How I Optimize My PPC Campaigns
Filed Under Jeremy Schoemaker
As many of you know, I am a 16 year old affiliate marketer. A lot of people are more interested in talking to me about my age or how much money I make– than the techniques I use to do it. It’s true that I usually make a six figure net (not gross) income each month, primarily through PPC. But were I someone else wanting to get their start in affiliate marketing, I’d be more interested in learning something, than talking about things you’d typically find in the gossip magazines. So this guest post goes into some of what I do. You’ll perhaps be amazed that there are no “secrets”. It’s not because I’m not telling you— rather, it’s a ton of hard work and a little bit of luck. It’s amazing how “lucky” you get when you work hard. Don’t believe the “get rich quick” scams that would have you believe a single piece of magic software or a single technique to find the right keywords is all you really need. I hope you find this post helpful– ping me at harrison @ leaderclicks dot com with comments and don’t forget to check out my social advertising network http://www.leaderclicks.com and my small business advertising service.
KEYWORDS
When initially setting up your campaigns, DO NOT go to some keyword tool and dump in a gazillion keywords into your adgroups and campaigns– unless you want to boast about how many terms are in your keyword portfolio. The majority of these terms, scored by whatever techniques are going to be junky and low volume– and the engines will penalize you for it. Rather, what I do is hand pick just a few terms per ad group and then borrow ads from competitors that are already bidding on those terms. Sounds simplistic? Well, it is– but it works. Make sure you group your keywords tightly, so they all reflect the same user intent. The engines will choose one of the ads from that ad group to show, so make sure that each keyword is just as relevant for the ad you show.
MONITORING AND OPTIMIZATION
This is probably where most people fall down, because they try to get really fancy and end up spending lots of time optimizing garbage— spending their time in the wrong places. What I do is let a campaign run for a day or two (less if there’s lots of volume) and then look at which terms are driving the most volume— sorting first by clicks descending in AdWords Editor. By the way, if you aren’t using AdWords Editor and are trying to optimize via the web interface, you are handicapped right there because you can’t make bulk changes and do “>
You’ll also want to look at your analytics data to get a sense of quality– don’t be just a PPC tool jockey. Check out your landing page bounce rate per keyword. You’ll find that some terms will have a 60%+ bounce rate and should therefore either be cut– or you have to change your landing page. A bounce rate is what percentage of folks bail on your landing page. Most affiliates choose to look only at conversion rate, but bounce rate is a great intermediate metric, since you get a lot more data earlier than having to wait for a conversion. We use our in-house analytics system, by the way, because we don’t want to give the engines our data. For many of our clients, however, we just install Google Analytics, since it’s easy, cheap (free), and has a beautiful UI. Anyway, the bounce rate is usually a good indicator of eventual conversion– after all, if they leave, they didn’t exactly have a chance to convert. So that will save you some money. If you’re sending people to your own site, you’ll also want to look at keywords that drive organic traffic. Provided you are not a one-page wonder and have a real site with information, then you’ll probably find a fair number of terms that people are coming in on— put those into your PPC campaign. And for terms that have worked well in PPC— start making pages on your site, so you can start ranking for them. I don’t look at things like KEI, LSI, or another TLA (three letter acronym). I rarely even use the Google Adwords API– but do in cases where there is enough volume to make it worth putting automated bid management in place. You do get dinged on using the API, for those who don’t know, so AdWords Editor is a more effective prototyping tool. Once you have something stable, then you can consider scaling it to the moon and using the API.
CREATIVES (ADS and LANDING PAGES)
Affiliates are notorious for copying each other– because if it’s working for somone else, then I ought to do it, too. Plus, it’s the lazy man’s approach. I admit that I do, it, too— since it’s a great starting point. But don’t just be a PPC tool jockey and think that this approach will bring you massive success. You gotta consider for a moment– if I’m doing what everyone else is doing, what kind of results can I realisttically expect? It does frustrate me when other affiliates copy my ads— what am I going to do, tell them to stop or sue them? Guys, you know who you are. So come up with a clever twist for your ads and landing pages. That slight increase in conversion rate or CTR can allow you to make significant profits even if your PPC campaigns are no better than everyone elses. I highly recommend Tim Armstrong’s book on landing page optimization. And promote related products on your landing pages— you already got them there, so might as well increase your chances of converting on something.
SILLY THINGS THAT I SEE PEOPLE DO
- put content and search in the same campaigns– CTR is important in search, but not in content. Plus, on the content network you’re interrupting people, so ad copy must be different.
- setting up campaigns that have only one ad group in them— and then putting in a ton of unrelated terms and only one generic ad.
- inappropriate use of DKI– make sure that when using Dynamic Keyword Insertion, your ads make sense. You can dynamically insert the ad, search/content, and a couple other tracking variables in your destination url.
- weak negative lists– don’t just put in a few negative keyword, be clever and find ways to grab a whole list of synonyms. For dating traffic, for example– don’t just put in “carbon”– grab all synonyms related to archaelogy, radioactivity, etc.. And run placement reports to exclude the content network sites that don’t convert.
- not taking the time to understand ROI— do this in Excel at first, don’t be mentally lazy and go straight to tools. Just having a calculator doesn’t make you good at math.
- spending time discussing someone else’s lifestyle, instead of learning real skills– when you’re making real, sustainable money, then go get your black card.
- looking for shortcuts, instead of learning funadamentals– it’s like fat people and dieting “secrets”. True, tools can help, but become a well-rounded marketer first.
- not launching: I build and launch campaigns the same day– don’t spend forever building campaigns, get it out there and then learn from the data. Keep incrementally optimizing. It will never be “perfect”.
ROUNDING IT UP
There is much more we can talk about here— maybe I should write a book? The main point I wanted to get across is that my wins in affiliate marketing (I’m still young, so who knows where this will go) have come from being a cross-functional player. I understand a little bit about PPC, analytics, SEO, landing page development, relationship building (to get the best offers and payouts), and creative writing. With a limited reliance on tools and no formal education, I’ve been able to do reasonably well so far by coming up with new strategies at the intersections of these areas– for example, monitoring my natural and paid rankings together for keywords or using analytics to data drive PPC bids. In the last year, I’ve branched out beyond pure affiliate marketing and started doing lead gen for Fortune 500 companies, as well as a semi-automated solution for small business advertising (blitzlocal). Our team has developed some internal tools in the process, such as a kick-ass ad server and some PPC/SEO/analytics tools. We’ll be publicly releasing these tools in trimmed down versions soon. Meanwhile, I hope this was informative for you. Check out my blog for more articles.
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
How I Optimize My PPC Campaigns
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