A Successful PPC Campaign
On May 5th, 2009 the group discussed What Makes a Successful PPC Campaign and revealed some tips to improving yours.
Top 10 Most Common Mistakes To Avoid When Designing Your PPC Campaign
- You Believe Your PPC Campaign Is An Easy Way to Get Rich Quick
- You Quit After Not Being Successful On Your First Campaign
- You Don’t Take The Necessary Time to Educate Yourself On the PPC Space
- Inadequate Research and Planning Prior to Starting Your Campaign
- You Don’t Use The Tools Provided By the Search Engines
- You Don’t Understand How To Use Match Types
- Poor Campaign Structure
- You Are Not Tracking the Right Things
- You Don’t Continually Test the Different Elements Of Your Campaign
10. You Believe Your PPC Campaign Is An Easy Way to Get Rich Quick
The idea that a PPC campaign is an easy way to make money is a common misconception.
We get the occasional affiliate email that revolves around an affiliate looking to make a quick dollar, and this is something that we do not advocate at RevenueWire. The affiliate marketing industry is not about getting rich quick, and if you’ve heard this don’t believe it. It’s actually the opposite – it’s about making money gradually and growing revenue in the long term.
There is tremendous opportunity to do well in PPC marketing, but the reality is that it takes time & effort.
RevenueWire affiliate managers do their best to educated affiliates and help them understand that becoming successful in this business takes time, commitment, hours of research, resources, and testing and at times.
It’s possible that you can expect weeks, if not months of time commitment prior to breaking even with your campaign. That’s the nature of this business. It’s not easy, but with hard work there is a huge opportunity to become successful.
9. You Quit After Not Being Successful On Your First Campaign
We see too many affiliates give up on their campaigns if they haven’t seen immediate results. They key to success in this industry is to stick with it, test new strategies and combinations, and persevere until you’re making the kind of revenue you want.
8. You Don’t Take The Necessary Time to Educate Yourself On the PPC Space
There are many ways to generate traffic to your site with affiliate marketing and pay per click (PPC) advertising is one the ways that we are discussing today.
Without question the top 2% of affiliates have invested plenty of time and resources to educate themselves about the PPC space. So why wouldn’t you!
.Blogs and forums are great resources an and interactive way to hear from industry thought leaders and other like minded affiliate marketers
Some great sites are to take a look at are: 5-Star affiliate programs, Revenews, Revenuewire blog and Webmaster Radio
Tradeshows and conferences are also great opportunity to learn, network and gain new ideas for your PPC camp. I recommend SMX and Pubcon conferences as they both have PPC focused tracking.
7. Inadequate Research and Planning Prior to Starting Your Campaign
Successful affiliates know their product, their target audience, and their competition.
Spending time to research these things prior to launching a campaign will save you time and money in the long run.
For example: One of the products on the RevenueWire network is an outlook .PST repair utility. Based on sales trends we know that this product is being bought by individuals at work, Monday to Friday 9-5. Knowing this, an affiliate may then want to pause campaigns on weekends, major holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas when offices are usually closed and use ad scheduling to only show ads during business hours.
A little bit of time spent up front can really pay off in the long run.
6. You Don’t Use The Tools Provided By the Search Engines
If using a certain search engine, it would be in your best interests to use tools that they provide.
If you have decided that “diets for cats” is one of your most important keywords and Google Adwords keyword tool comes back with “healthy”, “holistic”, & “nutrition for cats”, you might want to consider using those terms as Google thinks they are relevant to your keyword. You may also notice that the keyword tool brings back “science diet cat food” as relevant. If this is something that you don’t have, you might want to use that as a negative keyword.
Google has a slew of tools, as does Microsoft Adcenter. One of my favorites is the search funnel from Adcenter. Know them, use them, love them:
- Google keyword tool
- Google traffic estimator
- Google trends
- Google search based keyword tool
- Google Insights for Search
- Google Analytics
5. You Don’t Understand How To Use Match Types
You need to know the difference between the various match types. These options can help you control who sees your ads and ultimately make your campaigns more targeted.
Broad match is a great way to generate a large list of keywords in a short period of time; if its volume your after, broad match is your answer. However it could be quite costly and you need to be aware that this is the default option.
When you want to fine-tune the clicks you pay for, start using phrase and exact match terms.
Don’t ignore the negative keyword option because it’s an easy way to avoid unqualified traffic that drive up your overhead costs.
By simply avoiding ad impressions on the irrelevant or unrelated searches, ad targeting will significantly improve.
4. Poor Campaign Structure
Campaign structure is one of the most important elements of a campaign. How is your account segmented? Do you have appropriately named, tightly themed ad groups? Is there a logical organization? Can you find keywords and ads easily?
You should have multiple campaigns for a single product. These campaigns could be organized by features, audience or promotions. Then in each campaign set up your ad groups with a root keyword paired with 5-7 closely related keywords.
One product on our network is a registry cleaner. You could set up separate campaigns for this product along the lines of “slow computer”, “dll errors”, “startup errors” and so on. Then under each campaign would be the appropriate ad groups.
As time equals money in this business, a well-organized campaign will save you both.
3. You Are Not Tracking The Right Things
What is making you money? Which ad group is resulting in sales? Which keywords are triggering ads? Your campaign will only be as successful as your strongest link. And there is more than one component in that chain.
The search engines provide different reports and analytics that will help you evaluate each piece of your campaign. Use these tools and look at all the metrics as a whole. If you consider your click through rate as the most important metric you may miss out completely on an ad group with a lower click through rate, but with a significantly higher conversion rate.
2. You Don’t Continually Test the Different Elements Of Your Campaign
Testing is perhaps the most important element of creating and maintaining a successful campaign. Simple A/B testing can reveal what techniques are outperforming others and allow you to continually hone and improve your marketing campaigns.
