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By Kelly McCausey
I'm hearing it everywhere and it's breaking my heart!
"I tried PPC and it was too expensive so I dropped it."
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and it refers to the kind of
advertising that you do with Google AdWords or Overture.
You create an ad, choose the search keywords you want to
target and set a budget based on what you are willing to pay
per click.
I completely understand the Mom's frustrations because I
felt that way on my first PPC campaign. Fortunately I had
someone to encourage me and give me some advice to help
improve my efforts.
The advice that changed my PPC perspective forever:
==>Start with Google.
Google Adwords will only cost you $5.00 to start with and
your bids can begin as low as five cents. You can set your
daily budget as low as you like and you have the ability to
monitor and pause your campaign instantly.
Once you get your feet wet with Google and feel like you
know what you're doing, you can move on to Overture or some
of the smaller sites.
==>Find someone with experience to double check your
keywords.
Many of us just go too crazy with our keywords and we grab
anything and everything that gets high clicks, never
stopping to ask ourselves, will someone searching for this
really be an interested buyer for my product? Someone with
some campaigns under their belt can help you trim out the
non producing keywords.
==>Don't try to be number one.
If you have never used PPC advertising before you will have
the urge to bid whatever it takes to be number one in the
paid search engine results.
There is absolutely no value in doing this. You don't even
know if your ad is written well enough to earn a click and
you sure don't know if you're going to attract clicks that
turn into sales yet.
If you're new - stick to five cents and just learn the
system. You may sit on the second or third page of search
engine results but that's ok. You will get clicks, slowly
but surely.
This can be tough if you are using highly competitive
keywords. Five cents may leave you on page seven or eight
and your clicks would be very far and few between. If this
is the case, you need to go back to the keyword drawing
board and get more targetted, dropping the common keywords
that everyone else is targetting.
==>Break up your keywords into targetted groups.
Don't put 50 keywords into one lump and try to write an ad
that will cover all of them. Break them up and write ads
that will speak to the person searching for those terms.
==>Always be testing two ads for each keyword group.
Write two ads and have them both running. Google will
automatically split the impressions up between the ads that
you have written. You will be able to watch and see which
one is getting the clicks. Then you can rework the
underachiever and see if it starts to do better. Every 50
or 100 clicks you keep tweaking your underdog. This way you
are always improving your results.
==>Use the conversion tracking capabilities.
This was intimidating to me. I had never used tracking
before and was afraid I could not figure it out. But it is
so simple. You just place the code they give you on the
order completion page and Google will be able to show you
the percentage of your "clicks" that turn into sales. Best
yet, they can show you by keyword so that you can see what
keywords to drop and what keywords to up the bid price on.
Ok, I could give you 25 more tips and tricks but this is
enough to help you get a pretty good idea of why your first
campaign didn't go well. If you weren't doing these simple
things, your campaign was doomed from the start. It wasn't
your fault! You just didn't know!
Take these tips and go rework that unsuccessful campaign,
starting from scratch if you need to. If you put it to work,
keep an eye on things and do the tweaking and tracking, you
will begin to see favorable results within a few hundred
clicks.
Believe me, you can do this Mom!
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