Archive for June, 2007

Faced with a mediocre or worse performing paid search campaign and the pressure to allocate resources elsewhere, many businesses choose to drop their paid search or scale back their budgets ? leaving ripe buyers waiting to be harvested by their competitors.

If you face paid search challenges, before you decide to drop or scale it back, try these proven strategies to skyrocket your profits.

A. Get “Down and Dirty” with Keyword-Level Tracking

Track your paid search campaign at the keyword-level. To manage an effective paid search campaign, you must know your “per click” results from the money you have spent.

For example, if you have 1,000 keywords active in your paid search campaign and you spend a total of $3,000 a month ? do you know which of the 1,000 keywords generated your sales?

What if 80% of your sales came from 20% of your keywords? Moreover, what if this 20% accounted for just a small percentage of your $3,000 monthly cost?

Without keyword-level tracking you will not be able to make financially beneficial assessments. Time-tested experience shows that the 80/20 rule applies to pay-per-click marketing.

WARNING: Beware of Matching Options!

Although matching options (i.e. broad, advanced, exact, phrase and so on) offered by Google Adwords, Overture and other paid search engines provide “convenience” they unfortunately skew your keyword performance results.

If you setup a “broad-match” for the keyword “real estate”, you will attract visitors who have entered any possible variation of the term “real estate” including geographically specific “real estate” keywords like “Arizona real estate” that may have absolutely no relevance to your product or service.

Although it takes more time to add exact (or standard) keywords to your paid search campaigns, you will reap significant rewards and a quick payback from the profits generated through understanding your individual keyword performance.

B. Developing Custom Landing Pages

I have written a great deal about landing pages lately. Why? Because they generate profitable results through converting paid search visitors into customers.

Paid search marketing is unique compared to natural search. In part because you have the convenience to select specific keywords, write specific ads and direct the click-through to a specific web page (a.k.a. landing page). This “connect-the-dots” process creates the need for consistency among a visitor’s expectation from the keyword they enter to the ad that draws their attention and down to the web page, they “land-on”. Relevancy and consistency are essential for an effective paid search campaign.

When I review a marketing plan and its associated strategies with clients, they often laugh because I get passionate about the power of landing pages. I get passionate because they work so well at generating leads and sales that I can’t believe everyone is not using them!

So what are landing pages? A “landing page” is a custom web page developed exclusively for a paid search campaign. It is highly keyword relevant (so you may have multiple landing pages tied to different sets of keyword themes) and they focus a visitor’s attention on one call-to-action (e.g. requesting a visitor to take immediate action). The sales copy (content) on a landing page connects the visitor with the paid search ad and keyword they searched for and clicked from.

The copy is strongly benefit-oriented (e.g. communicates the value the visitor will receive from your product or service). A landing page’s layout and graphics relate and support the keyword and paid ad.

For instance, if a visitor clicks on your paid search ad for the keyword “website conversion” in Google and arrives at your landing page, the landing page will clearly communicate “website conversion”, how website conversion will benefit them and presents a call-to-action like a contact form for them to complete.

It may also contain a “secondary call-to-action” which could offer a lower commitment action like an email opt-in in case a visitor is not ready for a higher commitment action (e.g. request a phone call) yet still wants to begin a relationship with the business. Testimonials, case studies, and graphics all support the benefit and value of “website conversion”. In essence, the whole visitor “experience” created by the landing page is “website conversion” and its value to the visitor.

For example, if a visitor expects to find “real estate book” as demonstrated by their keyword search, your landing page should present a “real estate book”, (relevancy), offer a consistent message with the paid ad that attracted the visitor to click-through (consistency) and communicate your product or service benefits to fit the visitor’s needs (connection). If you get these three right (assuming that you have a quality product and a fair market price point) on your landing page, your leads or sales will skyrocket while your costs drop.

One of the reportedly major reasons why paid search campaigns fail is because businesses direct all of their click-throughs to their home page. Since most businesses’ home pages are designed to serve mutliple audiences (i.e. media relations, investors, current clients, potential prospects, customer services, etc.) they do not provide the level of relevancy and consistency expected from a visitor.

C. Luring Buyer Intentions with Keyword Selection

Keyword selection is important. The keywords you select provide access to “pools” of visitors at different stages in their buying cycle. By selecting the right keywords for your products or services, you can open a completely new market of ready-to-buy visitors.

You see – results from advertising occur through relevancy, connection and consistency. In search whether paid or natural, the visitor (search user) drives the process. By entering a keyword into a search engine, the visitor is telling you what they want to find. From a marketers’ perspective – this is a dream come true! A potential buyer telling you what they “expect” to find on your website and what they are considering for purchase.

So when selecting keywords, make sure you thoroughly canvass your marketplace using strategies such as:

? Your competitors’ websites
? Your website’s copy
? 3rd party tools- (e.g. ? Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool)
? Website metrics (find “natural search engine” keyword phrases)
? Search engines like AskJeeves (suggest keyword variations)

Most importantly, “THINK” but never “ASSUME” about which keywords your potential customers may use to find your products or services. Never give up searching for new keywords to setup and test. Both seasonal and even weekday keyword performance fluctuations should be analyzed and studied in addition to potential associations people make to find your products and services.

D. Performance-driven Bid Strategies

All paid search engines possess bidding nuances. However, for the two largest, Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, do not get locked into the top bid position. Test how each keyword performs against your website’s sales or lead conversion metrics up to the seventh bid position.

Depending on your product or service, you may be amazed how bid position six attracts less click-throughs but produces higher sales or lead conversions on your website. Test, test and test ? the outcome may mean lower costs and higher sales conversions for you.

E. Writing Negatively-Qualifying and Appealing Ads

Finally, always test different ads by interchanging words in the title and description. For Google Adwords, try split-testing two different titles and descriptions and add a unique tracking code to each one so you can identify which one causes the best sales conversion increase. In order to split-test at the keyword-level, you must structure your campaign correctly. If you are tracking at the keyword-level then this will be automatic, if not, get some expert help. Notice that I did not state, “the best “click-through rate increase”.

Why?

Because “a lot of nothing” (i.e. a lot of traffic without sales or lead conversion) is not a financially effective strategy. Consider that even a single word change in your ad can create a significant jump in your paid search profitability.

Follow these strategies immediately to send your paid search profits soaring!

Kevin Gold is a writer, speaker and co-founder of Enhanced Concepts, Inc., specializing in turning website visitors into leads or sales. If you want to increase your leads or sales, get “12 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion” by visiting http://www.enhancedconcepts.com

Google and Yahoo-Overture control over 90% of the PPC market and as such you should seriously consider using them if you want the maximum possible exposure to targeted web traffic through PPC advertising .

Sign up for the Google Adwords program is free but they require a $5 USD deposit before they will start to display your ad copy. Google provides an excellent interface to work with. A pleasant modular design groups all of your work into nice “containers” that can be manipulated and viewed in a variety of ways.

The system reporting is by no means real time but the delay on their results display is palatable when comparing them to the other major PPC provider, Yahoo-Overture.

A nice feature that sets Adwords apart from other PPC providers is that your ads display almost instantly after you place them in their system. They have built a lot of their editorial guidelines into the ad entry system.

Their system will flag your ad before you can enter it if it doesn’t meet their terms of service . That is a lot better than waiting 2-5 business days to find out if your ad had a problem or not. Time is money.

Also provided with your Adwords account are a number of free tools to help you with your campaign management.

While several of these tools are great starting points I have found the need to augment what Google provides through my own online research, tools and software as well as e-book purchases.

The lesson learned, everybody that uses Google Adwords has access to the same tools that you do, including your competitors. It goes without saying that if you want to get an advantage here you will need other resources to supplement your knowledge other than what Google provides.

Having said that the Google Adwords system is still extremely powerful . Providing you with keyword suggestions, automated bid management, campaign optimization (by Google staff), geo-targeting, roi tracking, and all the reporting you can handle, their system allows you a b level of control over your spending and the ability to truly identify who your customer really is.

What I really like about the Adwords system is the fact that the guys with the most advertising dollars are not guaranteed to win any particular market.

Google tracks the Click Through Ratio (the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it) for each of your ads and keywords. Their system gives you a better position in their display listings if more people are clicking on your ads.

Why do they do this?

To reward people who take the time to write relevant ad copy and marry that to a tightly relevant keyword list.

You see, Google will reward you for doing your homework . The time you invest studying and learning their system will save you money , which can be just as rewarding as making money.

Hey, if I could afford 5 dollars a click I would pay it, but I can’t. I need to lower my advertising costs while at the same time generating as much targeted traffic to my site as possible.

Unfortunately, my experience with their support system does not paint as rosy a picture of the mighty Google . In general, their online information is pretty good. It will solve your routine questions such as “when exactly does my credit card get billed? ) ” quite well.

Google’s support system seems geared towards keeping you off the phone with them. They like to refer to their repository of online documentation and use template driven email communication.

In instances where I needed specific information (i.e. why is this keyword disabled even though I created a brand new campaign to put it in?) I received “canned” emails with my support persons name “pasted” into the email.

Often times I was required to send them another email asking if they had even read my first one and to get the answer I was REALLY looking for.

At the end of the day I was left feeling that eventually my problem was going to be solved I just wasn’t sure when that was going to be and how many times I would have to contact them in order to get the answer I really wanted.

Typical Costs associated with Running an Adwords Campaign

There’s two ways to approach this:

Are you going to manage your own campaigns?

or

Do you want to leverage someone else’s experience and invest money in a company that can manage your Adwords campaigns?

Let me suggest that you manage your own accounts at least in the beginning . Start small and start collecting reference materials while you learn how the system works.

Search for other products and resources that can help you but keep in mind some of them won’t work out . Don’t let that stop your research, there is material out there that can truly help you and save you a lot of money.

Investing in a $40 e-book is a lot cheaper than blowing $500 or more with Google while you are learning the ropes .

Having said that if you want to get a successful campaign started now you can enlist an SEO company to manage your Adwords campaigns.

The question is: How will you know who to trust?

You can burn several thousand dollars for overpriced, untargeted traffic if you let the wrong companies manage your campaigns. How can anyone honestly know what to look for in an Adwords Management company if you haven’t even tried the system out for yourself? Food for thought. If you manage your own campaigns at first you will get a feel for the system.

Campaign Costs

Ok, let’s talk about the typical costs you can expect running a Google Adwords campaign. The good news is Google Adwords gives you the potential to reach millions of surfers in a matter of minutes for pretty much as little money as you want to spend.

The bad news is after the novelty of having an Adwords account and setting up your first few campaigns wears off it can begin to feel like a ball and chain. There are a lot of monotonous tasks that have to be managed daily and it can be a tough thing to manage unless you are a disciplined person.

Before you spend money on campaigns and resources acquire this mental discipline. Realize before you begin that it isn’t going to be fun after a while. Google Adwords is a business tool, one of many, and as such it has it’s advantages and flaws . It can make you a lot of money or it can cost you a lot of money and create a lot of stress for you depending on your ability to consistently manage your campaigns.

Ok, your minimum initial deposit is $5 to get started as we learned above. Start here, and I suggest resisting the urge to JUMP in and start spending like crazy… stay at or near this $5-$50 level of investment until you use it up .

You’re not going to see any returns on this investment financially but you will gain valuable knowledge of how best to use the Google Adwords System to generate income without learning the hard way.

You have a lot of learning to do before you want to start pouring money into your account. Google is in the business of making money and their system makes it “REALLY” easy to spend as much as you want.

Minimum bids start at a reasonable $0.05 USD. After developing your keyword list and dumping it into Google’s system you have to start making financial decisions.

If you take Google’s suggested bid prices for your keyword list you can pay a lot of money for your web traffic depending on how large your keyword list is and how much traffic these keywords generate.

Rest assured Google’s system will provide you a lot of traffic quickly if you want to pay for it. It’s not uncommon for Google’s big management system to suggest max bids in the $20 – $30 range.

You don’t have to accept these outrageous suggestions of course so your first big money saver is to lower the max bid to something you find acceptable and enter it for all of your keywords.

Please note Google’s system will not charge you this full amount unless someone else is willing to pay that much for the keyword. Leave this number set higher if you want to produce a lot of clicks quickly.

Bidding into position’s 1-3 will deliver the most traffic, but will be less targeted than position’s 4-6.

Position 1 will get the most clicks but many of these clicks will be untargeted “impulse” clicks. Taking the time to scan all the way to position 6 in the listing and click on the advertisement at that position suggests that the searcher is extremely interested in the subject being advertised.

Over time you will learn which keywords are making you money and which one’s are simply too competitive for your budget. Google’s campaign tracking abilities in conjunction with other 3rd party ad tracking software can help you identify these profitable keywords and track your website visitors.

Unfortunately every system can only provide so much traffic and you will find the larger companies can afford to bid pretty high for more general, high traffic keywords because they can afford it.

Large companies will pay $5 for general keywords like “credit cards” because they know over the lifetime of using a credit card they will recover their investment.

The big boys can squeeze you out of the Google Adwords World just as easily as in the “real world”. Of course it’s not all “doom and gloom”. You still have a powerful and relatively inexpensive tool in your hands if you can exploit niches and find the “bargain” keywords.

Google’s system of tools leaves you high and dry in this respect unless you have a lot of money to blow on “throwing out a wide net” by trying a large keyword list and then refining your campaigns as you start to get clicks and track your conversions.

You can get a lot of garbage clicks by bidding your way to the top for general keywords . This is expensive, less targeted, and lower converting than if you bid to position 3-5 or spend time finding the less expensive niche keywords (using your third party software or e-book techniques).

Chances are when bidding on more general high traffic keywords you will be competing with large companies and competitors using SEO company services to manage their campaigns.

These companies can afford to pay a lot more than you or I for their clicks. In order to counteract this you need to tightly target your campaigns and find niche keyphrases to be profitable with Google. I can’t stress this enough.

To make proper decisions you will need to gather as much data as you can on how the Adwords system works. Obviously, you won’t have this data until you run a campaign or two which is why I suggest running your own Adwords Campaigns for a while to get familiar with their system.

Study the stats provided by Google which are really quite good in conjunction with one or more 3rd party stats tracking packages.

You will start to notice trends in the numbers which will allow you to make more effective use of your time and money by bidding only on the keywords that are generating sales.

Analysis may also prompt you to tweak your site content if you notice a niche you want to start competing for (better yet start up another site or tier two web page on your site targeting that niche and remove these keywords from the original campaign moving them into a new campaign pointing to your new content).

Minor tweaks can save you BIG money using Adwords

Some Notes on Scalability:

Google allows you to bid on 3 types of keyword matching options which immediately gives you three times the keywords to bid on without any more brainstorming on your part.

Each matching option provides different results and should be managed on a keyword by keyword basis.

Google also provides two methods of displaying your ad on their network: Content Match Listings and Search Network Listings .

Effectively this allows you the potential to be noticed by:

1) anyone searching on Google’s portal

2) anyone searching portal sites that get their search results from Google

3) anyone viewing a site displaying Google’s ads that has content related to the keywords you bid on.

4) anyone reading an email with content related to your keyword at Google’s free email service Gmail.

That’s a lot of options and a lot of potential exposure. Tweaking to find the right combination for your particular situation and spending requirements is something you simply have to do on an ongoing basis. I think the benefits are obvious to you by now.

A final word on costs. You may have noticed that I didn’t use a lot of numbers in my discussion of campaign costs with Google. What I think I have illustrated is a Google campaign truly can cost as little or as much as you want it to.

It can get you as much or as little traffic as you want it to. What kind of traffic it brings and how much it costs is up to you.

Where will your ads be displayed? More places than you might think:

At the time of publication AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, AT&T Worldnet, EarthLink and Excite all get some or all of their search results from Google.

Content Match Listings vs. Search Network Listings

When user’s do a search on one of the Google family of portal sites your paid listings appear either along the top of the search results highlighted as sponsored listings or to the right of the actual search results in text boxes.

Your position on these search pages is determined by your keyword list and your bid for that keyword.

Your results with the Search Network Listings can be quite successful as long as you manage your account using some of the techniques suggested in this article.

Use the included Geo-targeting capabilities built into the Adwords system to ensure your ads display only in areas that are potential customers for you.

Content match listings appear as inserts on web pages not in search engine results pages. My experiences with the content Match Listings haven’t been as successful as with the Search Network Listings although I still use this option for some of my campaigns.

Google’s system analyses the content of web page and serves up ads to those pages based on the what it feels the page is about . A web page on motorcycles may feature ads about buying motorcycles, motorcycle catalogues, parts distributors … I think you get the idea.

And this idea is a good one since the ads it displays are usually pretty close to what you would think they should be. When you display ads on your website using Google’s Adsense program for example, you are effectively joining their content network.

A drawback to the content matching system is you can’t really know who is clicking on your ad. It could even be a competitor clicking on your ad from their own site! Google gives you the option of disabling either of these display methods if they aren’t working out for you with the click of a button.

You can do this on a campaign by campaign basis only enabling/disabling what is working for you. If you want to minimize your risk but still utilize the Content Matching system you do have an option.

You can set up a separate campaign with lower bid prices for your keywords and only enable content matching for this campaign. Remove the content matching option from your original campaign and voila! you’ve minimized your risk.

A few more notes on Google Campaign Optimization

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting a good Click Through Ratio (CTR) for your best target keywords. Google has really offered you a chance to save some big time money if you know how to get a good CTR for your ads and keywords.

Getting a good CTR allows Google to sell more ad space which makes them more money. Google transfers some of this money to you the advertiser by increasing your ranking within their search results it displays for your keywords, at no additional cost.

That’s right, if you can write relevant ads for your target keywords you don’t necessarily have to pay the higher bid prices for those keywords that your competitors are paying. More money saved!

Advantages of the Google Adwords System

- Highly configurable system with an intuitive web-based interface.

- Reporting system is near real-time so you can tweak campaigns on the fly

- Since their system is web based you can access your account at any time.

- Good list of Free tools and guides (although third party tools may still be required)

- Rewards advertisers that pay attention to providing relevant content to their search clients not necessarily the highest bidder. Get a better CTR and your ads are cheaper.

- Geo-targeting capabilities. Target by City, Country or display your ads Globally.

- Multiple ad delivery systems. Content and Search listings, Partner Network listings, Email.

- Multiple keyword matching options including the ability to ‘filter’ keywords.

- Reasonable minimum startup cost of $5 with no monthly minimum spend requirements

- They have licensed their search results to several other large search engines improving your web site’s exposure to people that don’t use Google as their main search portal.

- Free ROI tracking tools.

- Minimum bid is a reasonable $0.05 USD.

Disadvantages of the Google Adwords System

- Learning curve can cost you a lot of money.

- Not the most expensive PPC search engine but certainly more expensive than all other PPCs except Yahoo-Overture

- Click fraud is an unavoidable risk.

- Content matching system does not always deliver the same ROI as their search listings. If both ad delivery systems are enable for a particular campaign the content match results can lower your overall campaign CTR and get keywords disabled.

- Support system is email template driven. It can take you a few tries to get the information you REALLY need from Google’s support.

- Interface does not indicate what your competitors are bidding, only the maximum bid for any particular keyword, making the implementation of bidding strategies much more difficult.

Google Adwords Resources: Google Adwords Homepage

About the Author
Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for http://www.cobrasurf.com – Providing Free Website Traffic and Free Website Promotion

He also publishes a Blog which can be found at http://cobrasurf.blogspot.com – Discussing website promotion, internet marketing, traffic generation, search engine marketing and more.

The other day I was talking to one of my consulting clients on the phone about the return on investment from his Google Adwords campaign. And, he asked me a question that I get several times a week from clients and other online marketers.

His question was?

“Eric, how on earth can my competitors afford to bid over $4 per click for the number one position on the top keywords for my niche?! I can’t make a profit on those keywords at just $2.00 per click!”

His concern is a common one among businesses that use pay-per-click advertising to generate traffic. It seems that the top positions in most competitive markets are reserved for businesses with more money than sense.

I explained to him that short term his best strategy is to just cast a broader net with his keywords by expanding his keyword list to include thousands of less competitive, yet still targeted phrases, by using tools like WordTracker or Ad Word Analyzer.

However, to remain competitive long term he needs to address the real reason that his competition can afford to bid $4 per click and still make a profit?

There are only 4 reasons that another business can bid higher than you on pay-per-click ads.

# They have very deep pockets and very dumb marketing managers. You usually find this in businesses that are used to blowing their offline marketing budget on unaccountable “image advertising”. While there are a few like this in every market, these are not the ones you need to be concerned with. The dangerous competitors are the next two?

# They earn more profit from each sale than you. If you are making a $10 profit selling an ebook, yet your competition is earning a $100 profit selling a set of DVDs and a printed manual, then (all else being equal) your competition should be able to afford to bid 10 times what you can per click.

For example:

Site “A” is making a profit of $10 per sale and converts 1 out of every 100 visitors. This site can afford to bid only $0.10 per click to just break even.

Site “B” is making a profit of $100 per sale. If they also convert 1 out of 100 visitors, then this site can afford to bid $1.00 per click to break even. (Better yet, they can bid $0.50 per click and earn a 100% return on investment!)

# They are making their real money on the “back end”. It is not uncommon for savvy marketers to sell a lower ticket item up front, and only break even or sometimes even take a loss, when they know that they can then upsell a good percentage of those customers on a higher ticket item later. Using pay-per-click advertising as a lead generation or list building method for future follow up is actually one of the most effective uses for this method of marketing.

# They convert more of their traffic into buyers than you do. Even if you are both selling the exact same item at the exact same price, if your competition converts 5% of their traffic into sales and you only convert 1%? Well, it’s no wonder that they can afford a $5 bid on “blue widget” when you are loosing money bidding $1.25.

You can get a pretty good idea who has the best converting website in any given market by watching the Google Adwords listings in that particular keyword niche for a few weeks. Unless they are one of those “more dollars than brains” marketers, the sites that constantly stay near the top long term are the ones that are generating the highest value per visitor.

The only way to compete long term on the super expensive keywords is to maintain a continuous focus on improving both conversion rates and average profit per sale.

Want to improve your conversion rates? Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. Internationally recognized as a top authority on eCommerce, Website Conversion & Internet Marketing, he’s an in-demand speaker & consultant.

Visit http://www.web-site-evaluations.com today for an in-depth evaluation to boost YOUR websites conversion rate!

Get expert tips, advice, news and commentary on improving conversion rates, split testing, web usability, copywriting, internet marketing and more. Just visit Eric’s popular Blog: http://www.conversiondoctor.com/conversion-blog/

There are good reasons why many webmasters and website owners choose to pay for visitors to their website as opposed to the involved and often grueling method of search engine optimization. Improper SEO may not only waste time and resources, there is never a guarantee that what your site is optimized for will result in actual sales or conversions. Choosing Bid for Placement advertising can help ensure that you get what you pay for and pay as little as possible to do it.

How You Know if Pay Per Click is Right for You The single biggest mistake most PPC advertisers make is paying a higher amount for visitors than they can afford. Pay per click search engines are ideal to generate traffic if you already know what it costs to generate one sale or conversion. By not going over their predetermined amount, advertisers can dramatically increase the likelihood of their websites’ success.

High-End Pay Per Click is Not Right For You if? There are millions of websites online but only a small percentage of these sites can benefit from the traffic that high-end PPC resources such as Google Adwords or Overture provide. When it comes to generating conversions from the top-tier of PPC’s, low profit margin categories of business (members of affiliate programs for example) would do well to avoid higher priced bid for placement search engines (as bid prices are often too high) and focus on 2nd tier pay per click services or vertical portals working on a bid for placement model.

How to Choose A PPC That is Right For Your Campaign When choosing a PPC campaign for your website, take into account not only bid prices, but traffic volume, customer service and account management tools.

Check Bid Prices A significant mistake that novice PPC advertisers make is to jump immediately into the largest advertising networks, namely Google Adwords and Overture. While these PPC’s certainly have the most extensive reach, bid prices per visitor are higher than any other network and can easily drain your account before even one visitor converts. Check bid prices before signing on anywhere and match as closely as possible to what you have determined you can pay for each website visitor.

Inquire about Customer Service No thanks to their size, larger PPC’s usually have much less attentive customer service (unless you are one of the larger advertisers – this means spending $10,000 a month or more). Many second tier PPC’s pride themselves on their attentive customer service. Always ask your PPC company if they can help advise you before and during your campaign to ensure the highest ROI.

Investigate the “Reach” Bid for placement search engines (PPC) are simply advertising networks that help you spread your message to their users. As some PPC networks have greater access to more users, it is important to investigate the reach not only of their own network but the network size of their partners. When speaking with sales or customer representatives ask for a list of their partners.

Top Tips for Success with PPC

There have been many small business website owners who have lost their proverbial shirts with bid for placement advertising. Case study after case study has shown that the reason that most fail with PPC is a lack of understanding on how to maximize the bid for placement model to their advantage across various networks simultaneously. Here are a few tips to make the most of an online advertising campaign using a PPC methodology:

1) PPC success resides in your titles and descriptions:

Well-written titles and descriptions can make or break a PPC advertising campaign the same way they affect traditional search return listings. The most important thing to keep in mind when writing titles and descriptions is that you are not only speaking directly to the searcher, you have an obligation to explain your product or service so that it either elicits a positive response sufficient enough to motivate them to click or discourage them from clicking altogether if what you are offering is not what they are actually looking for. When writing titles and descriptions, focus on the specifics of what that user will find at your site, i.e. special deals or discounts, signup information for a newsletter, registration for an e-book, etc.

2) Use Specific Terms for Specific Pages

By bidding on specific terms related to your business and directing visitors to specific pages which represent those terms, conversion rates on this practice increase dramatically. Imagine conducting a search and finding a great title and description but then having to go through hundreds of page to locate the information. When “landing pages” are created which offer information on what the surfer originally searched for, chances are that they will take the action you want them to, whether it be signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. A common rule of thumb is to have no more than fifty terms per page that you are promoting on a PPC.

3) Be Passive or Aggressive, but be something.

Most PPC advertisers are either passive PPC players or aggressive marketers. The secret behind PPC marketing is that these networks’ partner with other networks to display advertisers’ advertisements. So the higher you bid on a PPC, the better placement you will receive on network/partner sites. Bidding in this manner makes you an aggressive PPC marketer and the advantages are many and include ? more traffic and more exposure to target markets.

If a small website (or one of a low profit-margin category of business) decides that the traffic that each PPC network alone provides is sufficient, managers of the campaign must be aware of their bid amounts (overbidding or underbidding) as well as what can afford to pay for each visitor. Usually the top four positions are where most of the traffic is received from – the highest percentage of total clicks (thanks to partner networks). The number of clicks in your account will usually decrease incrementally based on your bid.

CONCLUSION: PPC advertising has proven to be a productive method of generating traffic (and more importantly) sales or conversions for many webmasters and web site owners. If you are thinking about trying your hand at pay per click, make sure to use the tips outlined in this article and ask others PPC advertisers if they have any advice!

Thank you for reading this article! If you would like more advice about PPC advertising, become an advertiser of 7Search.com ? where you have access to 500 million searches per month, low bid prices and free campaign assistance. Visit 7Search.com today.

Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content relevant advertisements on web pages. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral. Google’s AdSense program essentially allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google’s pay-per-click AdWord results.

Website maintenance related to AdSense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert a Google generated java script into the web page or website template. Google’s spider parses the AdServing website and serves ads that relate to the website’s content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served. The java script calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the web page.

Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain’s ads from being served on any websites in their account. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitor’s ads from being dynamically served on their websites.

Google provides a wide variety of ad formats to match the most suitable option with a website. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted towers, inline rectangles, banners and buttons. The ad boxes can be modified by webmasters to resemble the website’s color scheme. Examples of how different the various text boxes and color schemes appear on similarly themed sites can be viewed at:

http://www.ring-tone-software.com (scroll to the bottom)
http://www.ringtones-central.com (scroll to the bottom)

or

http://www.police-central.com (download left side)
http://www.police-supplies.com (scroll to the bottom)

Ads can be geo-targeted based on the visitor’s location. Advertisements containing content in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish are all available.

Channels
Google recently introduced channels, enhancing AdSense reporting. When a channel is selected Google modifies the java script to include additional tracking. The additional tracking information allows webmasters to track a variety of metrics across their sites. Channels can be used to measure performance on various domains, differences in revenue with various ad sizes, or placement. By assigning each group of pages to a specific channel and comparing results in custom channel reports webmasters can work at increasing their AdSense revenue.

Optimizing
Google determines the content of the ads that are shown, webmasters serious about earning revenue from Google AdSense can use the following guidelines to optimize their website and ensure that targeted and relevant ads are served. If Google’s spider has not crawled the site and determined the nature of the content, public service ads may be served. Public service ads will not accrue any AdSense revenue if clicked. As a result Google allows webmasters to designate alternate ads. Alternate ads allow webmasters to utilize the ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to the web page. By specifying an alternate image, HTML page, or ad server the advertising space can always being used effectively.

1.) Web page content on pages that ads are served should be static not dynamic.

2.) Ensure that the robot.txt does not prevent the web page from being spidered. Robots.txt file’s will need to be removed or the following text will need to bedded to allow Google’s content bot to crawl the site: User-agent: Media partners – Google

3.) If the website contains frames, select the ‘framed page’ checkbox when generating the ad layout code for that website.

4.) The body of the page and title of the page should contain contextual words that indicate a common theme on the web page.

Revenue Earned
Although Google doesn’t disclose the exact revenue share or percentage that webmasters will earn, webmasters will receive a portion of the amount paid for clicks on Google ads on websites.

AdSense Conclusion:
Overall, Google AdWords can provide great supplemental income to webmasters with content sites. Implementing and maintaining Google AdSense program on a content site requires very little effort and can often bring a steady stream of additional revenue for webmasters.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com , and http://www.small-business-software.net

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “pay per click” before. This refers to any type of advertising where you only pay per click-through.

Traditional Web advertising, such as banner ads, charged advertisers based how many people SAW your ad. But with pay-per-click deals, you only pay for how many people actually CLICK on your ad (to get to your offer page or Web site).

This is great because essentially you only pay for RESULTS.

THE PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH PHENOMENON

One of the most popular places pay-per-click has become a phenomenon is within search engines and Web directories. For example, let’s use one of my own listings.

Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ right now and search for “ezine publishing.” On the search results page, you’ll see at the VERY top a section called “Sponsor Listings.”

Guess who is listed up here? Yours truly! In fact, at the time I wrote this article, my book site – http://www.ezinequeen.com/tutorial/index.htm – is listed at number one.

Underneath the sponsor listings is the section called “Web Matches,” which shows the regular search engine listings that are submitted and indexed the traditional way.

If you do searches for “ezine publishing” on Lycos, AltaVista, and CNET, you’ll also see me in the top “Sponsor Listings.”

How did I achieve this? Did I pay some search-engine-optimization guru thousands of dollars to tweak my Web site in the favor of all these search engines’ algorithms?

No way! I’m on a small business budget, just like you. I achieved these listings myself, and you can too. In fact, it’s ridiculously easy.

I simply opened an account with Overture and bid on the phrase “ezine publishing.” Overture (http://www.overture.com) provides the “sponsor” listings at all of these sites.

Now, don’t let the word “bid” scare you – it’s actually a simple process. Once you have an Overture account, you can go in and see exactly who is bidding on the keywords you want, how much they are bidding, and how many clicks these keywords get each week. Then you can choose an appropriate amount to bid and estimate your budget. Some popular keywords go for several dollars, while others go for as little as 5 cents.

AIM TO LAND ONE OF THE TOP THREE SPOTS

Your goal should be to land one of the *top three* spots for your keywords at Overture, because most of the affiliate sites (such as Yahoo) ONLY show Overture’s top three listings at the top of the page in that “sponsor” section, which people see FIRST. If you’re number four or five in Overture, you may show up at the bottom of the search page, if at all.

Right now Overture has contracts with Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Lycos, AltaVista, CNET, and more search sites, and they claim their listings reach more than *80 percent* of all U.S. Internet users!

EASY TO SET UP, QUICK RESULTS

I’m the first to admit that while I’m “The E-zine Queen,” I’m NOT a technical person. I do none of my own Web design, programming, or computer maintenance, and I’m apt to throw money at anyone who can help me avoid technical tasks! But I found Overture easy to figure out.

It only takes them a few days to approve and post your listings. This means if you sign up today, your site can be listed for the keywords you choose by next week. And that means more TARGETED TRAFFIC to your site by next week!

THERE ARE OTHERS TOO

There are a few other popular pay-per-click services out there. Google AdWords Select (https://adwords.google.com/select) is one of them. Their service works very similarly to Overture, although your listings appear a bit differently – in little boxes alongside of the regular search listings. And your position is determined not only by your bid, but by your ad’s popularity (number of clicks).

The only drawback I found with Google’s service is that they absolutely will not accept any listing for a site that features a pop-up window. Even if the pop-up features content that is completely related to the site, such as for a newsletter. I hemmed and hawed to their editorial staff … and got nowhere.

GIVE THEM A TRY!

So be sure to give pay-per-clicks a try. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, so why not see what type of results you get?

It’s important to remember that pay-per-clicks are just one tactic in your bag of online marketing tricks. Don’t rely on them for all of your Web site traffic. You should still put effort into achieving regular search engine listings and gaining online exposure in other ways.

As your mother likely told you, don’t put all your eggs in one basket! ; )

(c) 2000-2003 Alexandria K. Brown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen,” is author of the award-winning manual, “Boost Business With Your Own E-zine.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more FREE tips like these, visit her site at http://EzineQueenTutorial.com/

Success with Google Adwords isn’t quite as easy as some would have you believe.

Still just about anyone who is persistent can succeed if they’ll but implement a consistent testing program. Since testing can produce a nearly constant improvement in your click through rate (CTR).

Here’s the surefire three-step formula that’s as easy as one…two…three.

Surefire Step #1: Develop Your Initial Test Ads

Notice I said ads not ad.

You want to present two competing ideas to your market right away. Letting your prospects tell you which they prefer.

Tip: Test headlines first while keeping the body copy the same. Headlines can have a huge impact.

Tip: Set it up so Google serves up both ads equally. Otherwise Google will present the ad that’s producing the most click throughs more often which will skew your test.

Surefire Step #2: Monitor Results

After 40 clicks review your results. Google displays the ads under your listings. Showing the number of clicks each ad got.

Here’s early results from a campaign I tested:
High PR Reciprocal Links
Easily Get More Traffic Fast!
Access Directory of High PR Sites.
HighPRLinkClub.com
39 Clicks | 1.4% CTR |
Served – 49.5%

High PR Reciprocal Links
Boost Search Engine Ranking Fast.
High PR Links Equals More Traffic.
HighPRLinkClub.com
26 Clicks | 0.9% CTR |
Served – 50.5%
Each ad was served up half the time. Yet one outperformed the other by more than 50%. As one had a 1.4% CTR. While the other only .9% CTR. So by doing nothing more than setting up two ads I found one was clearly a winner.

In case you’re wondering I have no idea why one ad worked better. And really don’t care. Marketing is about “what works” not so much “why it works”.

CRITICAL STEP: You’ve got an ad that produces clicks. Now you want to improve on that without wasting half your impressions on an idea that may or may not work. So here’s the trick.

Surefire Step #3: Duplicate the winner. Add another contender.

With three ads being served up equally the winner will be presented two-thirds of the time. While the test ad will only be shown one third of the time.

From here on wait until the challenger accumulates 40 clicks before deciding if it’s better or not. (Unless it’s dramatically out performing the reigning winner.) If so it’s the new champ. If it is, or isn’t, repeat Step 3 trying another idea.

CTR Boosting Ideas to Test

Here are five known CTR boosting tactics you can test:

? Put the target keyword in the headline. Google will bold it to draw attention to your ad.

? List the big benefit on the first line of text followed by the features. Does this generate more response than an ad that simply lists various features?

? Capitalize the first letter of each word verses using all lowercase.

? Do action inducing words like…sign up, new, right now, today, buy now, save now, apply here …impact response?

? Qualify by including the price.

Result? Over time you’ll improve your CTR driving more traffic to your site. Making you a winner in the Adwords game.

This is why I say you don’t have to be a marketing Einstein to develop Adwords ads that work. Just know a little bit about your market’s hot buttons and the market will tell you the rest.

See? a surefire formula that’s as easy as one…two…three.

So what you waiting for? Start testing today for more traffic tomorrow.

John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook “Traffic From Google in 35 Days”. Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml and get the free special report “Coming Out On Top”.

Are Small PPC Search Engines Really Worth The Effort?

The final answer is “Maybe.”

Hey…Whadya expect? I’m an attorney!
But let me explain further. The correct answer to almost any marketing question is “to test.” That’s the only way you really know the true answer. But we can learn from the results that others have and adapt them to our marketing.

When it comes to PPC (pay-per-click) search engines, you know they are not all created equal. Google and Overture dominate the market. The total traffic you get from them will dwarf the total from all other PPC search engines combined.

But does that mean that there’s no money in the little guys? Au Contraire. (That’s the fancy French way of saying, “No.” — and I probably missspelllled it. It’s been long time since my high school French class.)

Before I give you some suggestions, please realize that your results are going to vary – always.

Here’s the most important point of this entire article:

Your conversion rate will vary from search engine to search engine. A lot. By as much as 300%.

You can run an advertisement on Google and get a 2% conversion ratio of visitors turning into buyers. Then, run the same advertisement on Overture and only see a 1% conversion ratio. Always…always track your promotions and results. They’ll be all over the place in terms of conversion.

Does that mean you should stop the ads with the lower conversion ratio?

Absolutely not…unless you’re not showing a profit. Aha. Remember, it doesn’t matter that the conversion ratio varies as long as you make a profit!

Let’s assume you foolishly have no backend marketing in place so the only money you ever see from a customer is on the one- time sale that has a profit of $30 per sale. And you require at least a $15 profit to you after costs. with a 1% conversion ratio, you can pay 15 cents per click and still make your numbers work. You’ll get less clicks than if you bid higher, but you can still make the numbers work for you.

Of course, every PPC campaign you get set up and running profitably can be basically put on autopilot. You don’t have to micro-manage the campaigns. Just let them keep on bringing in buyers.

You will generally find that the smaller PPC search engines have lower conversion rates than the big two. But they will also usually have a lower average bid.

Just track your clicks and sales so you can adjust your bids to make your numbers work. Even if a specific campaign only results in 1 more profitable sale per month – that’s a sale that can keep coming in month after month after month. Do that for just 50 or 100 keyword and search engine combos… and you’ve got some nice extra moolah rolling in.

If you go to http://www.ShawnsNews.net/ListPPC_SE.html you can get an enormous listing of over 600 PPC search engines and read reviews of the top 30 – more or less. You also find that these listings are often somewhat out of date, but it’s a still a good resource.

Yours in success,

Shawn Casey

Internet Millionaire Shawn Casey’s “Mining Gold On the Internet” is one of the best selling Internet books with over 85,000 copies sold. In “Mining Gold”, Shawn reveals the same step-by-step strategies he uses to create millions in Internet sales => http://www.ipcgold.com/ad/100/CD3839 Benefit from Shawn’s 7 years of Internet experience and learn from someone who has actually made millions online.

When search engines pay website owners a percentage of the bid cost, you’re just looking for trouble. This is the problem with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, especially with smaller named search engines. Many websites request or even pay there visitors to search a specific search engine and click on a result. This just sends advertisers fake leads and causes problems for the advertisers that paid for the keyword listing. Many PPC search engines offer webmasters up to 80% of the bid price. For example, let’s say I pay ‘Example Search Engine’ $1 for the keyword Viagra, they then pay webmasters $.80 per visitor they send that searches and clicks on a bided search term. You can see why PPC can be a problem.

Paid Inclusion offers a safer, less expensive form of search engine advertising. You pay one price to have your site listed in a specific search engine, often under a specific keyword. Your site will also be updated on the search engines data base more often then non paid sites. Paid Inclusion costs and average of $25 a year per URL submitted. Plus the cost goes down the more URL’s you submit at one time. PPC usually starts at $.01 per click being the cheapest bid per keyword, but you’d be lucky to find a keyword that low that would result in any clicks.

Something to be aware of when advertising on PPC search engines. Although you are paying for your site to be viewed in a search engine, many times your site will show up on other people websites. This is a common practice on both Google and Overture search engines. Advertisers have to opt out of this service if they only want to be shown in the search engine,. In my opinion, this will help reduce fraudulent clicks of your paid search term.

This isn’t to say every PPC search engine is bad. For example, Mamma.com offers a fixed price per website category. They then rotate all the websites in a category evenly. Websites big and small get their advertising site seen the same amount of time. Before spending money on a PPC search engine be sure to read how they protect advertisers against fraudulent clicks. This will help make sure you get more for your money.

If there was only a way to eliminate fraudulent clicks in PPC advertising. It would make using this method of search engine advertising well worth the extra costs. After all, you are getting targeted hits to your site by people searching for precise keywords.

About The Author

Kristian Pulz is the owner of http://www.Links2See.com an internet directory and http://www.barterNsave.com a direct partner of the First Barter Network. He can be reached at webmaster@links2see.com.

As a blog or site owner, you can make some cash with Google’s AdSense pretty easily. To maximise your potential earnings, here are some tips that may help you:

1. Create Well-designed Sites

People are impatient and will not tolerate poorly designed websites. Make sure that your site’s colour scheme is overly gaudy, glaring, or plain hard-to-read. Use a readable font size, and always make use of bulleted lists, dividers and make your paragraphs short whenever possible.

Never create an overloaded website and always focus your content. Ensure that your navigation is easy to understand and that the user will intuitively know where to click to get to where he wants. A good well-designed website is the first step in attracting more visitors.

2. Place AdSense Ads On Pages With Content

Content in this case means text, because images and other media may not return targeted ads. Only text is used by Google’s targeting technology to determine what kind of ads will be served.

3. Make Them Prominent

Put your ads in a place where your visitors will have a high chance of looking at them. For example, place them in the middle of your content, or above the fold of the page, where they can see your ad before scrolling down.

4. Customise Your Ad Colours

Google allows you to customise the colour of ads, so why don’t you? There are two schools of thought here: You either make the ads look like part of your site, or make them look very outstanding. For variety’s sake, you can even rotate up to 4 different color palettes for a particular ad.

5. Use Appropriate Ad Formats

AdSense has a number of ad formats available for you to choose from, so make use of them to create ads that suit your layout best.

6. Double-check Framed Ads

If your page uses frames, check that you have selected the Framed page checkbox on the Ad Layout page. Otherwise, AdSense cannot gather the proper information about your site and will not be able to serve targeted ads.

In fact, I highly recommend that you place this line in the AdSense code of all your ads anyway:

google_page_url = document.location;

It’s just for the simple reason that while your site may be frames-free, someone might have clicked through to your site while in someone else’s frames, and your ads may not be showing targeted ads anymore.

7. Use channels to track performance

Channels are the best tool to analyse your ad performance. Use them to determine the performance of a page or site. Test your colour schemes, placement and formats with channels to tell which are the performers that you want to keep. Remember to give your channels descriptive names that you will be able to understand.

Alvin Poh has been specialising in web development, content distribution, advertising and marketing strategies since 1995. His goal is to provide practical information based upon his years of experience to help webmasters, website designers, and self-employed people achieve their goals in today’s competitive Internet. At his site, you can learn how to make money online. http://www.xodes.com/