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 came across this Adwords advert when I was surfing around today and I thought it would be a perfect example of what not to do.

The headline is bad, probably written by someone who’s first language isn’t English, or can’t proofread from a reader’s perspective.

Cbmall’s – what the hell is that?

Bizopts? What? Yeah.

Most popular businesses on the web to make money at home… read that, like actually read it, does it read really bad or is it just me? And it gives me no reason or interest to click on the ad.

When I thought the example of what not to do was good enough, it got better, with Adwords you can specify an URL to show to the public, and an actual URL for the link, this guy has used the actual URL, which is pushing people direct to a Clickbank product, the URL is scary and is obviously a affiliate program link.

Again, why would I click it?

Is it just me or is this spam pointless?

CUTKEGUIRLIS Lesbiean Teuens Finvgeriing & Lcickinig On Sofia Young Luong Havired TEEENS Suecks & Fcucks In Car

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ng langkuage’us ediutors are an exvcepition to tkhis, as tvhey acvcept RTF fkiles.

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I mean 95% of the time these just go to my junk mail, the odd one gets through, but even if it does the email is so bad that I instantly consider it spam and delete it anyway. What’s the point?

I’m fairly certain if they spend a few hours and designed a nice good looking email that looks like it came from a real company then it’ll get read and clicked on far more than their current spam.

They clearly have the email addresses and the means to send mail, why not do something more legit with their resources, even though doing it is still illegal – but does that really matter?

They’re going to spam regardless, it’ll make them more cash then what that email they sent me would have. Companies with like 10k email addresses can make heaps from their email marketing, these spammers would have millions of emails they can spam to, seems like a lost opportunity to me!

Speaking of advertising companies and how much they are competing, Microsoft has just secured Digg as a new publisher of advertising. That’s right; Digg has dropped Google as their contextual advertising partner and are switching to Microsoft.

Microsoft HAD MySpace.com but lost it to Google last year, but Microsoft have Fackbook.com under their belt at the moment so adding Digg to that little portfolio of major social sites is a nice notch on their belt and is sure to attract more advertisers the Microsoft AdCenter advertising system.

Personally I love it, Google having such a large market share is just wrong, as an advertiser if everyone is advertising on the one network the cost of advertising is going to be higher because it’s more competitive for position.

Also, as a publisher of ads, if you were kicked from Google for any undisclosed reason (which they do a lot) you wouldn’t be as worried if you could switch your advertising over to Yahoo or Microsoft – knowing they would be able to deliver similar advertising revenue to you.

I can’t wait for Google to lose a bunch of market share in search and advertising. They defiantly need to lose ground in the search arena too, it’s the same problem, everyone is relying on one source of traffic. When Google changes their search algorithms you can get dropped significantly, but if you were getting an even amount of traffic from say four or five different search engines then it wouldn’t matter so much, if you had trouble optimising your site for one engine, you could try for others and so on.

Google is leading the field in advertising thanks to their early purchase of Applied Semantics and the subsequent integration of it into their search solutions. Their next acquisition of DoubleClick defiantly helps their market share in online advertising since DoubleClick was probably the biggest online advertising company around.

Yahoo and Microsoft aren’t far behind Google, Yahoo bought 20% of Right Media for $680M, and a 35%-50% stake in Tyroo Media for an undisclosed sum of cash, Microsoft bought aQuantive and ScreenTonic to help their online advertising market share and now AOL continues their buy-out for market share game.

AOL has just bought out Tacoda, a web firm with technology to target advertisers. This is one of many advertising company buy outs by AOL including big boy Advertising.com back in ‘04. They also bought out ADTECH, an adserving company out of Germany and an internet marketing provider based in Sweeden – TradeDoubler and Third Screen Media all in the last 12 months.

It would seem that AOL is still committed to entering this online advertising war with the other 3 big players. Now might be a good time to start an online advertising company, get some investors, acquire lots of clients, use some fancy buzz words and try and get yourself bought out, at the rate these guys are buying up advertising companies there’s not going to be many other big independent advertising companies around in a year or so.

Ever wondered why companies sponsor people and teams who are always last and never seem to get any TV time during their big events? Well besides helping to promote a sport and helping a team stay in the sport, sponsoring the back runners or team that always loses does have its advantages.

Sponsoring the lower down teams is cheaper, you find that these teams have more loyal followers who will seek out who sponsors them and then support those sponsors, and sometimes those underdogs come up trumps, they beat the better team or they win a race and the TV coverage when something like that happens goes crazy.

During the Formula 1 over the weekend something like this happened.

The Spyker Formula 1 team is a back runner, always a few seconds off the pace, they have car upgrades coming in a few weeks which they are boasting will make them more competitive, but at the moment, they are consistently last.

But just like in any car race Mother Nature changes everything and in the last race in Europe the rain came early, caused a bunch of crashes and caused a restart, a restart with a spiker for the first time ever in position 1 on the grid and for the first time ever leading a race.

This of course has resulted in heaps of media focused on the team and their car, lots of TV time while their car sat on the grid in P1 for 5 minutes waiting for the restart, they are on the front page of the f1.com website and all over the formula 1 / sports sites and TV shows there’s news of the event.

The team wins from the media and so do the sponsors who paid much less for their sponsorship then companies like Vodafone do for their sponsorship.

The big teams have lots of coverage, but it comes at a big price, I like the underdogs and the cost to advertise with the bottom team is cheap so why not try it from time to time?

The same goes for the internet at times, advertising with the smaller sites but spreading your money across a bunch of them can pay off just as much and more than spending the same amount of money with one bigger site – as long as the small sites you choose aren’t lying about their stats and what not.

You’ll also find that if you help support these up and coming smaller sites when you want to advertise again in the future you can get a better deal on advertising then what the retail rates would be.

Edit: I’ve just noticed that a blog I like Zoomstart had a post about the underdog, check it out it’s a good post…

PPC marketing when done right can be very profitable, I have developed my own PPC reporting tools in Excel that are pretty damn advanced if I may say so myself (that’s what I used to do for a living, develop business intelligence tools that integrate with 3^rd party systems) with the help of these tools I can track my PPC campaigns on Google and Yahoo and compare the results over a few pages (lots of graphs and analytics so it takes up about 5 tabs in Excel).

The datasets I create are very informative, for example I not only know my ROI, but I know my ROI based on my GM (ROI – return on investment, GM – gross margin), on top of that I know all my click through rate, my click through to subscribe rate & cost, and my click to sale rate & cost.

The management tools I have are so good I’m able to give clients better data then the advertising companies provide, which enables me to charge a nice management fee of 40% of revenue spent. For e.g. if a client spends $10k, my bill is $4k. Might sound hefty but wait till the end and you’ll know why it’s not all that bad of an investment.

Here’s some data of mine, I’m not going to include all the graphs etc, just the small breakdown that gives an indication of the campaign for this month.

Campaign performance

Here we can see the totals and averages for the month, we have the number of clicks on the ad, subscribers to the site, sales we did, total revenue from the sales, the total gross margin of those sales, the ROI from the gross margin and the gross margin ROI as a percentage. Se were making close to a 300% ROI on our gross margins, and about 700% ROI on sales. I think It’s important to look at your ROI from your gross margins not from your sales, I’ll explain that in a different blog post.

Conversion Summary

These are the conversion summaries of the clicks, so our click through rate on the ads we use is on average 11.5%, of the 11.5% on average 2.9% subscribe, and 2.6% make a purchase.

Cost Summary

This is one of my favourite parts, this is our cost summary, in total in the month we spent over $11k on the campaign, with an average of $0.40 cents per click, and of those clicks we got the most we paid for a subscriber was $67, expensive! But all in all were paying $17 for a subscriber, bear in mind newsletter subscribers are worth lots of money, at times the newsletter itself can make thousands, we push the cost we’re paying for these subscribers into our newsletter reporting so we know our cost of the newsletter and ROI for it etc, those subscribers don’t magically appear at no cost.

We also paid $100 to make one sale; we probably went a couple of days without a sale but that’s not big deal unless your campaign is costing your heaps without any return, the average cost for a sale was $24 and our total money spent for the month as mentioned before was just over $11k.

The results

So after spending $11k in one month on a PPC marketing campaign across Google, and Yahoo we could be pretty scared at the result especially after seeing the most we spent to get a sale was $100 and the average cost of a product sold is $99!

But our stats tell us exactly how we went, we spent $11k, but our gross profits were $34k. The most we paid for a sale was $100, but all in all we sold $76k worth of products, I’m sure when you talk to lots of these PPC marketing companies they’ll tell you that the campaign was awesome and you make a 700% ROI, really your just being lied to and your lying to yourself if you think that, you need to base your facts on what counts and that’s your gross margins, our GM ROI was 300% pretty good still, after costs we made a healthy profit of $22k.

If I was a client of myself, my total costs would have been $15k, with a profit of closer to $18k, slightly less but don’t forget you just moved almost $80k of stock in a month, that’s sure to help your buying power to bring your margins down more and really, you still make $18k profit so why not go again? Oh and not forget you’ve also just increase your customer base and subscribers to your newsletter that also brings in heaps of revenue.

I came across this article on ars technica, it’s an article about Microsoft filing a patent for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time.

Either Microsoft is stabbing in the dark at the future of things, or they have some grand plan for the next version of Windows.

The adware framework would leave almost no data untouched in its quest to sell you stuff. It would inspect “user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink),” and more. How could we have been so blind as to not see the marketing value in computer status messages?

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?

Bloggintips.com has written off Technorai’s authority rating and ReviewMe in one foul swoop. That’s fine, I agree with his arguments to an extent, but these things have to start somewhere. You can’t expect the perfect authority ranking system from their first try at it; at least they are doing something.

Technorati’s authority ranking is pretty simple and it is easily gamed, it’s just based on back links from other blogs, the more you have the higher your rating. Yeah you can buy links and what not to build it up, but at the end of the day there’s only so much you can spend on doing that, real blogs with real back links will grow faster and longer than anyone who buys links. Having people cheat the system is a good thing, that’s how these systems evolve, Technorati will learn how these people are cheating it and change their algorithm, just the same as search engines do, people cheat the rankings and the search engines change how they rank, it’s the cycle of internet life.

I think Technorati have bigger issues, their search is average to say the least. I’d like to see someone use the Google search API and integrate that with Technorati’s authority ranking and Alexa data to provide a more accurate view of what blogs are authorities. Mostly because Google is the king of search and Technorati have at least made a start on some kind of authority ranking for blogs.

Bloggingtips.com also criticised how ReviewMe sets their pricing, saying that since Alexa ranks and Technorati authority can be easily inflated it’s not a good indication of what the price of a review should be.

I agree, it’s not perfect but I think the buyer should always use some due diligence and go investigate the blog themselves. ReviewMe are using the biggest sources around to base their pricing on and that’s the same sources most people look at when buying a link or a post direct from a blog themselves anyway.

Everything out there can be faked, page rank, RSS subscribers, how old your blog is, how old your domain is, posts, everything, Technorati’s ranking does show the big boys as big boys, shoemoney.com has a 4.5k authority ranking and that’s more than most people could buy if they tried. I think the authority rank will get better, it needs to but at least it’s a start, for now if you’re buying any advertising from blogs, check as much as you can before you buy.