The Secret To Profits With Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Understanding how Google Adwords quality score impacts your advertising campaign is essential to getting the best results for the least cost from your pay-per-click advertising. Many people are afraid of pay-per-click advertising, most of that fear comes from either not understanding how to do it properly and seeing hundreds of dollars in charges appear on your account almost overnight or you have heard from someone else who didn't know what they were doing. That is too bad, because used properly PPC can actually be a terrific testing ground, a sound investment and over time, become quite profitable. As we have mentioned many times in the past, your success driving traffic and sales to your web businesses is all about understanding the keyword phrases your best customers use to find your website and buy your products or services. This doesn't happen by accident. LOW SALES - HERE'S WHY If you have poor sales online, it is typically due to ONLY 1 of 2 main things 1. Bad traffic generation (usually because you have not properly targeted the right keywords) or --
2. Bad conversion once someone lands on your page. The trouble is, until you get good at #1 you don't even know if #2 needs improvement. So, to be successful wtih PPC, you need to focus on a few key aspects: 1. Learn the basics of keyword research AND learn to pick out the keywords that indicate your market is ready to buy
2. Learn the basics of writing Adword Ads. What you really want is for your ads to both attract clicks, but also be relevant enough to your landing page that you get a high return on investment for your advertising dollars
3. You understand the basics of how Google Adwords works, and how to minimize what you pay for clicks while maximizing your return on investment. HOW PPC WORKS Google Adwords is an ad auction service...advertisers pay to have their ads shown against search and content all over the web. The next question you should ask yourself is "how does Google assign a cost to my ad?" That is a complicated question, but basically it is a system of demand and supply. The more competition among advertisers there is, the higher the cost per click will be. But more important, Google has factored in something called "Quality Score" into their algorithm for assigning costs to ads. Quality score is a method of Google controlling how relevant an ad is to an advertiser who will, through Google's Adsense system, host that ad. What that means is the more relevant and higher quality your ad is (in the eyes of Google), the lower your cost per click will be. Google assigns a quality score to each keyword in your campaign and assigns an overall weighted quality score across your keywords by campaign and likely, even by account. Further, Google will tend to weight high impression keywords (that is keywords that get more searches) with a higher factor so that if you have great quality scores on 10 keywords in your account, but they get a smaller number of impressions and you have a low quality score on 1 keyword that gets many times more impressions you are still going to be penalized for your low quality score on that keyword. SO HOW DO WE IMPROVE OUR QUALITY SCORE AND MAKE MORE PROFIT? 1. Tailor your ads to each keyword or at least, keyword family. If I have a root keyword that is lose weight, then I want an Ad Group that only includes keyword phrases in that family and an ad headline and body that is directly focused on the lose weight keyword family. You will get better response. I would NOT want to include keywords like weight loss or burn fat in the same ad group, I want a separate ad group for each of those with its own tailored ad. That way you have highly relevant sub-groupings of ad groups each with highly relevant ads. 2. Tailor your landing pages to your ad groups and ads. Same thing goes for landing pages. If you are targeting lose weight, then make sure your landing page reflects value for those that search on the keyword phrase lose weight. Your Ad Group for burn fat should end up at a landing page tailored to the Burn Fat message...and so on. Landing page IS a major factor in quality score, so pay attention. 3. Start off in the higher positions. When you setup a Google Adword Ad Group you get to set bids for each keyword and they will roughly tell you what position you will sit for a given bid. To start off, bid yourself into the top 3 positions to get your number of clicks up. As your account, Ad Group and keyword gains more history, Google weighs the actual click through rate as more important to the calculation of quality score. Higher click through rates will result in higher quality scores which will result in lower cost-per-clicks assuming the concept of relevancy explained above is met. 4. Quickly get rid of losers. Make sure you track conversions on your ads and keywords. After all, the ultimate measure of a keyword's success for you is how well it converts clicks into conversions (this may be buyers or list signups depending on your marketing goal). You may find that one keyword gives you very high click through rates, but after several hundreds clicks your conversions are extremely low...that is NOT what you want. So, you want to track your campaigns daily for the first several weeks getting rid first of keywords with low click through rates AND low conversions - these are the biggest losers for you. Then weed out the keywords that have good click through rates, but after several hundred clicks are not converting. Over a 2-3 week period you should be left with keywords that have high click through rates, high quality scores (which will begin to bring down your cost-per-click) and decent to high conversions. 5. Test multiple ads per Ad group. Remember, you should have Ad groups formed around keyword families (our example was lose weight, lose more weight, lose weight fast, etc...), in Adwords you have the ability to generate multiple ads and run them to see which one performs (and converts) the best. By doing this you are making sure you identify the ad that gets you the best results. I like to run 2-3 ads against each Ad group. 6. Turn Content ads off in the beginning (or at least watch them closely). When many people lose hundreds with PPC it is because they don't realize that Content Ads is turned "On" and they go through money like hand over fist. Content ads simply mean that your ad will not only appear along side search results, but will also appear alongside partner website content that is relevant (ex. CNN). These tend to get you quite a few clicks and can often be lower conversion, so you can burn through more money without paying extra special attention to these. I am not saying Content ads won't work, they just are a little riskier than search By putting these systems and practices into place, you will be amazed at how valuable pay-per-click campaigns can be. When you use this method you will come out with... a) A very good idea of which headlines and ads really connect with your market
b) A precise list of the top keywords that draw buyers, not just visitors. You can now target these keywords in multiple ways to pull in even more sales and profits
c) You have weeded out the least profitable keywords and turned an unprofitable "test" camapaign into a highly profitable traffic source that you can use to automatically generate ongoing sales For more information on Google Adwords Quality Score, here is the page at Google that explains more...http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215 Used properly, PPC is a great way to quickly pull out extremely important internet marketing metrics that will help you quickly grow your internet business profits...now that doesn't seem so scary does it?
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