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Monday Question: Dispelling the PPC FUD

Here’s a straightforward Monday Question:
“Now that you’re starting to do more PPC (pay per click) traffic. How has it been? Isn’t it a waste of money to pay for traffic, and it doesn’t generate much income, does it?”


My Answer:
There’s a lot of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) being spread, especially by marketers who aren’t using paid traffic, typically certain members of the Web 2.0 fraternity.

Yes, you can lose lots of money, and not generate a single sale, but only if you don’t have a plan in mind. I was in that category before, bidding on low competition keywords, having subscribed to the “long tail keyword” strategy.

The fact is that with quality score playing a dominant role in Google AdWords, you will need to bid reasonable prices to get the conversions.

I have a stock portfolio which generates 10-20% on an annualized basis. If you’ve refined your PPC campaigns and are able to generate at least 50% on a monthly basis, you’ve outperformed most of the mutual funds and equity funds in the market.

So let’s look at some PPC newbie pitfalls:

  • Not enough keywords in your adwords campaign

If you’ve only 20-200 keyphrases in your campaign, it might only generate a handful of clickthroughs and even fewer sales per day.

Reasonably you should have at least 1,000 keywords in your campaign to see good results.

  • Poor choice of keywords

It’s not just enough to choose cheap or low competition keywords, you need to have an idea of the type of keywords your intended clicker will be typing, regardless of whether you expect them to complete a CPA offer or buy an affiliate product.

Bad match? A key indicator is if you’re getting good clickthroughs and poor conversions. While it’s easy to blame it on a poor landing page, the more fundamental issue is your keyword list.

  • Insufficient ad budget

While it’s ambitious to want to generate great results from your PPC campaign, it’s going to be difficult to do that with a $5-10 daily budget. A budget should be the result of working backwards from your outcome/result.

You also need to understand your market. If you’re planning to do an ultra competitive area like webhosting, you might do better with a $100-200 daily budget given the high commission payouts and even greater competition in that niche.

  • The “Fire and forget” mentality

Successful PPC marketers will tell you that keyword research, setting up the campaign and launching it is only 10% of the battle. The rest lies in being able to effectively optimize your campaign.

Optimize in this case, goes way beyond merely making changes to your bid prices.

The optimization process is a reflection of your optimization strategy – you need to know whether you need to increase your traffic, improve the quality of your traffic, or adopt a different strategy.

Google already provides a powerful suite of tools and analytics package. If you fail to use them, you do so at your own peril.

As you evolve your PPC strategies, you’ll see that PPC is systematic in nature and there’s “more than meets the eye”.

5 comments on Monday Question: Dispelling the PPC FUD

  1. JIm
    November 20, 2007 at 1:56 am (16 years ago)

    All around good advice, if you don’t know what your doing you can certainly blow your wad on PPC. I would also add its important to have a good tested sales page or offer with a known conversion ratio before diving into paid traffic.

  2. Rasheed Ali
    November 21, 2007 at 5:43 am (16 years ago)

    Hey Andrew,

    Good stuff as usual man.

    So what are your thoughts on congruency between keywords and landing pages? Importance? I’ve seen mixed results but am now realizing the importance of watching my landing page copy holistically per keyword.

    In other words, the theme of your copy matching your pay per click keyword phrase. Any thoughts or tips on that?

    Warmest Regards,
    Rasheed

  3. Andrew Wee
    November 21, 2007 at 3:09 pm (16 years ago)

    If you’re using Google AdWords, there seem to be elements in their pricing algorithmn that look at your ad and your site.

    I’d suggest making your site human-relevant, rather than go into micro SEO detail. Conversions and sales are the best metric in my opinion.

    At the moment, I’m doing a case study with Amit Mehta and I don’t even have a landing page. It’s a variant of the Google Cash method, so landing pages don’t factor in.

  4. Garrett
    November 21, 2007 at 3:37 pm (16 years ago)

    Great post!

    Optimization is the hardest part. As far as Adwords goes, I see so many people who don’t even know how to design their landing page for human eyes.

    Google does manually review all landing pages within 24 hr?s.

    With a base keyword…add 10 more CLOSELY related keywords to that adgroup.

    Other keywords need separate adgroups. Thats it. Play the game.

  5. DJ Kennedy
    February 15, 2008 at 5:56 am (16 years ago)

    Great post! I think that there is a great deal of other unanswered items that need to go into the development of a successful PPC CAMPAIGN.

    How about GEO Targeting, Ad Scheduling, Using Google Optimizer? These are very key elements that ofcourse need to be thought of in conjunction with a well planned keyword campaign.

    Lest we not forget the importance of including conversion code on all your forms so that we can measure the CPA (cost per action) of each of your PPC events!

    Nice writeup!

    DJ Kennedy

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