Online Advertising & PPC Marketing
February 27th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Usually in Google ads there’s the green web-address at the bottom. But recently there seem to be more ads showing up that have a call to action there instead of a link. Just look at the picture of the two ads on the left. The first one has the standard web-address there, whereas the second one has a call to action “Learn More Now”.
This is something that you might want to split-run for your campaigns and see how it affects CTR.
February 25th, 2008 — General
A new way to advertise online? That’s what Yahoo wants to do. After they reclined an offer from Microsoft which offered to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion USD Yahoo president Sue Decker announced that they had big plans.
But let’s look at that number again: 44.6 billion US dollars and Yahoo did NOT want to sell for that amount of money. Do you know what that is all about? It’s all about Pay Per Click advertisements! That’s how Yahoo generates revenue! From PPC advertising! And they didn’t want to sell for 44.6 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money…
Anyway: Yahoo’s new advertising platform is currently under the name of APEX (advertiser-publisher exchange). According to the Decker it will make it much more easier for both buyers and sellers of online advertising. They are working together with around 500 newspaper publishers to make it easier for them to advertise on a broader, yet still targeted scale.
And Google is not the only company that aims at simplicity: Google tries to make things simpler, and so does Microsoft with their AdCenter and AOL with Platform A.
February 19th, 2008 — PPC Resources
Ok, wanna spy on a real PPC-genius? Some of the real-life results he got from split-testing different ads against each other?
Visit this secret website:
February 13th, 2008 — PPC Resources
Want to learn PPC advertising from scratch?
Check out these two pretty new (and FREE!) resources from PPC-giant Google and it’s smaller brother Yahoo Search Marketing.
February 12th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Headlines are probably the most important element of any ad that you want to test against another headline.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to headlines. Just copy your way to success.
Cosmopolitan magazine! They have some of the best copywriters in the world writing for them and their headlines are worth gold! Just check out their headlines and find ways to use their headlines for your products. And you don’t even need to buy the magazine. Just head over to Magazines.com, search for “cosmopolitan”, click on the cover and will show a large image of the full cover with all the top-headlines!
Resources: www.magazines.com
February 11th, 2008 — General
Brent Sharp just wrote a really good post on how PPC advertising will continue to grow in both market share and total spending. In case you ever find yourself wondering: ‘is this whole PPC thing really worth the trouble to figure it out?’ It’ll be good for you to look at the bigger picture and see where the future is going too: more and more money will be spend online, and lots of it will be in PPC ads!
February 11th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Negative Keywords are a must. If you are selling umbrellas online you don’t want to google to display your ad when somebody is searching for “free umbrella”. So the word “free” is a keyword that you almost always want to exclude. There’s a bunch of other ones, but here I just want to point out how powerful this can be.
If you can reduce the time that your ad shows up by 50% with negative keywords you will have a 100% higher CTR (click-through-rate).
If you reduce the time that your ad shows up by only 20%, you still get a 25% higher CTR. This will be well worth your time of setting up your campaign with negative keywords.
February 10th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Another very basic but powerful concept in PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns is qualifying your website visitors.
If for example you are selling an ebook that teaches people how trade baseball cards for profit your ad might look like this:
Baseball Cards Profits
How to sell your baseball cards
for fun & profit.
www.baseballcardbroker101.com
Many baseball card collectors will be attracted to click on that ad, but they won’t be willing buyers.
So how do you sort out the people who are ready to give you their money in exchange for learning how to trade baseball cards for profit? You pre-qualify them with an ad like this:
Baseball Cards Profits
How to sell your baseball cards
for fun & profit. $27 guide.
www.baseballcardbroker101.com
You see the difference? It’s clear already that they have to spend $27 on a guide if they want to learn it. The people who will click on that ad will in general be much more likely to actually buy from you and not just look for free information.
Can you think of other ways to qualify your website visitors? If you are teaching a golf swing technique - is it for advanced golfers or for beginners? So then your headline might be “Gold Newbie Technique” or “Golf Pro Technique”.
Other ways to qualify your customers? By age, by income, by nationality, by sex, by price, “Must accept Amex”, etc.)
Examples of this: Instead of a Dating Guide make it a Dating Guide for Men over 40. Instead of a Tax Savings Advice make it a Tax Savings Advice for people with a yearly income of $100,000+ etc.
The point is to only have people click on that ad that will be most likely to actually buy your product instead of just check out your website. Remember: You don’t get paid for having somebody look at your website. You only make money if somebody buys from you. But you have to pay for every click that somebody does on Google Ads on your ad.
Qualify visitors and your CTR might go down - but your conversion rate will be much higher and so will your profits.
But there’s a downside to pre-qualifying your visitors too: Ad-networks penalize you if less people click on your ad. So an ad that get’s clicked on 10 times of 100 times that it shows up will get a better quality score than an ad that get’s clicked on 6 times out of 100. So you might want to weight that in, but generally pre-qualifying your visitors is worth the little penalization.
Again - as always with PPC, don’t just take my word for it. The golden rule of PPC is: TESTING, TESTING, TESTING. So try it, see if it makes you more profitable, and decide for yourself.
February 8th, 2008 — General
There’s an interesting article on the value of domain names for pay-per-click marketers. It basically goes on to say that domain names are still a great investment, even when the economy everywhere is tumbling down right now. Read it for yourself: Are domain names recession-proof? By Paul Sloan
February 8th, 2008 — Introduction
This is very much for absolute beginners, but if you are a pay-per-click-freshman, then check out Jon Regneruds article “Top 11 Money-Wasting AdWords Mistakes”.
