A New Guide to PPC Marketing and Campaign Management. The 12 steps of PPC marketing which will help to lower your CTR while Increasing your ROI and Lowering your Spend!

Preface

People ask me all the time how do you create an effective ppc program. The simplest answer I can give them is a series of questions. What exactly are you trying to do? What is the actual objective of your company (and no it is not to make money in this circumstance)? Are you sure that that is the true goal of your spend and campaign? Now take what you are thinking and throw it away. Then they look at me and all I can say is, “well that’s it. You have to properly define your goals according to what you actually should be trying to accomplish, Lower your CTR and modify your highest performing keywords and phrases.”

Normally people just say “well that was a load, I could have gotten better advice from an intern!” (This was an actual quote from someone who then hired me because the agency they went with only did what the normal PPC marketer does with normal results. As I had said, they did hire me after and I increased what the agency had done 3 fold by following the steps which you will learn in this manual.)

The Manual

So now that I have begun establishing myself and speaking to various groups of people, I have decided to share a few of the 12 steps of PPC marketing which I have created for every and any type of business in the world. However if I gave out all of my secrets, I would be out of a job. This manual is a way for you, regardless of experience level, to be able to create a new plan of attack, modify a current strategy and hopefully be able to at least double the ROI (return on investment) of your current PPC efforts. This manual will give you the guidelines to be successful and will seem like you have had professionals working on your campaigns for years. However the world and the internet are always changing and with that I will always be adding another step to my program. To find out the rest, you can always contact me for help (See step 12). And with that said, let’s go onto step 1.

Step 1: Defining your business and your goal

What is the goal of your business? (The correct answer to this question is not to make money.) Is your business trying to make money from advertising? This could be newspapers, an entertainment website, anything that basically attracts people but does not have a physical product and needs advertisers to survive. Is the main source of income, or at least most of it earned by charging for advertising on a CPM basis? We will call this #1. (These are the search engine and link farm’s favorite customers as they only see $ signs which is the most common mistake in Paid Search Marketing)

Does your business have a product or service which you offer? Does this product change on a normal basis? Do you sell advertising space for complimentary products? Let’s call this #2

Does your business rely on sales? Does it have at least one product or a diversified catalog? Do you not run ads because you do not want to take the focus off of your product or products? This is #3

Once you have figured out which of the numbers most fits you we can begin a thorough investigation on the appropriate approach to launching your campaign.

Step 2: Beginning your campaign #1’s only

Your goal is to generate as many possible views to your site from unique visitors per day, week, month or year. Your goal is to also drive traffic that might be interested or might have the spend or family/friends interested in your products or services. If the traffic you drive to your site through PPC has no interest in the products your advertisers (your main source of revenue) offer, and the advertiser does not have diversified products to appeal to your audience as a whole, you have now made their advertising spend basically worthless and hurt your chances of future advertisements being placed within your site.

Lets make #1 an online newspaper where all of the articles only appear online and you do not sell subscriptions to the paper, therefore you are dependent on the traffic visiting your site to be relevant to the widest variety of advertisers possible. (This could also be an online gaming site where the games are only found on this particular site and cannot be bought or downloaded anywhere else and you do not sell tickets or tokens to play the games)

Your initial thought is to go ahead and bid the number one spot on keywords such as Newspaper, Online Newspaper, Online Media, Newspapers Online, etc… they are great they are searchable and they will drive all the traffic you need to make your CPMs skyrocket. However will the traffic be diversified enough to satisfy the needs of your advertisers, or will it only bring people to the site who want to see the info or use the services only available on your site?

That question brings up my first point.

A good way to look at it is to: 1. Look at your advertisers and their products 2. Think who might want them 3. Create 5 or 6 categories for the advertiser’s products and services 4. Set up ad groups named after these 5 or 6 groups 5. Make sure you do not rule out that advertisers can change on the drop of a hat and you will need to create new ad groups eventually 6. Develop copy specific to each of these groups which will create an interest in your services as well as the products being advertised. 7. Take the copy and try to word it three ways and run them by a random person you know to see which is most appealing and which is not. The person could be anyone on the street, the security guard at your building, anyone who may visit your site.

Now that we know our goal, have set up categories for each of the groups of advertisers it is time to select keywords which we will do in step 3.

#2s

You are the group selling ad space as well as pushing your products and services. Not only do you need to drive high CPMs but the traffic has to be relevant to you and to your advertisers. Here is a process to set up for step 3. 1. Give yourself at least 7 categories of keywords specifically to your site. Let’s pretend you are a casino. a. Blackjack, Texas Holdem, 5 card stud, roulette, Online Casino, Online Gambling, Legal Gambling Online. 2. Now lets create 5 or more categories for advertisers a. Alcohol, Cards, Travel, Gifts, Credit Brokers (although this last one is mainly a joke, think about the possibilities) 3. Think about what you should be spending to bring in traffic specifically for your casino, what percentage you will need to be devoted to your casino as well as complimenting your advertisers, and lastly what percentage you will need to dedicate to your advertisers where the traffic will at least have a minimal amount of interest in your products and services.

Now let’s break this up real fast. A number 1 priority is to ensure that your business begins to generate enough revenue that you no longer need advertisers. You want to be able to stand on your own to feet and have the advertisers begging at your (portal, internet pun) door for ad space. Wouldn’t this be nice? Lets make bullet 1 58% of your spend.

Advertisers are important and many companies need them to ensure they will have a steady flow of income to cover fixed costs. Lets give bullet #2 32% of the remaining budget.

Now to keep the advertisers, you will need to make sure they are getting traffic flowing from your site to theirs and purchasing, signing up, or whatever the conversion goal is from your site to theirs so that they continue to pay your advertising costs. This is the other 10% of your PPC budget. (A trick you can also use here is if they provide you with tracking code, use that as your url to send traffic to from the keyword and it will automatically drive the traffic to them while tracking it as if it came from your site.)

#3’s

You have products and services that can stand alone and do not need (notice I said want, BIG DIFFERENCE) to take any attention away. Your PPC spend will be devoted to your product or products. We are going to make this a t-shirt company that sells blank t-shirts to anyone or anything that might need them for this example.

We need to take a few steps to define our categories. What most PPC specialists will tell you is bid on t-shirts, large quantity t-shirts, blank t-shirts, blah blah blah. They will also group it into maybe 5 to 8 categories. This will generate revenue for you, but will never reach the max of what you can actually make. What I suggest is the following.

In this case we only have t-shirts. Here is the bullet list for a company with one product or with multiple products. Do this for each and every product category you have or produce. 1. Make your categories as specific as possible. a. Cotton T-shirts for Boys, Cotton T-shirts for Girls, Cotton T-shirts for Men, White T-shirts, Black T-shirts, Green t-shirts, Fitted T-shirts, Sleeveless Men’s t-shirts, etc…. Also, make sure these categories are relevant to the stock you carry at least 30% of the time so that way you can turn them on and off easily. (Also don’t forget people search tshirt without the hyphen.) b. Now take each of them down another notch. We’ll use Green T-shirts. i. Set up new groups which will actually contain keywords. The groups should be very specific so anyone and everyone will know exactly what they will find. Here are possibly secondary groups for Green T-shirts: 1. Sleevless Green T-Shirts 2. Tank Top “-----“ 3. Long Sleeved “-----“ 4. Mens “----“ (Make sure in these categories where your actual keywords exist you only add in keywords that are directly relevant. For example in Mens Green T-shirts use Men’s green T-shirts, Guys “-----“, Male “------“, Blank Mens “------“, etc…..)

Unfortunately and luckily that is all I am going into for the #3s in step 2.

Step 3: Choosing the proper keywords and the proper placements for them.

#1s The engines love you all because you bid high on terms that drive the traffic and pay the most money on a regular basis to drive your CPMs through the roof.

That is your number 1 mistake. Driving traffic to a site is easy, making sure they want to use the information you provide and relate to your advertisers products is the hard part. Let’s keep the newspaper theme going for now.

Think about what type of newspaper are you? What view points do your editors and does your publisher produce? (Left, Right, Middle, All over the Board, etc….) What marketplace are your advertisers in? What categories did you choose to place them in?

Let’s start by using a left wing paper which has a weekly fitness section and a daily business section.

By having advertisers like diet pills and gyms advertising in your paper, an obvious group from step two is a generic weight loss category. Make sure you only set up a controllable amount of ad and word groups for this section, because you will only need to activate it for 1.25 days a week (The evening before and full day of the section). The business category will be running 24/7 and you can leave it alone unlike the daily section.

Let’s think about how to pick words which will interest readers to want to continuously come back to your information as well as have an interest in your paid advertisers.

Most PPC marketers seeing that you rely on advertising will choose generic terms and words like diet pill information, weight loss program trends, fitness articles, etc… this is great for driving traffic, but what if your advertiser has nothing to do with any of that and is a health food store.

A way to think about creating the special term for PPC driven advertising is bid on those generic words because they are constantly searched, however from personal experience, they do not relate to every article and definitely do not relate to every advertiser. Also these words and phrases tend to be more expensive. A good suggestion in this type of situation is to bid for the 3rd to 8th place advertisements on the main engines and maybe one or two spaces higher on other tiers.

Even though it is not spot number one and you will not necessarily drive the tons of traffic, (the competitors on the keywords could have small budgets boosting you upto to the top for cheap) you will be saving budget while driving a considerable amount of traffic while being able to take the number one spaces for less commonly searched terms but they are terms that are more relevant than a celebrity diet phenomenon and have a high click rate so you get traffic keeping your CPMs up and have the budget to buy the $2.00 spot on “Pilates for the future of fitness” keyword phrase which your competing bidders will not have budget for and will be relevant to the advertisers whether it is a diet fanatic who stays with the latest trends in exercise or the gymnasium who offer 5 types of classes. Also you could be doing your advertiser a favor if they do not have the budget to spend on such a related keyword but need the business from it.

You can argue that this will hurt them if they are using PPC themselves; however you are actually providing them with double exposure. You not only drive the customer to your site where they click on the ad and go to that companies site, but you also saved the advertiser the money they would have had to spend on the keyword themselves. If you do not agree with that statement, think about it this way too.

You just gave your advertiser twice the exposure by bringing the searcher to the ad on your site meeting your goal, which also allowing them to click on the advertisers keyword ad giving them more exposure and somewhat more of a sense of legitimacy to the buyer or searcher who is looking for info, stories, or products related to the advertiser. In other words they are getting three times the exposure. Once from your ad, once from the ad on your site, and a third time from the keyword ad they placed making them seem like the reputable supplier in the industry.

This is a way to be able to drive traffic from general terms which stretch across the board and offer not only your articles relevance, but will more than likely hit at least one or more of your advertisers and create the benefit of your reader returning and your advertiser landing a client and wanting to place repeat ads with you. I can go on about other tactics on this way of bidding and provide more examples to help further the cause of the untraditional approach; however that would not be fair to the #2s and #3s. You can always write me an email and I will be happy to let you in on why this can work and other benefits.

In short though, the engines are happy because you are maxing your budget, the advertiser is happy because they are getting relevant traffic, and since you still bid on high traffic words, but spent less, your CPMs are up and you can continue to sell ad space at the rate to which you are accustomed or even higher because of return readers seeing relevance in your publication or site.

Strong Warning and Note! #2s and #3s I want to point out that because someone searches directly on your brand, trademark or url and domain name, does not mean they are ready to purchase your products. A lot of the time they may have heard it mentioned or they just want to do a little research on your products, services or company. People searching on your branded terms also include people wanting to sell to you, not to buy from you, competitors seeing what types of landing pages you have developed and numerous others who just click for research and do not intend to buy. I strongly recommend not spending on these words in top placements when you can have others take the hits for you. You will see why in later steps.

#2s You have products but you also have advertisers. Let’s break this into multiple types of keywords based on your goals. 1. You need high traffic. 2. You need it to be relevant to keep your steady income coming in from advertisers and customers. 3. You need to build a presence and a brand

I am going to make this simple. My suggestion here is to bid 30% of your budget on general terms to get traffic up high. Designate one category as general terms. Then go into the categories we defined in Step 2.

1. Find the general terms in each category and bid them in the 4th or 5th places then go for number one spaces for the second most popularly searched groups to keep your CPMs up and mostly relevant. Lastly bid on the number 1 spot on the least commonly searched but directly related search terms to drive traffic that is specifically searching out your products. You also do not want to loose the person who may only search the term once a month but is ready to buy. These terms tend to be either very expensive since they are very direct, or they are dirt cheap with only one or two bids on them because the competition might not have thought of them. These are your money makers and can help build the repeat customers you need to not have to rely on your advertisers to supplement income.

2. Take the next part of the budget and use it on strictly general terms in the third or fourth place positions. These are the terms that tie in your product to the advertiser’s product. Not only will this drive traffic you need, but it will make a correlation between the advertiser and your product. In other words, you are driving a high CPM while making your product a compliment so that when someone takes a sip of a beer, uses an off brand of card, puts on a pair of sunglasses, they will have some thought of where they first heard of the product, or all of the sudden start to think where they had seen it before and hopefully head back to your site adding extra CPMs and repeat customers for you and your advertiser helping you and your advertiser double time. (This one is a hit or miss theory but can be effective if done right.)

3. Now the final part of your PPC budget should go to driving direct traffic to your customers. Use words targeted to their ads without their brand names. Brand names tend to be general and the people searching on those brand names might just be doing research on the company. If you target the product in the ad you (namely with specific and very direct keywords and phrases) then when the searcher sees the ad there is a better chance they will click on it and it can/will convert. Also, while searching for keywords and phrases, look for words or slogans which they use and avoid those terms to the best of your abilities or at least word your ad in a way that would not draw a click from your advertiser, so they do not catch on that you are competing with them. Try to think of what they might not have thought to bid on to bring in that customer which would not have found them. If the advertiser is an American chocolatier, look for words like dutch chocolate imports or something industry specific and use the ad to make it seem local and better. Write something in the ad pulling away from the exotic and bring in the local cost while keeping the quality level high. Also make sure you use the tracking code that the ad on your site has so that the advertiser knows where the traffic and buyers came from. We will go into this in more detail in the step on copy writing.

#3s My strongest suggestion for #3’s is do not waste your money on your brand name, your web-site domain (unless you have not optimized and do not show up in the #1, 2 and/or 3 spaces in organic search), on generic keywords etc… (I will go into the reasons why you do not or do not necessarily need to bid on your own brand when we get to the chapter in incorporating your affiliates.)

I think it is important to have generic terms within your campaigns, but my strongest suggestion is that if it is generic enough, it could have other meanings like the word “record”; which could be the spinning thing that made music like magic when it was touched by a needle, or a shop that only sells framed ones which do not work, a shop that sells or has info on public records or records of famous people, world records etc…. my suggestion on keywords like this, since everyone will be competing on them, even with different meanings, shoot for position 8 through 10 mainly because you will want to find the person that is reading the ad and not the person just clicking because they see the words The downfall to some of the second and third tier engines though is that they do not offer negative keywords in searches, so you are stuck and should definitely bid towards the bottom the get the people reading and looking for the ads.

The search engines want you to use these words because it attracts people to your ad and when they don’t get what they thought, they search again and the engine gets paid twice. Also remember that with your business model you don’t care about traffic, you care about sales and that is why it is important on the highly searched words to place lower so you get the people who actually read the ads and are looking for your products.

The statement above excludes the use of negative keywords . (Negative keywords are the words you add to your categories and when someone searches using one of your negative keywords, the engine automatically pulls your ad out of the running, not showing it or wasting your money.) Negative keywords are a great way to exclude a few of non relevant search results which saves you money, however they are also not always perfect so you need to take other measures as well.

High click through rates are your killers and you need to avoid them. My basic point is that on these generic keywords, the lower the click rate and the more relevant your keywords are, and by having very direct copy, you will lower your spend per conversion, lower your click through rate, save money and have more budget left for getting the direct keywords which you would not have been able to afford or gotten exposure to because you were busy spending on generic terms which only appear relevant. This si the mistake that most search marketers make and all of the search engines endorse and recommend because they seem logical to the eye, but really if you honestly look at your clicks to conversion rates, these terms are your killer and not worth spending on. Trust me, this actually is true. You should also find that when you place your ad around spot 5-9 with the generics, your conversions magically increase due to the fact they were clicked on by people reading the ads instead of just reading the keywords in the ads.

#1s and #2s I went over the basics of what a negative search and keywords are with the #3s, I will repeat what I wrote for your benefit right here. “Negative keywords are the words you add to your categories and when someone searches using one of your negative keywords, the engine automatically pulls your ad out of the running, not showing it or wasting your money.”

Step 4: Writing your copy (the wording of your ad)

Copy is the next most important part of your PPC campaign. It can drive the traffic to your site in huge quantities, it can combine the ad on the site with the articles and it can drives away wasted clicks while bringing the clicks which makes you meet your campaign goals.

#1s You guys are the exception to this rule and this is why the search engines love you. You want heavy traffic that is somewhat related to your site. Write your copy generic to appeal to a wide variety of searchers but make sure it still ties into your advertisers to an extent. A good way to get a searchers attention is to:

1. Use the search term in the title of the ad. 2. Make sure your characters fall between 62 and 70 characters long. I have found this is great for getting attention, is easy to read quickly and just works well with the searchers. 3. If you have the option to have a url show up different than your actual landing page url, Use two rotating ads where one makes the url read as keywords or as a way to further entice the click and the other just as a simple form of your url to keep your site repeatable and refundable to the searchers. 4. Make sure your copy has some relevance to the advertisers so that the person will already have an uncontious taste for the products or services your advertisers are offering.

You should now be receiving slightly targeted traffic in large amounts keeping your CPMs up and your advertisers happy. You have started meeting your goals.

#2s You all need to take a slightly different approach. Your goal is to combine your advertisers with your products, services and/or topics. My suggestion for effective copy writing is: 1. Use synonyms or variations of the search term in the title. We will stick with health and fitness section of a newspaper and use the phrase “Information on Pilates” as the title. (This will not attract as many people just looking for the keyword, but will grab people reading ads looking for information on pilates.) 2. If you have a diet soft drink being advertised but your article is again on Pilates, combine them with your copy by trying a description like: a. Information on current fitness and food trends. This might not be the best copy in the world, however it ties the diet drink to the products or services by using “Information on current fitness” while letting the words “food trends” bring in the advertiser. 3. For the url, let the searcher know exactly where they are going by using the domain name as the url which shows with the ad. It is important to get them to remember the site so that they will return to find new information and see new advertisers. You want them to remember your site so they come back without having to search for you keeping your CPMs high.

#3s You all need the bang for your buck and ad copy is a key factor in doing this. For the title of your ad, use very direct language about exactly what they are going to find.

Avoid using generic search terms in the title as you do not want to draw attention from random people who only look for and click whenever they see keywords. (The affiliates step will cover why you do not need these people.)

Be specific about what product you have on the landing page and that they should be ready to buy if they click your ad. Sound like a lot to have to include when you only have maybe 25 to 55 characters? It is but if you sit down and brainstorm some phrases, use thesauruses and think about you product name and what your sales people use to close a sale, this becomes a fairly simple task.

Next is the description. In your description, be very direct and forward about your product, mention the cost if it is expensive, (this is extremely important if you are a clothing designer and the person searching cannot afford your clothing) use sales terms making them feel they cannot afford to buy from your site, or depending on the situation make a comment like “Do not click if you are not ready to buy!”.

With a title that does not use keywords or flare to stand out, you will reach the searchers who are reading ads and start seeing better conversions. Remember, the description is what will drive the click or let the searcher know that the ad they are clicking is correct for them or not right for them at all.

With the url, branding is important and if the person is not ready to buy yet or might be in the future, use the most simplistic for of your domain name as the domain which will appear so that hopefully they will remember it, and when they are ready to purchase they will remember your domain and hopefully not need to do a search wasting another click where you could be attracting other shoppers.

Step 5: Choosing landing pages (the page that the click leads to.)

This seems obvious enough to each of us. It is probably the simplest part of PPC advertising; however there are a few tricks and tips I would like to point out. #1s 1. Only use landing pages with the info and ads. 2. Do not build special landing pages with information then drive them to the pages with the advertisers and content they want to find.

#2s 1. Use a mix of content landing pages and landing pages with ads. Track them to make sure that you get the traffic you need but you also send enough people to your advertisers. Develop multiple landing pages with different content until you find the pages which work best for your traffic. Don’t be afraid to get creative and play with your branding a bit. 2. Use tracking software to see if people are leaving your landing pages with ads or if they continue to your site, then leave by clicking on an ad. It is important to keep traffic on your site, but you also need to keep your advertisers happy. If for some reason one of the ads is not living up to what you have promised or stated, you might want to develop a few landing pages specific with the information from your site, but also heavily push the advertiser to keep them spending on your site

#3s You have products to sell and you need to push them. This is your chance to make or break the click. 1. Design specific landing pages geared exactly towards the product you are pushing and the keyword that the person used to search. 2. Offer coupons on the landing pages to make it more enticing to buy right then and there. 3. Make sure that when they click through the landing page they end up on a page that shows the product and allows them to buy right then and there. You can even drop them in the shopping cart from the landing page where they can enter the quantity, payment information and coupon codes then buy in one more step.

Step 6: Choosing the proper engines for the proper purpose

The most common mistake people make with choosing engines is that they forget they have customers in other countries or they want to sell in other countries. Just because you have a top engine in your home country, does not mean it is going to be as widely used in another. Research and find the engines in the other countries and find out which ones are used for which purposes. Trust me, the major engines in the US do not always stand ground on the world search scale!

#1s 1. You need high traffic with only some relevance, so choose the major players in the countries you want to target. 2. Use second tier and aggregator engines as well as PPC directories for the second part of the spend. The aggregator engines are great because they pull information from multiple engines while having their own PPC advertising methods. People trust these because the information they receive not only passes through the algorithms of the top tier engines, but then it is filtered again for relevance by the algorithm of the aggregator engine. This is the reason they receive a decent amount of traffic and why you should advertise on them as well. 3. You rely on high CPMs so there really is not as much urgency into looking at specialty and industry driven engines and programs because on average they can be more expensive and your goal is to get more traffic with lower costs. I’d stay with the bigger players if I were you and not focus much time or effort on the third tier.

#2’s A good way to think about the budget for you all is to think about what you need to do to keep your advertisers happy; as well as drive traffic which is targeted to your products.

My suggestion for #2’s is to watch what your engines are doing closely and be prepared to change the budgets and engines you advertise in every two weeks until you find the combo that works. The first combo I would try which shows best results for me on average is: 1. About 60% budget in the major engines to get traffic for your advertisers. 2. 10% in the second tier engines which are the aggregators and the PPC directories. 3. Use the final 30% in industry specific third tier engines which will drive highly targeted traffic directly to your products. Chances are that the people searching on these engines are looking to buy instead of researching products. (This is where you drop them onto specific landing pages with product features and coupons, if you had decided to create product landing pages in the previous step.) This will help increase your exposure in the industry and hopefully boost your product sales.

To create the effective PPC landing page focused from the third tier engine, I would recommend doing it like I had suggested to the #3s in the previous section. 1. Design specific landing pages geared exactly towards the product you are pushing and the keyword that the person used to search. 2. Offer coupons on the landing pages to make it more enticing to buy right then and there. 3. Make sure that when they click through the landing page they end up on a page that shows the product and allows them to buy right then and there. You can even drop them in the shopping cart from the landing page where they can enter the quantity, payment information and coupon codes then buy in one more step.

#3’s You need to sell products to make your company survive. I would set my budget up for the engines like this. 1. 40% in the major 1st tier engines for the targeted countries 2. 20% on second tier and targeted PPC directories 3. 40% on third tier industry direct engines and industry specific PPC directories. If for some reason there are no engines on the third tier level within your industry I would then recommend 1. 65% on the major search engines. 2. 35% in the second tier and PPC directories mainly because the second tier might not drive as much traffic as you need to meet your budget.

Step 7: The affiliate effect. This step applies equally to every and all #s. I am not whatsoever going into affiliate marketing as that is a whole different ball game, however I am going to say how you can incorporate it into your PPC campaigns to lower your spend on words which do not convert as easily, and how you can extend your budget and make the most out of your PPC program.

Side Note (If you are an affiliate, this is not a way to rip you off. My advice to you as an affiliate is to read this manual, use it as a guide to your own PPC efforts. Also from a PPC perspective, you have just as much knowledge of converting words as the PPC manager as your profits and income rely on your tracking of the words yourself.)

Affiliates give you prime exposure to audiences which you may never have been given exposure to because they receive money per click, per lead, per sale or whatever program terms you provide them with. The way to incorporate them into your PPC campaigns can vary. Here are some tips, pointers and tricks that are almost always effective and help you increase your overall PPC ROI.

1. Let the affiliates bid on your brand names and trademarks. Most companies are scared of giving out their trademarks, especially to people who do not know the ins and outs of your company and brand. However if you allow your affiliates to direct traffic to your site by bidding on your trademark, not only does that give you exposure across the board, it lessens the chances of your competition bidding and being seen on your brand names and trademarked products. (On a side note, if you cannot trust your affiliates to use your trademarks correctly, why should they be a part of your network and why would they trust you? Why would an affiliate help make money for a company who does not trust them, when they can easily find one who does and help make that company extra revenues.)

What you can do to help ensure they use proper messaging is set up guides and suggestions on how to make the most of using your brands. Give them copy to use, let them call you for ideas, help them design a complimentary campaign and let them spend on your trademarks and basic keywords which seem the most obvious but have lower conversion rates. This way you know what they are bidding on, you can see what they are doing and if they are mimicking your campaigns, and you can help control how they are promoting your company.

1. One thing you might also want to think about is if your company name and/or domain name does not convert because people are only researching the term, you can bid lower if you still decide to bid at all on these terms. This lets your affiliates work on ways to convert traffic from searches on your products, brands and domains, which may only be researching your products, thus letting you focus on building direct campaigns which will provide you with higher ROIs and still collect off of your branded terms while only spending a fraction of what you were before.

2. Affiliates are also great because a lot of the time they think of words and phrases which you might not think of which turn into conversions and increase your traffic and overall sales.

3. Affiliates competing on the same keywords and phrases as you are, provides you with more exposure to your company and your products, while taking away the visibility of your competition. Let me explain this in a bit more detail.

Suppose you bid on a keyword which is also branded by your company, we’ll use trademarked product “Blah” for example.

There are two competitors bidding on Blah just like you. This makes 3 ads total. Now you build an affiliate network which utilizes PPC marketing and you suggest the product and term “Blah” for the affiliates to bid on. 3 of your affiliates decide “Hey, this seems like it will convert well, lets bid on this term.” Now you have just taken your company to the next level of exposure on a branded term.

Before you had 1/3 exposure on your product or service while your competitors had 2/3 the chance of taking the business from you. You would need to bid high and they can guerilla you out of money fast and easy and then use their remaining budget to steal your business. When you add in the 3 affiliates, you have now taken your chance of getting the exposure from 33% to 4/6 or 66% leaving only 33% of a chance for your competition to take the click.

Also, from personal experience, affiliates prefer to bid high on these branded terms. Anyways you look at it, your affiliates are doing you a favor, even though you give up part of a sale or pay for the lead. At least the sale is not going to the competition. You have also gained maximum exposure for searches PPC wise on your company’s brands.

These are only a few of the positive effects from allowing affiliates to participate in a PPC campaign on behalf of your company.

Step 8: PPC to protect your name and turn bad publicity into sales!

Suppose you have a ton of bad publicity or your company gets sued. One way to fight this off is with a creative PPC campaign bidding on terms such as Company 1 Sucks, Beware of Company 1, etc…. A great way to take someone who is researching your company and only sees bad and turning them into a customer is a fairly simple process.

If the search pulls up a specific incident, buy keywords which will match the terms searched which pull up the bad publicity for your company, and create copy which will have the person searching find your ad, click on it and take them to a special landing page explaining your side of the story.

On this landing page you will need to devise very carefully worded copy which relates directly to the term searched, the incident that is being searched for and the product or company that is in question.

When the person lands on this page, it is now your turn to reveal your company’s side of the story without any interruptions from the accuser. This is your chance to defend your goods and services as well as convince the searcher that the organic listings are wrong. You can also offer the searcher a special discount to try the goods or services out for themselves making a person who would only have seen the negative, now see the good and have an opportunity to judge for themselves at an even lesser cost than they would have normally had to pay. What better way to take someone who would have only seen the bad and help to turn them into a new patron.

Step 9: What you cannot list in organic you can buy in PPC.

This is extremely obvious, however very underutilized. If you show up all ten spaces in an organic search in the major engines, it is not as important for you to pay a high price for a keyword on that term unless you just want to show your dominance which is a waste of money that most companies cannot afford.

A great way to allocate your spend is to spend on words that you need to list for organically, but for reasons unknown to the common marketer, you just cannot get the top ten listings organically. This is where you invest heavy amounts of money to make sure you are always seen on the important terms for your company where you where you have no other way to gain exposure.

Anyways isn’t that just the basic principle and point of PPC altogether? Think about it, look at your campaign, look where you do and do not show up organically, and then see what you are missing. I can almost guarantee you will be shocked on where you forgot to spend and where you haven’t thought about cutting because you actually do not need to spend. It is a very common mistake because many of us focus on advanced techniques.

Step 10: Forget what they have taught you and think for yourself

The great thing about internet marketing is that it never stays the same. The minute someone finds a solution that seems to work across the board; everyone else begins doing it and although it might still be profitable, it may be time to revert back your old methods since the competition will no longer be competing with them, or try reversing the new techniques and see if you can develop a complimentary technique which provides better results.

For years and still today people judge keywords with high CTRs to be successful keywords. I cannot stress enough how horribly wrong they are. Just because a keyword gets a great click through does not mean it is a good one. Unless your goal is to drive random traffic for high CPMs with little or no relevance, aggravating your advertisers because they are now not receiving the targeted traffic either, go right ahead and keep on spending.

The search engines will always comment on how great your CTRs are because the higher it is, the more clicking takes place and it also increases the money they make! That is their goal and not yours. Your goal is to make money and spend as little or at least maximize your spend as much as possible. Find a good mix which will maxout your budget making them happy, but also drives the most relevant traffic depending on your model making you happy.

Take a strong look at your highest clicked keywords (regardless of how many you have) and then track them directly through the shopping carts or to the point of full conversion. Although it seems like very tedious work and like it is way to granular, you will be able to see whether your conversions are actually coming off your highest CTRs or if they are coming through from the other words and phrases in your campaign. Although some high CTRs convert great, a good portion of them are what kill your campaigns, at least the general terms.

Step 11: What to do to lower the CTR and Raise the ROI

No one can answer this for sure; however here are a few steps and tricks to try. 1. Lower the spend and placement of keywords to try and attract only people who are actually reading the ads. 2. It is not a bad thing to modify your ad copy and try things that are 100% different. Although one ad might seem like an obvious choice because it is direct and to the point, phrasing it in a different way or using a joke etc… might actually drive a higher conversion rate. 3. Try new landing pages and new designs. Although you will want your landing pages branded alongside your company’s website, who says you cannot go off and make a landing page look more like a magazine ad. Just try to keep the basic colors and use your company’s logos and slogans to retain the branding purposes while offering more of a pleasing alternative to the main website. 4. Get creative. If text ads are not working for you, the engines now offer other types of ads including video, voice, image and more. Who says everything has to be in writing? Some keywords can be better represented with a graphic. Your company’s brand name can definitely be better seen by an image or your logo which can also be more memorable and repeatable.

BTW step 12 is actually about 6 steps long ;-).

Also, be sure to visit and shop on www.couldashouldaprada.com or provide a link to it from your blog or website. It is a site that raises money for AIDS clinics, testing, research and treatments.

Thank you for reading this manual and look for my other ones which are already or will be floating around online shortly.

 

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