Pay-Per-Click – Is Your Landing Page Working for You?

Without a doubt after the click-through, the landing page is one of the most important pieces of your PPC puzzle. If you convinced the searcher to click on your link, but fail to deliver what  you promised in the ad on your landing page, you spent that money in vain.

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.

PPC Challenge Update

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.

Pay Per Click Basics

Pay Per Click or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.

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.

March PPC Challenge

This month I am participating in Matt Levenhagen’s Blast Challenge 11. What is that, you may ask? Every few months, Matt challenges the members of his campaign blasts forum to challenge themselves and do 100 PPC blasts/campaigns in a span of 5 weeks.

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!

What To Do When You Find a PPC Winner

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.