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”.
February 7th, 2008 — General
Internet advertisement will reach $23 billion in 2010 according to Park Associates - that would be 10% of the total spent on advertising that year. And guess what - a big share of that money will go into PPC-advertising. Good News!
February 7th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
If you want to start a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign one of the first things to do is to check out how many advertisers are bidding on that search term. The fastest way to do that is to just search for that phrase in google.
Some keywords have almost a hundred advertisers - just type in “affiliate marketing” and see how many ads show up (per page there is an 8 ad maximum, but then the ads show up on other pages too).
Other keywords might have only two advertisers - when I typed in “pencil” there were just two results showing up.
Guess which campaign will be easier to compete in? Usually everything below 15 ads per searchphrase is an easy game, and every searchphrase that has more than 50 ads will be a tough one.
But again: this is just a rule of thumb, and some search-terms will be just too hard to monetize even if you are the only one. The key to higher profits is as always: testing, testing, testing.
January 31st, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Ok, this is pretty basic, but it’s still powerful. And if you’re not currently applying it, you are leaving money on the table no matter how sophisticated you are already.
Example, if you are selling edible underwear online you might target keywords like: “edible underwear”, “eatable underwear”, “underwear you can eat”.
But instead of having all the search-terms for the same ad, you should create a new ad for every search-term. The exact search-term should be in the headline.
Why? Because Google displays the search-term bold in the ads if they match the search term.
So let’s pretend somebody searches for “eatable underwear”, your Google Ad might show up like this if you do it wrong:
Eatable Underwear
Fun and Sexy Underwear.
+ Free Shipping with Min. Purchase!
EatMyShortsShop.com
Whereas if you do it right and set up an own ad for the specific search phrase “edible underwear” it will bolden the term in the headline of your ad:
Edible Underwear
Fun and Sexy Underwear.
+ Free Shipping with Min. Purchase!
EatMyShortsShop.com
Now will this little bolding turn you into a millionaire overnight? No, but chances are pretty high that including the searchphrase in the ad headline will increase your CTR by some percentage points - and in the PPC business it’s all about incremental improvements!
January 27th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Want a way to explode your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) through the roof? If you haven’t incorporated misspellings, there is definitely a lot of room for improving your profitability.
When you launch a Pay-Per-Click campaign you also want to include misspellings. Because most advertisers DON’T include misspellings, the CTRs are higher and the prices you pay per impression are lower.
Example: if you sell gold jewelry you don’t just want to use the keyword [gold jewelry] but also [gold jewelery] - because many people spell the word jewelry wrong and slide in an extra “e”. If they search for “gold jewelery” many of your competitors who just show up for “gold jewelry” won’t show up for - which results in both lower listing prices and higher CTR!
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