I’m creating a PPC marketing campaign for a new site in our network – poposco, and I’m going to be creating the campaign on the AdBrite PPC network for a change.

While I do this I’ll walk you through the process and why I do it.

In a couple of weeks I’ll show the results of the campaign and any tweaking I performed to increase its performance. Let’s get started.

PPC marketing can be a very effective way of marketing any website if you do it correctly, the effectiveness of any campaign can be measured by your KPI’s (key performance indicators), so this is where we’re going to start, at the measuring point.

What’s a KPI and why are they so important?

A Key Performance Indicator is basically a point of measurement, before you build any marketing campaign, free or paid, you need to think, why am I doing this? At the end of it all, what would I look at to deem my marketing efforts a success?
In our case, I want to achieve two things

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return to the site
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

So my KPI for number 1 would be traffic, and not just traffic I’ve bought, but sustained traffic and increased traffic.

For example, if I buy 1,000 clicks, I will receive 1,000 visitors. If all I receive over the duration of the campaign is 1,000 visitors – then my fist KPI wasn’t much of a success, the visitors aren’t returning, nor are they referring other people – if they like what they see and if it’s of relevance you’ll find users will refer other users. Regardless, if our total traffic is just 1k then we’ve failed on the first KPI.

On the other hand, if we buy 1k clicks and over the duration of the campaign we end up with 1,500 then we’ve had some success.

For the second KPI we’re going to keep an eye on registrations, since we’re not advertising anywhere else at the moment, only on AdBrite, we can assume most of the registrations will be driven from this marketing, we’re not going to assume too much, but at this stage it’s not going to hurt too much to assume. In future campaigns we will track clicks to registrations with tracking codes.

Kids, don’t try this at home, never assume anything, and always track with codes. I’m not since we’re not advertising anywhere else right now.

It’s not all running around blind, I will be checking my referral stats and look at the tracking data, I can see the number of registration page and submit page hits from ads we’ve placed, it’s not optimal but It’ll do for now.

 

Pre-creating the campaign

Now that we have our KPIs, we need to think about what we’re doing before we rush off and do it; firstly yes we need to build some ads, but not just any old ads, we need to build ads that will help us meet those KPIs of ours.

When your building ads, one thing I see way too often are ads with no meaning, pointless ads that aren’t targeting anyone, there’s no call to action or reason for anyone to click the ads, and the ads on describe where they are going to be landing, they are pointless.

This is where building KPIs first helps, we now know what we need to build the ads for, we need to build ads that meet our KPI requirements, that why were marketing in the first place right?

Other overlooked items when creating a campaign is our budget and duration. Our KPIs are measured on those factors as well, marketing campaigns aren’t open ended forever funded ordeals; they should end in a set period with a fixed cost in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind here is the marketplace in which you’re advertising with, AdBrite isn’t the greatest place to advertise a website for webmasters, so this is going to be a little test marketing campaign, I’m going to keep the budget small and time short… see what happens. If it turns out that the response based on our KPIs are good, then I’ll increase the amount of spend and extend the campaigns for a few more months.

For the time being I’m going to restrict us to a $5 a day 1 month long campaign to limit our potential loss.

 

Creating the campaign

SO let’s get started, shoot on over to AdBrite, if you don’t already have an account, create one.

Once you’re there, login then click on the ‘for advertisers’ tab.

Under the ‘for advertisers’ tab there’s a link called ‘create a new campaign‘, click it to get started.

The first thing we need to do with this Text Ad is to setup our Geographic Targeting.

I want to target the big English speaking countries, I think that’s going to be our demographc, so under geographic targeting, I’m going to specify regions (countries) – Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

The next step in our campaign creation process is Category Targeting.

Since the site is based around webmaster topics, business, marketing, technology and what not, I’m going to select specific categories rather than showing the advert across the whole AdBrite network.

I think this is a crucial step when creating a campaign on AdBrite, the whole network is deadly, there are lots of random sites out there you really don’t need your advert to display on, like humour sites, real estate sites and more.

So to keep away from those areas I’m going to use the following categories

• Business and Industrial
• News
• Technology
• Blogs
• Business and Finance
• News and Reference
• Small / Medium Business
• Social Networking

On the category targeting page, at the bottom there’s an additional option – Target site by quality, again another step which I think is important to the success of a webmaster targeted campaign, by choosing the option ‘Only show ads on sites with family-friendly content and professional presentation’ should hopefully weed out the sites that are built to exploit clicks on ads and keep the advert on more professional sites with quality traffic.

Demographic targeting is next but there’s nothing there in need of change so I’m leaving that alone and skipping direct to Keyword Targeting.

I’m not going to describe how I came up with my list of keywords, there’s lots of ways and articles around about how to come up with a list of keywords for your site, if I was do start talking about it here it I could do a few posts worth of content so I’ll leave that for another time, this article will be big enough as it is.

Anyway, I recommend coming up with a list of keywords and using them for keyword targeting. Again this should help cut back on sites that aren’t relevant to people we’re targeting.

Setting your budget

To start off I usually set my campaigns to a modest $5 a day budget, with a $0.20 cost per click.

I keep my daily budget low so in case all the clicks end up being $0.20 each and were not receiving traffic that meets our targets we don’t blow too much money too fast. You will see below that even though our MAX cost per click is 20 cents, most of the clicks ’should’ be in the 2 cent per click range.

It’s always a good idea when testing things to keep your daily budget low; it allows you to not over do your spending while you’re still testing, it gives you time to tweak your targeting and the text in your adverts.

Once your campaign is producing quality traffic then start ramping up your daily budget, but in the meantime start small and build up over time.

 

You can see in the image above that our campaign is expected to be shown 3.5million times a day, across around 600 sites with an average cost per click of $0.02.

We should expect around 121 clicks per day which will only eat into 45% of our budget.

Now that data is based on their current network averages, I think with the way we word our adverts that we should be able to max out our daily spend and produce over 200 clicks a day.

If we can max our daily spend with keeping our CPC low then we’re in a good position to control the flow to of traffic to our site, not having to sit around desperately wanting more traffic, we have a tap we can turn on and off when we want more or less traffic – which in my opinion is a good thing.

Creating our text adverts

To create our actual text adverts we need to again look at our KPIs

1. Attract visitors who would use the service and return
2. Build a member base of users who submit content

We have 2 different targets here to achieve and in order to do this I’m going to create at least 3 ads per KPI.

Why 3? Well there’s no real great reasoning, I usually create more, but I wouldn’t create any less than 3 per KPI, having a few variations will give you enough of an indication of what style of ads are attracting more clicks than others and for what reasons.

For example if one of your ads has the word FREE in it, and the other doesn’t, but the advert with FREE in it is getting the majority of the clicks then we know why, the clickers are after something for free. Make sure they are getting it or cut the advert.

For our first KPI since our site is unknown (we don’t have any brand awareness yet) I’m going to try and use the name of the site in the adverts, the more the users see the unique name hopefully the more they remember it or notice that it’s being advertised around the place and build some interest within them to visit the site. This is a benefit with text ads; the domain is at the bottom of the advert and I’m going to keep it simple with just showing ‘poposco.com’ not some random URL on our server like ‘http://www.poposco.com/home/index.php’

Another tactic I’m going to use is include the word ‘digg’ in the advert, since poposco is a digg.com style of site, if the users are interested in that kind of thing then that’s our target market and we hope they click.

The final thing I’m going to try is direct the user to an article link direct on the site.

 

I’m no genius ad copywriter but there’s enough variation there to let me know what will work and what won’t and I can go from there re-writing and tweaking the adverts.

Our next ad group is going to target our 2^nd KPI, attracting new article submitters.

Again I’m going to use the digg angle, everyone knows it so why not, I’m also going to try the newspaper style ‘wanted’ ad headlines, see what it does.

 

Okay that should do.

There’s a rule I always use when I create a PPC advert, and that is to never send users to a generic homepage. It’s stupid, your advert is giving the users an expectation of what they are going to see after they click, and if you don’t deliver that expectation they will leave your site in seconds.

Deliver that expectation. Whatever you describe in your text ad, send them to a page with more information about what you told them already. Not a generic product page, build a page for the text ad if you’re selling a product, be specific and to the point, don’t content overload either.

However, when your homepage is the bulk of your content and that is what you are promising, then it’s alright, and in our case that’s what we have, a content rich homepage and that’s what the site and adverts are all about, all except our 6^th advert in the first group.

For that last advert in the first group I’m going send the user direct to the link of that article on poposco.

By doing this I’m going to achieve 3 things. Firstly I’ll know by the click through rates what people are more interested in, a digg style webmaster site, or 8 tips of PPC marketing. Secondly if they do click the advert they will be exposed to the site which is our KPI goal, and thirdly if they don’t visit any other pages on poposco hopefully they click the link to read the whole article which is on my talkingdynamics site – so more traffic for here.

For the second group of adverts I’m going to send half direct to the submit page, and the other half to the homepage. Why not everyone to the submit page? Well I want to see how smart people are; I’m thrown them to our site which obviously works like digg, if they want to submit an article is the site easy enough to use to achieve that?

That’s something we need to know, if submissions are low maybe we need to have a bigger more visual button on the pages to let people know how to submit an article, the rest that hit the submit page hopefully will submit.

I’ve put together an incentive to submit an article, it’s imperative for a new site to have a hook to get people using it, in our case we want content submitted all the time, if the users are submitting and reading hopefully it will help the site more returning visitors, until there’s a steady stream of submissions we’re going to offer some freebies like advertising.

When creating a campaign always consider a hook, most of the time a product of service isn’t all that interesting, but if you can offer something else attached to your boring product then it’ll help it sell, you see this done all the time in traditional marketing.

Conclusion

Well that’s it really, there’s a fair bit to consider when building a campaign, even on a simple network like AdBrite. You need the appropriate landing pages, hooks (offers) and ad variations to test your advertising before you dive in spending too much.

The next thing you need to do is report and optimize your campaign before you increase your ad spend, but that’s a different article. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to make sure you don’t miss that one.

Feel free to join in the discussion about AdBrite on the forums.

I’ve been doing PPC marketing for a fair while now for myself (personally and for my businesses) and back in the day for a long list of clients, over time I’ve developed a list of golden rules that I always try to stick by when building and managing a PPC campaign.

They’re fairly straight forward but more often than not they’re overlooked by most people and their ad spend gets blown out of proportion with not enough ROI (Return on Investment)

So here it is, my 8 tips for a successful marketing campaign:

• ALWAYS choose counties that your customers will be in, don’t go and click “all countries”
• BE SPECIFIC with your keywords - if you sell shoes, what kind of shoes do you sell? Put down the brands and types, like running shoes, indoor sports shoes, track shoes, Nike indoor shoes, Nike tennis shoes
• AVOID using keywords that corss into markets you’re not interested in, for example, if you used the keyword shoes, but you don’t offer tennis shoes, then remove that keyword from the search, for Google Adwords you add the keyword with a negative in front of it like this “-tennis” and “-tennis shoes”. If you do that your ad wont show up for people who search those terms.
• BUILD a landing page for your visitors that is relevant to your keywords or advert description. If I’m searching for Nike running shoes and I click on your advert that is advertising Nike running shoes then the first thing I will expect to see is a page on your site dedicated to Nike running shoes, not your homepage with Adidas, Puma and other general shoes. Your trying to get the targeted visitors, so give them their targeted page, the less I have to do to find what I’ve clicked on the more chance you’ll get me to buy
• TRACK those landing pages, of the people who landed, what advert did they land from, how long did they stay, where did they go elsewhere in the site, did they exit or did they buy? If they are exiting or surfing else ware then update the landing page to something more relevant to where they are all surfing to
• REPORT on what’s happening, what’s the CPC for each keyword and advert, how well are they converting, what’s the ROI for each keyword / advert and campaign
• MONITOR every aspect and make the changes you need to so that your visitors buy what your trying to sell
• TWEEK everything constantly! If after a few days some of your pages aren’t converting them change them, if for some of your adverts your converting US and not UK visitors then stop showing them in the UK, whatever you do, never just set and forget the campaign, no matter how well you think you’ve set it up, go and do it all again based on a few days results

I can’t stress that enough, nothing is perfect the first time around, trends and traffic always change, once you’ve built this campaign check your data, look at what keywords are performing and try new things, I’m a fan of not competing with 1st place in the list, I like to keep my CPC down a little and still make conversions, but if I have a page or two that are converting really well on a few keywords then I’ll up my per click spend as long as it keeps converting and producing a good ROI.

If some pages aren’t converting then change them or change the advert that’s sending traffic to them, your outlaying the money to get the visitors there so outlay the time to make the return on investment, build good landing pages that are easy to read and are relevant to the advert.

The only time I go and use general keywords like “shoes” I’ll setup my advert to be very specific in its description, so if my keyword for the ad is “shoes” then my advert will be “Nike Track Shoes – New mens Nike 07 track shoes on sale this week only for $50” Know what I mean? And my landing page will be just that, a list of my Mens Nike track shoes that are around the $50 mark that are on sale, make the page very “retail” or something along those lines. Don’t just advertise the mens Nike shoes then throw a user who has clicked on that ad expecting that to your index page that’s a bit of everything.

Anyway, I’m babbling on about things now, hope that all helped a little.

I’m a believer of ‘change is good’. It’s the human condition that we hate change, but I love it, I get bored doing the same thing for more than a few days and so will your visitors. If they see the same ads in the same spots all the time they’ll become immune to them to an extent so why not switch it up? Try some different PPC networks in different areas of your site, try different styles of ads, different sizes and colours ads or change the type of ad to a CPM ad, use ad links in your content and even cut back on the amount of ads you’re bombarding your users with.

The less Google AdSense ads you have on your page the better, Google deliver the higher paying ones first so if you have one ad box you’re going to have one box of high paying clicks, if you have 3, you’re going to end up with high paying mixed with low paying so you’re better off using just 1 box and putting it in a better position, move it around on a weekly basis to test where it’s performing better for you change it up a little.

If you need to make more money from your site don’t put more ads on it, better engineer your site to make money, move ads around, use a different style of ad or a whole other ad network.

Here’s a list of ad networks I like

• Yahoo
• Google
• Microsoft
• Adbrite
• BidVertiser
• MIVA
• Quigo
• Vibrant Media

What ad networks do you use and trust?