The Only PPC Guide You’ll Ever Need to Read – Part II

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The Only PPC Guide You’ll Ever Need to Read – Part II

Note from Web Success Team: Here is part II of the article published on January 7th. When we run into an article that has practical application value, we want to make it available to our clients and our readers. This Guide takes the mystique out of PPC and offers excellent short-cut strategies to maximize your PPC budget and its effectiveness in driving more qualified traffic to your website.  — Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

Creating Killer PPC Ads

  1. Include your keywords in your ads (on every line if possible) for higher QS and lower cost per click.
  2. Use your headline to grab attention, the first line to mention the top benefits of your products and the third line for a clear call to action. You can use the URL line for including keywords and calls to action as well.
  3. Use Digg.com to come out with killer headlines. Look for the headlines with the most diggs.
  4. Tie your ad copy to current events.
  5. Always split-test ads. Have two ads that look almost the same except for one element. Find a winner and then write a new ad to beat it. Keep doing this again and again to constantly improve your click-though rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Start by testing the big stuff (offers, guarantees, marketing message) and move down to the small details. Changing one single word can double or triple your CTR, so test everything. This is a nice tool that allows you to calculate if you have enough data to make a good decision.
  6. Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This is a feature that includes your keywords in your ads. I used to love it but then I realized that it made some of my ads look really bad if the keywords people searched for weren’t relevant to the ads. Stick to one keyword and one ad per ad group and you’ll do great.
  7. Use numbers and special characters in your ad ($, #, ®, ©, ¼, &, etc.) They’re a great way to get people’s attention.
  8. Call your readers. For example, “hey you, skinny man” or “hey you, bankruptcy victim”.
  9. Use negative ads. For example, “Is Bob’s New Book a Scam? Don’t Buy Bob’s Book Before You Read This”
  10. Try news-style ads. For example, “62 Year-Old Woman Happy with Husband’s Performance”
  11. Try tease ads. For example, “The One Secret to Reduce Taxes by 87%. Get It Here for FREE”
  12. Ask questions: “Are You Sick of Spider Veins?”
  13. When you write ads for the Content Network, you don’t need to include your keywords. Your goal here is to grab people’s attention, so get controversial, use weird characters and get their attention in any way you can.

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The Perfect Landing Page

  1. Use landing pages; don’t just send people to your home page. The goal of a landing page is to capture leads. After that, you’ll need to do a good job to monetize those leads.
  2. Avoid big headers and navigation menus. If you need a navigation menu, you can have it in the footer.
  3. Have an attention-grabbing headline.
  4. Use bullet points to get your point across.
  5. Have 1 clear call to action. Make it clear what you want people to do.
  6. This post will give you copywriting tips.
  7. This post will help you understand how the subconscious mind works.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

  1. The best way to ensure you pay as little as possible for your clicks is by using negative keywords effectively. Read this post on PPC negative keywords.
  2. Eliminate keywords with no impressions after 7 days.
  3. Eliminate keywords with no clicks after 14 days.
  4. Eliminate keywords with low conversion rates after 30 days.
  5. Eliminate keywords with low CTR or write better ads to increase the CTR.
  6. Eliminate keywords that don’t appear on the first page or increase their bids so they make the first page.
  7. Use the Opportunities feature to get ideas on how to improve your campaign.
  8. Put keywords with a lot of traffic in their own ad groups and write special ads for each of them.
  9. Use Google Website Optimizer to test elements on your landing pages (headlines, calls to action, graphics, bullets, guarantees, etc.) This is the best way to increase your conversion rate.
  10. Pick your winning ads and write new ads to beat the winners.
  11. After 45 days, once your campaign has built a good record of high CTR and QS, lower your bids by $0.03 every couple of days and keep an eye on your traffic to make sure it doesn’t drop. Most of the time, once a campaign has a good record, you can lower your bids without losing any traffic.
  12. Look for the “Campaign Limited by Budget” message. If your budget is limiting your campaign, set it extremely high. If you absolutely need to have a budget, lower your bids so you get more traffic for the same amount. Keep lowering your bids until the”Campaign Limited by Budget” message disappears.
  13. Look for new traffic segments. For example, if you’re a chiropractor and a lot of people see you for their back pain, create a landing page addressing that issue and create a new ad group with back pain-related keywords and ads.
  14. Compete with yourself. If your campaign is doing great, create a new website (in a new domain) and get almost twice as many leads/sales.
  15. Buy several domains. Some domain names get 2-4 times as many clicks as others. Keyword-rich domains always win. Domains are only $9/year, so buy a bunch of them and see which one has the highest CTR.
  16. Don’t limit your campaign to Google. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com also have PPC programs. They’ll send you a lot less traffic, but the conversion rates are usually higher.

How To Ensure an Excellent Quality Score
QS is extremely important. If you have a high QS, your ads could get twice as many clicks as your competitor’s while you pay only half of what he’s paying. In fact, having a poor QS is the reason why most people lose money with PPC, so pay attention and follow these guidelines:

  1. Have links to a contact us page and a privacy policy page on your landing page.
  2. Include your keywords in your ads as much as you can. This is where having one ad per keyword makes a lot of sense.
  3. Include your keywords in your landing pages, but don’t overdo it.
  4. SEO factors on your landing page are very important. Have a relevant page title, H1 tag, meta description and meta keywords.
  5. There must be a connection between your ad and your landing page. If your ad promises a downloadable report and your landing page tries to sell a widget, you’ll be in trouble. You can offer whatever you want, just be upfront about it in your ad.
  6. Avoid “trouble” words like “offer”, “guarantee”, “buy now”, etc. Put these words in images and call the images 1.jpg, 2.gif, etc. Don’t put the trouble words in the images alt tags either.
  7. For all those images that don’t contain any of the “forbidden” words, use descriptive alt tags.
  8. If you’re going after very different markets (such as “beach vacations in Costa Rica” and “ski holidays in Colorado”), have individual landing pages for each of your markets so you can keep your QS high.

I hope you guys enjoy this post. It took me a long time to put it together but it was a lot of fun. – Zeke Camusio.

Source: Zeke Camusio

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