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Tips for Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
By Eddie Machaalani (c) 2005, Interspire,
ROI and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint
http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint 

Introduction

Pay-per-click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest
methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to your website.
While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for
some, it's actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one
marketing method that you can't live without.

What I'd like to do today is provide some tips and techniques
that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ad's.
Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing
endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than
others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously
known as Overture. It's a good idea to start your PPC campaigns
with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search
engines to experiment and see where your target market may be
lurking.

Generally speaking, I've found Google Adwords is better for more
technically orientated products or services, including software,
hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for
general consumer products, including insurance, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you
should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they are
performing their best. We'll discuss this in detail a little
later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of
all when it comes to creating your PPC ad's. You'll need to
select keywords that are specific to your product or service
offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that
are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner
than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one
question:

"If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or
phrases would I search for?"

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then
use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your keyword
list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try
searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side for your
competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the
overture search suggestion tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords,
including the number of times that keyword has been searched for
on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There's often a fine line between selecting keywords that are
either too specific or keywords that are too general. Try to keep
away from these, as they can often result in wasted PPC funds.

A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently
for our latest product, TrackPoint, which -- not coincidently --
is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking
tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet
marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually
impossible to compete with the other advertisers.

The term "internet marketing" is searched for 825,674 times per
month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge number of
different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for
"internet marketing" on Google AdWords is $13.84 per click! With
an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising
alone would cost $505!

Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of
visitors to sales, or you're selling a high priced item that
usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting
more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall
competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the
chances of turning your newly found web site visitors into
customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my
keywords. One keyword was "ROI tracking", which is searched for
1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid.
This keyword is also more targeted to the product I was
marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on
my ad should turn into customers.

It's also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always
necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate great leads.
This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Now that we've selected our keywords, we need to get those
searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in them
clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our
product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their
search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has been proven
to increase click-thru rates on ads by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for "ROI
Tracking" and the title of a PPC ad begins with "ROI Tracking",
then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn't
need to know much else, other than that the PPC ad is catered
specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more
relevant title by combining your different keywords into one PPC
ad. For example, I could have easily used something like "ROI
Tracking PHP Script" as the title of my ad, which effectively
would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my
ad more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to
analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to
differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our particular
case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions,
whereby they manage the software on their servers in return for
monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more
control over their software, as well as those not wanting to pay
monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my
ad "Pay no monthly or per traffic fees".

Next -- and this is where experimentation is extremely important
-- we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will
attract the potential customer and let them know that our product
is exactly what they are searching for. To do this, I start my
ad's description with "Track PPC, campaigns & search".

Finally, it's good practice to add a "Call to action" at the
bottom of your ad. If you're not familiar with this term, its
usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such
as "Click here to view a demo", "Download Now", etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to
be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we'll add this
line to the end of our PPC ad's description:

"Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!"

Reducing Click-Thru's

Sometimes it's important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC
ad is receiving. This could be because you are attracting people
who are only after free products/services, or even the wrong
target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru's are to make the
description of your ad more targeted and to add the price of the
product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I've discussed above)
can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but potentially increase
the likelihood of a click resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words "PHP script" to the
description, we are effectively filtering out those looking for a
hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a
server that isn't capable of running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that
the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking for a PHP
script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to
the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking for free
products, and target those willing to purchase your product or
service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign --
whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad -- is
knowing whether or not your ads are actually converting into
sales or not.

If your ads aren't making you money then you're more that likely
better off saving your advertising dollars and adjusting your
ads or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion
tools that you can use to get a holistic view of your current PPC
ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add
conversion code to your website to tell you exactly which of your
ad's are converting into sales and which aren't. This is often
referred to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much money we are making per dollar
spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we are making
more money than we are spending, then the ad is working and we
can use this knowledge to further improve our other ad's or
increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ads are costing us more than they are
returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our approach, or
remove these ads altogether. It's a rather simple formula, but
frustratingly ignored by many advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form of
Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor and
adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return
on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I've provided you with a clear insight into PPC
advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your
advertising campaigns. It pays -- pun intended -- to do your
research and understand your target market, because the rewards
can sometimes be much more than you expected.

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Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project manager.
He's most recently been kept busy helping out with the interface
design for Interspire's ROI and Conversion Tracking Application,
TrackPoint (http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint). To see how
TrackPoint can help boost your revenue, go here:
http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint
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