“I Don’t Know Where to Begin”

You know what? That’s okay. Everybody has to begin somewhere and learn the skills it takes to effectively advertise on the internet. And learning Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the early skills one has to master as a “newbie”. So the following are a few tips I have put together to help one in shortening the learning curve and getting a jump on their advertising campaigns. But please remember, these tips aren’t even scratching the surface of what mastering PPC involves, and one still needs to continue to invest in their education and learn as much as they can about it.

“I Hate Tests”

Remember uttering those words growing up in school? What kid didn’t loathe having to spend time brushing up on a subject so they could try to make a decent score on a test? But you better have a mind shift in your thinking if you want to make it in the internet marketing game, BECAUSE TESTING IS THE NAME OF THE GAME!

That’s right. You are going to hear me say this time and time again. In fact, it is probably the most important aspect of PPC advertising. If you are not willing to spend the time to find out what works and what doesn’t with your PPC campaigns then you might as well just get out of the business right now. Because you are going to fail and NEVER recover!

Listen.

It is rare for anyone to throw up a PPC campaign and have it work right out of the gate. A few years ago one can get away with doing that and pretty much be successful. But the rules have changed since then. Competition is more fierce. Search engines have made it tougher to advertise. And there’s always the dreaded “Google slap” if you use Google AdWords.

So the key is to test and split test as often as you can. What is split testing?

Split testing is where you would take two of something and run them both at the same time to see what works the best. So in the PPC world, a good example might be two AdWords ads that are identical except for the headline. Here’s an example:

Dog Training Is Your Dog Biting? Find Out HowTo Make Your Pet Stop Today.

Stop Your Dog From BitingIs Your Dog Biting? Find Out HowTo Make Your Pet Stop Today.

Two ads with the same copy but with different headlines.

Why split test?

Because one never knows what is going to resonate with the potential customer. The ad on the left might get a 2% click-thru-rate (CTR) while the one on the right might get 4%. But one wouldn’t know that unless the split testing philosophy is used.

The same idea works for landing pages. Creating two separate landing pages and testing one against the other is a great way to increase the number of conversions. And this testing strategy never ends.

Search Versus Content

AdWords has two basic networks in which one can run their ads, the search and content networks. For “newbies”, the best thing to do in the beginning is to run on the search network. It’s much easier to learn and once it is mastered then one can gravitate towards the content network and learn how to use it.

There is a lot of debate how best to structure an AdWords campaign on the search network but the following is what I have found to work fairly well on a consistent basis:

• Create one keyword per ad group. This actually makes a lot of sense when one thinks about it. Since there is going to be an ad that is tied to the ad group, one wants to make that ad as relevant as possible by using the keyword in the ad, usually in the headline and in the ad copy if practical. In an example above, “dog biting” is the keyword so we have placed those words in the headline “Stop Your Dog From Biting“. We also placed it in the ad copy to make it extremely relevant. “Is Your Dog Biting? Find Out How To Make Your Pet Stop Today”. If one puts multiple keywords in the ad group then it gets increasingly difficult to tie the keywords to the ad and therefore one could see their quality score dip because of relevancy issues. Remember, relevancy is the main goal one wants to accomplish when setting up Google AdWords Campaigns.
• Create a landing page that is built around the keyword. Several years ago it was fairly easy to use direct linking as a means of avoiding having to create ones own landing page or investing in a domain name or web hosting account. What is direct linking? That is where one can create an ad and use the affiliate link in the destination link section of the ad so that the customer goes directly to the affiliate product page. There are people who swear that they still use that method and make a lot of money. But for beginners i would not recommend it. Google instituted some new rules several years ago to try to improve the searching experience of the people using their search engine. And this meant that if multiple ads were using the same destination link in their ads, then they would not be displayed on the search results page at the same time. They would have to share being displayed and it also caused bidding wars to break out because the highest bid would be displayed most often. So it’s always a good idea for one to construct their own landing page or outsource the project out if one doesn’t know HTML to build a page themselves. Either way, get a landing page and use that domain as the destination link in the ad.
• Think about the target audience and to whom you want to market. If the product you are marketing is only available in the United States and Canada then one doesn’t want to market to the entire world. There are options available in the campaign settings where one can select what countries can see your ads, and what language can see your ads. One can also set what time of day the ads can be seen. Use these settings to finely tune your campaign.

And then don’t forget to do what?

Test…Test…Test!

One may not see great results in the beginning but by tweaking the ads, the keywords and keyword bids, and the landing pages, it is possible to turn a loser into a winner. I have done it on many occasions and so can anyone else.

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Gary Chappelle

http://maximusearch.blogspot.com/

http://gdi-secrets.blogspot.com