How To Get The Best

Results From Your

Pay Per Click

Campaigns!

 

By Mark Bowden

Website Mentor

 PPC Pay Per Click is one of the most powerful ways to instantly drive traffic to a sales page or website. Before we think about SEO and traffic generating campaigns we always test websites and sales pages with pay per click traffic first and there’s a few very good reasons for that.

Firstly with PPC you can turn the tap of traffic on and off at will, and secondly PPC traffic is far easier to monitor and track.

This allows you to test the sales process of a website very effectively. Also whichever industry you are in you’ll find that some of your keywords convert into sales far more than other keywords and it’s those keywords that we ide-ally would like to optimise our website for when it comes to natural SEO (Search Engine Optimisa-tion).

Now I appreciate that many of us already have fully working online businesses that are attracting traffic and sales as we speak and in many cases we don’t have the same luxury but there are many ways you can still monitor and improve your PPC campaigns to get the very best ROI.

One commonality I keep discovering both with my own experience and our regular entrepreneur interviews is that PPC campaigns should never be out sourced to an-other company.

Although there are many good pay per click manage-ment companies out there that will create a good cam-paign for you, every single time I speak to someone who has done this and then taken back the reins and managed it for themselves has had much better results.

 I guess at the end of the day nobody knows your business, target market and buying patterns of your traffic like you do.

So it makes sense that you are the person in control of the traffic you buy.

For those that don’t fully understand, here’s how Pay Per Click works in a nut-shell.

Let’s use Google’s example. When you conduct a search using Google and you are presented with the 1st page of results it is made up of…

3 results at the top with a blue or pink background (Not always displayed) which is the top 3 PPC Ads.

The main body of the search results which are naturally indexed websites. and the right hand side re-sults which consists of the remaining PPC Ads.

This is the same for page 2,3,4,5 and so on. When you set up a PPC campaign with Google

(Google Adwords) you can create a 4 line advert for your website.

 

A Headline, 2 Lines of text and the URL for your site. You then decide which key-words you would like to display your advert for and how much you are pre-pared to pay every time someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. Hence the name Pay Per Click.

The order of the pay per click results Generally this works on a Bid-ding basis.

For example let’s say I have an ad that I want to display for the keyword “Fishing Tackle” and lets also assume that I am prepared to pay 15p for each click that I get.

If I have a competitor that also wants his ad displaying for the same keyword and he is prepared to pay 20p per click, his ad will generally be placed above mine.

However, there are other con-tributing factors to the order of the displayed ads. Such as, how relevant the ad is to the page it is pointing to, the amount you set as your daily budget and also the amount of “click throughs” you get from your ad.

For example my 15p ad may appear above my competitors 20p ad if I get more click throughs and my target page is more relevant.

Basically that’s how the whole thing works.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that if you are not con-verting a certain percentage of those visitors into paying cus-tomers you can soon lose your shirt and many do!

So here’s my top tips for get-ting the very best return on your pay per click investment.

Number 1: Track the per-formance of EVERY key-word.

It is vital that you set up Google analytics on your web-site (Free) and have your web designer set up the ecommerce section. This will allow you to monitor how much you have paid for a particular keyword and also how much revenue you have made from visitors who used that particular keyword to find your site.

Many site owners are simply guessing which keywords are working for them or they take overall statistics such as the total Adwords cost and the to-tal revenue.

At least they are tracking something. But, what if one of their mainly used keywords just isn’t converting into sales and costing a large portion of the budget—how would they know?

Tracking each individual key-word is extremely important if you want to get the most from your PPC Campaign.

Number 2: Set up different “ad groups” based on “keyword clusters”

Google Adwords allows you to set up separate groups of ads and my advice would be to set up separate ads for different keyword clusters for a couple of reasons.

Firstly a keyword that is searched for which also ap-pears in your ad is Bolded and makes your ad pop out from the crowd.

Take a look at some of the results I found for the search term “Fishing Tackle

 The second reason involves the page you are directing your ad traffic to.

As I mentioned earlier one of the ways you can get your ad higher for less is to make the ad & the key-words you are bidding on more relevant to the page you are directing the traffic to.

Let’s assume I have a fish-ing site again which sells all things “fishing” from tackle to books and DVDs.

I would create a completely separate ad group for my fishing books page.

This would then give me a separate Ad which now cor-responds to the keywords I have for fishing books eg: Fishing Books, Books For Fishermen, Fishing Tips Book etc…

The ad would then direct visitors to the page I have created that sells fishing books and that page should

also contain the keywords that I have set up in the PPC ad group. I would then do exactly the same for Fishing tackle and fishing DVD’s etc…

Number 3: Create compel-ling ads OR “Pre Qualify” if necessary

Remember the ad you create must be compelling for the visitor to click through and visit your website.

Besides including the main keywords you are bidding for in the ad try to also include a benefit driven message that compels the reader to click through to your site and see what you have to offer.

Now on the flip side you might find that some of your key-words are driving huge amounts of click throughs which can be costly if only a small percentage are convert-ing into buyers.

One of the ways you can im-prove the quality of the visi-tors that actually click through to the website is to “Pre Qualify”.

This means that you craft the ad so that only serious visi-tors, buyers or prospects click through to the site.

One of the ways you can achieve this is by including a price or make it clear that the information or service is for sale and not free.

Many web surfers are looking for free information so Pre Qualifying maybe a way for your to weed out those that are only looking for free information.

This is something you should definitley test.

You should expect to see less visitors but a higher conversion rate for those keywords.

However, this strategy should be carefully monitored espe-cially if you rely heavily in pay per click for generating sales.

Now when you first set up your pay per click campaigns it’s very tempting to start throwing in lots of keywords and key-word phrases in an effort to get more traffic through to your website and that’s ok especially if you are tracking the perform-ance of those keywords very carefully.

However, what if you entered the key word “Glasses” into your ppc campaign?

Think about that for a moment. Would you be displaying your ad in front of those who are looking for eye glasses, beer glasses or wine glasses?

Well you would actually be dis-playing your ad in front on any-one who types in to Google the word glasses which includes any other words they type in such as wine glasses.

Obviously if we’re selling eye glasses or prescription glasses we wouldn’t want our ad being clicked on by anyone searching for beer or wine glasses.

This can come in to play with all kinds of products.

Imagine for a minute that you sell “Fishing Reels” and you stock many of all the differ-ent makes on the market, but not “shimano” or “okuma” fishing reels.

 Again you would not want to display your ad for those people specifically looking for something you cannot sell them.

So first of all I’d like to show you how to do just that.

When entering your key-words and keyword phrases in to the campaign or ad group there are few differ-ent ways to enter them which will affect when your ad will be displayed.

Here are the different char-acters you can place around your keyword to affect when they will be displayed:-

Keyword = Broad match

“Keyword” = Match ex-act phrase

[keyword] = Match ex-act term only

-keyword = Don’t match this term

So as an example you might have.

“Fishing Reels”

-shimano

-okuma

But lets explain what each variation means.

Broad Match

Let’s use the Fishing Reels example again.

If you have fishing reels set up as a broad match your ad will be displayed when someone types in “fishing reels” but also for just “fishing” and “reels”.

So when the search term con-tains either or both the words in any order your ad will be shown.

It may also be shown when someone includes either of those words in a longer phrase such as “Fishing Reel Reviews” as broad match will also dis-play plurals or variations of your keyword.

A broad match is likely to get you lots of impressions and lots of traffic. However, much of that traffic will be highly un targeted and expensive.

Phrase Match

Phrase match is much more targeted than broad match yet still has some flexibility.

If we use “Fishing Reels” in the campaign as a Phrase match your ad will be displayed only when someone uses both words in the same order as the phrase match exactly and not including plurals or varia-tions.

However, it may also be dis-played when some one uses those words in that order as part of a longer phrase such as “buy fishing reels online” or “where to get fishing reels”

It will not be displayed for terms such as “Fishing Reel” or “Reels For Fishing”

Using phase match is much more targeted so you will ex-pect to see less impressions and clicks but the visitor is highly targeted to what you have on offer.

Exact Match

If we surround the key word or phrase with square brackets for example [Fishing Reels]

The ad will only be displayed when someone searches using the term Fishing Reels exactly.

So if someone searched for “Buy Fishing Reels” or “Fishing Reel” your ad will not be dis-played.

Exact match is great if you have a large list of key phrases but you will lose some traffic that may potentially buy from you.

Exact match is extremely tar-geted.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords can be used in campaigns or ad groups where you are using either broad match or phrase match key phrases.

For example let’s say I have a Fishing Reels ad group contain-ing some “Phrase match” Phrases such as…

“Fishing Reels” “Fishing Reel”

“Scierra Fishing Reels”

Remember I don’t supply “Shimano” or “Okuma” reels.

Normally because I have set up a phrase match a search for “Shimano Fishing Reel” or

 “Shimano Fishing Reels” would display my advert