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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Let’s look at some ads and their corresponding pages, and see if they have the right landing page. Let’s say I was searching for “mickey mouse toaster” (would you believe 6,600 people search for these monthly?), and here is the first PPC ad:

The ad looks good, though if it was me, I’d make it more specific. Once you click on that it takes you to this page (BTW, don’t worry, I copied the link, I didn’t click through from the ad):

WOW! Do you see a Mickey toaster there? I don’t! And I think the conversion rate on this ad is minimal. BTW, I don’t know if you can see this, but the ad was linked to a page that has the search results for “Mickey essentials”: nothing to do with toasters.

The second PPC ad is this:

And the corresponding landing page is this:

While I see a Mickey toaster, I also see a lot of other stuff going on that page. Of course, if you are the merchant, you are probably benefiting in other ways from your PPC campaigns (branding for example), even if you are not making a sale on that specific page. But if you are an affiliate marketer, you want every penny to count, to give you back a sale.

Here is how my landing page would look like, if I was trying to sell Mickey Mouse Toasters ( I did this quickly in less than 10 minutes in my Front Page program). My landing page is simple and to the point.

Are your landing pages cluttered and hard to navigate? Is your advertised product lost in that clutter, wasting you money? Take a few minutes and check your landing pages: make sure they deliver what you promised ion your ad, and that the potential buyer doesn’t have a hard time knowing how to buy the product.

As promised in my original post about this PPC challenge, this is an update on what I’ve been doing to meet my challenge goals.

Just as  a reminder, I am shooting for 50 PPC campaigns before March is over: that means 2 campaigns a day, 5 days a week, and this past week, I haven’t met that goal. I did 7 campaigns:

- 1 to  a landing page (I purchased some domains a while ago for specific products, and never did anything with them, so built one small site and I am directing some traffic to it with PPC). This page is monetized with a specific product from Amazon.com

- 1 direct to a merchant on CJ

- 5 direct to merchants on SAS

My ads are getting too many impressions, and not so many clicks, which makes for a very low CTR (see image above). That’s not good, and it means I probably have to tweak my ads.

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 19,427
Clicks: 96
CTR: 0.49%
Cost: $34.52
Commission: $61.18
Profit: $26.66

This week, I need to get more serious, and start even more campaigns, as next Sunday I’ll be heading to Jamaica for a few days, and the following week I won’t be adding any campaigns.

I’ll let you know how I am doing next week.

If you’d like to join me and others in this challenge, there is still time: check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report before you get started: it will save you from making many mistakes.

The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for very specific keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low (you can always adjust it), create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

It’s an intense 5 weeks, but the results are usually incredible. As a matter of fact, the very first blast challenge I participated in helped me find my first wildly successful PPC campaign, and I only did about 10 campaigns, not 100. Here is a snapshot of that campaign:

This month my challenge is to do 50 PPC campaigns (even though I participate in Matt’s challenges, I am in the group that only do what we can). I’ve never done 50 campaigns in a month: my highest was 35 I think.

So, here is what I will do: every Monday for the duration of this challenge, I’ll post my progress here: how many PPC campaigns I did so far, what network I used (CJ, SAS, etc.), if my campaigns are direct to merchant or to landing pages, and my results for that week.

I’ll also concentrate a lot of my blog posts on how to succeed with pay per click this month.

I hope you’ll follow along with me, and if you’d like to try a campaign blast of your own, try out Matt’s blast guide and forum: there are no contracts, and the knowledge you’ll gain from doing a blast challenge may change your life. Come on: join me!

So, one of your campaigns is doing well: you have a few sales, and wonder what’s your next step. Can you take it to the next level? Make it more profitable? Let’s talk about expansion, as Matt Levenhagen calls it.

If you are using the Adwords Editor, you can view your stats for that campaign and even search for specific parameters. Do you see lots of keywords that have no impressions? Remove them. Do you have keywords with  lots of impressions, but very few clicks? Delete those too, since they’ll pull down your CTR, unless they are making sales. If they are making sales, you need to figure out why your CTR is so low, and take steps to improve it.

Next, you’ll need to see if you have keywords that are getting clicks but no conversions. How do you do that? Well, hopefully you set up tracking at the keyword level when you first started your campaign. If a keyword is getting lots of clicks but has made no sales, it’s time to pause it.

After you you prune your keywords list, take a look at your ads, and start split testing your ads. Here is a little tip for you:  create 3 copies of the original ad (so you’ll have 4 of the same ad), then create a new one by just changing the headline or one of the description lines. Now you’ll have 5 total ads running, but you’ll only be showing the new ad 20% of the time, preventing you from losing too much if the ad will not perform.

You should also figure out how much you earn per click. This is easier to do when you promote a product with a specific price, but it’s important to at least get an idea of your even if the products you promote have different price points. To learn how much you earn per click, divide your profits by the number of clicks you paid for. Now you know how high you can bid to break even. If your ad position is low, you might want to try increasing your bids to get your ad higher on the page, since ads at the top of the page usually perform better. Of course, always test: your specific ad may do better in position 4-6, rather than 1-3. Each campaign and product is different: one size does not fit all.

Go check on your campaigns and see if you can expand on your winning ones. If you want more information about how to tweak your affilaite PPC campaigns, check out the Campaign Blasts Forum: it’s absolutely full of excellent information, and everyone there is willing to help.