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.

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.

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’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?