Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy!

I have recently been spend­ing a lot of time try­ing to improve my PPC cam­paigns. Although my cam­paigns (that are run­ning) are prof­itable i believe that i am miss­ing out on a lot of earn­ings poten­tial specif­i­cally due to my rel­a­tive inexperience.This is a par­tic­u­lar area of con­cern as most of my traf­fic is obtained using PPC, although i am also con­cen­trat­ing on SEO for my main keywords.

I have read much on cre­at­ing the per­fect cam­paign, how­ever their is always that feel­ing that i have missed some­thing, or per­haps the niche is just too dif­fi­cult to mas­ter and i should be thank­ful for my rel­a­tively small prof­its. I also often blame other fac­tors, such as the land­ing page’s abil­ity to convert.…..on this point i may still be proved right!

There are a num­ber of areas of PPC that i believe are essen­tial to turn a los­ing cam­paign into a prof­itable one (even small profits)..

1. Con­ver­sion Tracking

I dont believe that any of my cam­paigns would be mak­ing a sin­gle penny with­out this in place. Prior to work­ing with a mer­chant (or even def­i­nitely decid­ing to) i have my Adwords & Yahoo track­ing codes placed on there thank you pages. I have recently had this code taken of a mer­chants site (secu­rity rea­sons) and have basi­cally now just pulled the plug on that cam­paign. These codes will enable you to track con­ver­sions down to key­word level, for exam­ple the key­word “hat” may con­vert every 40 clicks whereas the key­word “hats” may con­vert every 5 clicks enabling you to adjust your key­word bids accordingly.

2. Decide on Broad or Exact Match

When i first started run­ning my PPC cam­paigns i ran every­thing as broad match (as this is the default set­ting on both Google and Yahoo). My cam­paigns were los­ing money. If you are new to PPC strat­egy i sug­gest that your cam­paign is only set up and run on ‘exact’ match in Google (like this: [key­word]) or stan­dard match type in Yahoo (cam­paign set­ting > tac­tic set­tings). You can change these once you know you have a suc­cess on your hands. The rea­son i sug­gest this is that broad match requires good use of neg­a­tive key­words and PPC as a whole; if you are the only per­son sell­ing the prod­uct then ignore this advice.

3. Decide on Your Keywords

When decid­ing on your key­words i would sug­gest start­ing with a small num­ber and then steadily day on day increas­ing these. I would strongly dis­agree with any­one that says you should upload 30K key­words (or as many as you can find) on launch as this will soon become unman­age­able, try and famil­iar­ize your­self with Google Key­word Edi­tor (free down­load) and when a key­word is not con­vert­ing prof­itably (as shown by your con­ver­sion track­ing) drop the bid by any­where between 10 & 20% and re-test (vice versa for those high con­vert­ing keywords).

4. Finally

Never get big headed and think you know every­thing because you don’t and even if you did Google and Yahoo will just change some­thing and you wont know every­thing any­more. Try to learn from oth­ers and pass on what you know to deserv­ing peo­ple wish­ing to learn. Also, never give up, treat it as a learn­ing expe­ri­ence and move on!

I am sure there are 101 things that i have missed in this post, and that not every­one will agree with my ram­blings. I am also sure there are 1001 peo­ple bet­ter qual­i­fied to give this advice so do what you want with it and i will hope to add PPC strat­egy to our Pod­cast Inter­view Series if we can find a good inter­vie­wee.
Good Luck!