By - Scott Smigler
Category - Pay Per Click Services
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/Pay-PerClickServices02
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| Pay Per Click Services |
I often hear from merchants that have tried
pay-per-click advertising, but it wasn’t profitable for them. So they
abandoned it. In my experience, however, many merchants could turn
unprofitable campaigns into profitable ones by adopting the six rules
that follow.
Rule 1: Commit to PPC
According to my analysis, PPC listings rank second of all traffic
sources, including organic search listings, direct type-ins URLs, social
media, affiliates, shopping engines, and email marketing.
What the chart shows is that PPC is too important to ignore. Just
search on Google for a product and you’ll notice that PPC listings —
including listings from Google Shopping — are dominating the search
results page. It’s likely that Google will continue emphasizing PPC
listings over organic listings. While organic listings are the most
important source of traffic, PPC will increasingly become a close
second.
That means that as an online retailer, you have a lot to gain by
making PPC work for you, and a lot to lose by not. It’s time to commit
to PPC.
Rule 2: Organize for Success
My company audits hundreds of PPC campaigns for online retailers each
year. Eight out of ten campaigns that we see are terribly organized.
There is no system or strategy in place to distinguish “campaigns” from
“Ad Groups.” That makes it very hard to do things like bolstering
budgets on product categories that are in season, aligning promotions
between your ad text and your website, or using advanced techniques to
target shoppers on mobile devices.
We usually recommend a simple approach to organizing Google AdWords
accounts that align “Campaigns” within AdWords with the product
categories on your site, and “Ad Groups” within AdWords with individual
products on your site.
Rule 3: Adjust Your Match Types
When we conduct PPC audits for merchants, we often find that many or
most of the keywords within their AdWords campaigns use the "broad"
match type. This is a big mistake. Broad matches find close variations
and synonyms, so a consumer who searches for “dog supplies” might be
displayed an ad meant for “puppy supplies.” A more exaggerated example
might be a shopper searching for “office furniture,” who instead sees
your ads for “baby furniture.”
You’ll get a lot more traffic when you use broad match, but that
traffic won’t be very qualified. As the graphic above illustrates, there
are four match types you can select from, and as a default I often
recommend “modified broad.” Modified broad match helps ensure that your
ad only shows for close variations of keywords. You can designate broad
match by placing a plus sign before the keyword.
Exact match (indicated by putting your keyword in brackets) and
phrase match (indicated by putting your keyword in quotes) work well,
too, depending on what your ad is targeting.
Rule 4: Use Negative Match
It’s likely that many of the clicks from your PPC campaign are coming
from shoppers who are not interested in buying your products.
Imagine that you sell Malibu car accessories, for example. If you run
a query search report in Google, you may find that you are generating a
lot of traffic from searchers who use the query “Malibu recipes.” Using
negative match, you can ensure your ads won’t show up for these
keywords.
Negative match gives you the ability to determine which searches will
trigger your ads. It can make a big impact in the overall profitability
of your campaign.
Rule 5: Test Your Ad Copy
You can ensure your PPC ads show higher on the page, for a lower CPC
cost, by improving your AdWords Quality Score. One of the most effective
ways to do this is to improve the click-through rate of your ads. Any
approach to optimizing your click-through rate should involve testing
multiple sets of ad copy to see what improves not only your
click-through rate, but also the conversion rate of the clicks generated
by that ad.
As a rule, try to have two or three variations of ad copy for each Ad
Group. I'm often surprised by the ad copy that performs best, which is
why testing is so important.
Rule 6: Implement Google Shopping
It’s generating robust results for many merchants, especially when they take the time to optimize their data feeds.
Even if you don’t have the tools or understanding to optimize your
data feeds, you can still generate impressive results by using a simple
strategy of bidding a penny or nickel per click within your Google
Shopping — i.e., Product Listing Ads —campaigns.
In December, I helped three hesitant merchants deploy campaigns on
Google Shopping using very small ad budgets, as summarized by the
graphic below. The revenue generated from those campaigns delivered an
outstanding return on ad spend that can’t be duplicated by any other
paid marketing channel.
