgets” or “Free blue widgets” etc which will affect your CTR (click through rate) and eventually will reduce your quality score. So the best solution to this is to put such keywords like hate, sell, free in your negative keywords list.

Geo-targeting is Important – Geo-targeting can save you a lot of money if your offer is localized. Geo-targeting your campaigns will help you to show your ads only to the users from specific locations based on their IP information.

Okay. These are the five things I feel should be done to make PPC campaigns successful. Do you think there are other must-do actions you must take to achieve PPC success? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments below.

Gagandeep Singh is writes for Invesp about affiliate marketing, landing pages and conversion rate optimization.