Need crash course- at least some tips anyway

Alright, so i need to jumpstart my online sales. Im working on my SEO and blog marketing and viral stuff through forums and such, but the sales just arent there. So im thinking of using PPC as a way to increase my sales while i wait for my seo to really start paying off.

Ive never tried it before so id like some suggestions for jumping in feet first and getting a good ppc campaign started.

Anyone?

Thanks in advance.
Justin

Google more than anyone wants you to succede: Adwords Learning Center

But is it a good idea? Will it work for any business, if done properly of course?

With SEO and SEM it is a game of experimentation guided by others experiences and common sense. You will not know whether it will work for you until you try it. It is not an expensive experiment, but can bring good rewards if it proves to be effective.

Will it work to "get clicks" - ABSOLUTELY!

Will it work to generate sales... that's up to you... seriously if business cards, brochures, flyers, magazines, newspapers, posters, radio, TV, and word-of-mouth didn't work... AdWords likely won't either.

It isn't a magic bullet.

Their are many ways to optimize your results, but the most important (I manage 700+ PPC accounts) is to use the proper filters (like [US only] because a lot of click fraud comes from non-US traffic), and to run your logs through an analyzer to verify the country of origin. Once you have these IP's, contact your rep at the SE and get credit for them.

I consider this to be the most important element because even if you have a great campaign, but if 30% of your traffic is from click fraud IP addresses, your conversion rate is seriously affected, and your overall campign is skewed.

Here is my approach to starting new PPC campaign:

1. Contact the company by phone and get a personal rep. Here are their numbers. (Toll-free when I could find them. Some are actual rep's personal lines, some of these were pretty difficult to get!)

Google 650-330-0100
Overture/Yahoo 503-615-3602 or 866-924-6676
LookSmart 877-512-5665 or 415-348-7842
7Search 773-283-0086
Enhance 800-840-1012
Miva/FindWhat 877-274-2525
Kanoodle 877-526-6635
Search123 818-575-4500
BrainFox 646-223-1255(fax only)
SearchFeed 866.722.9951
411Web sales@411.web.com
Turbo10 (UK): 0044 20 7232 1733
Mirago +44 (0)1420 592323
Mamma 888-844-2372
QuePasa support@quepasacorp.com
Lycos 781-370-2664
Ask/Ask Jeeves 510-985-7400
Bidvertiser 866.319.0373
Go Click 702-784-1787

2. Contact your site host and make sure your log settings are set to capture and store for at least 7 days.

3. Install a log analyzer. Be sure it will seperate the clicks from different countries and their IP addresses. This will give you the proof you will need if you get non-requested and need to prove it.

4. Find out about their filters as it relates to your products country demographics.(many ppc's require you to ASK that it be turned on - i.e.Enhance, LookSmart, Kanoodle). This is important because I market just to US companies only. BrainFox has NO FILTERS, LookSmart has a US filter but it also includes Canada which equates to 16% of their traffic sent to me. Anotherword wasted clicks and money. Check each one out carefully while setting them up, and check out the fine print.

5. Use this keyword tool to get your top 10 keywords

6. Start your campaign. (See step 10 for bonus deposit credits).

7. Use each search engines estimated cost tool if available. This way you can get an estimate on the overall cost of your campaign based on your bids, and if you can afford it or need to adjust the bids.

8. If you have a conversion rate from another marketing campaign for your specific product, get it to use in this task. (For instance, I have an email campaign that gets a 1 out of 250 conversion. Applying this to a PPC budget, I need to assume that 1000 clicks will get me 4 conversions (although this SHOULD be higher because of targeted demographics a ppc provides). So if those click are costing me 10 cents each, each lead will cost $25. Is this what your getting paid or are willing to pay for a lead?) Here is a CPM tool to figure CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and an ROI (return on investment) tool. You'll want to get friendly with both of these tools. They are the bottom line on your campaigns.

9. On some of the PPC's you can get a 1 cent listing through them such as GoClick, ePilot, 7Search, or 5 cent minimum bids on FindWhat, EnHance, Kanoodle, and Search123. Assemble a list of keywords and keywords phrases that you can buy for a 1 - 5 cent minimum bid. (statistics show the more keywords in your keyword phrase, the more the term will get traffic - 4 word phrases are better than 3, 5 is better than 4, this starts to decreases at 6 total keywords in 1 phrase) This will also give you great information down the road on certain phrases that temporarily jump up in the serps and can generate a good amount of traffic.

10. Set your daily or weekly budget low. Some will call it a "cap"**. This is the stage at which the PPC system will remove your ad from circulation. This is important!

**LookSmart has what it calls a "daily target". Beware of this, it is not a cap. I had a $70 "daily target" and thanks to click fraud, 12 hrs. later it cost me almost $800...or basically until my account was depleted. I fought and got it back but it took quite some time to resolve with my personal rep.

11. Analyze your logs and get credit from your rep on a daily basis. There are many skills to master such as bid monitoring, bid gaps, strategic bidding and keyword cpm/cpc adjustments, but these steps will get you started.

12. Learn to use the monitoring tools the PPC offers up, and if you are doing multiple campaigns across many ppc engines, checkout different ppc management tools such as BidRank or SearchIgnite to help you keep up. Some of these types of companies are signed up for affiliate programs through the vendors and can get you a $5 to $100 deposit match when you open your accounts.


If I had to target 3 of the primary tasks you need to do daily they would be;
1. Analyze your logs
2. Use your PPC Manager
3. More keyword research, keyword research, keyword research!


PPC is now as much SEO as anything else. Google and MSN (and sonn Yahoo) have went to content and landing pages to determine not just your positioning, but also what you pay. Another words, you will need to optimize your landing pages to effectively get top positions for PPC.

Use this template for your pages (this is just a start. Get VERY good content and BL's with your kw's in them as well)

Use your targeted keyword phrase:

· In META keywords. It’s not necessary for Google, but a good habit. Keep your META keywords short (128 characters max, or 10).
· In META description. Keep keyword close to the left but in a full sentence.
· In the title at the far left but possibly not as the first word.
· In the top portion of the page in first sentence of first full bodied paragraph (plain text: no bold, no italic, no style).
· In an H2-H4 heading
· In bold – second paragraph if possible and anywhere but the first usage on page.
· In italic – anywhere but the first usage.
· In subscript/superscript.
· In URL (directory name, filename, or domain name). Do not duplicate the keyword in the URL.
· In an image filename used on the page.
· In ALT tag of that previous image mentioned.
· In the title attribute of that image.
· In link text to another site.
· In an internal link’s text.
· In title attribute of all links targeted in and out of page.
· In the filename of your external CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or JavaScript file.
· In an inbound link on site (preferably from your home page).
· In an inbound link from offsite (if possible).
· In a link to a site that has a PageRank of 8 or better.

Other search engine optimization things to consider include:

· Use “last modified” headers if you can.
· Validate that HTML. Some feel Google’s parser has become stricter at parsing instead of milder. It will miss an entire page because of a few simple errors – we have tested this in depth.
· Use an HTML template throughout your site. Google can spot the template and parse it off. (Of course, this also means they are pretty good at spotting duplicate content).
· Keep the page as .html or .htm extension. Any dynamic extension is a risk.
· Keep the HTML below 20K. 5-15K is the ideal range.
· Keep the ration of text to HTML very high. Text should out weigh HTML by significant amounts.
· Double check your page in Netscape, Opera, and IE. Use Lynx if you have it.
· Use only raw HREFs for links. Keep JavaScript far, far away from links. The simpler the link code the better.
· The traffic comes when you figure out that 1 referral a day to 10 pages is better than 10 referrals a day to 1 page.
· Don’t assume that keywords in your site’s navigation template will be worth anything at all. Google looks for full sentences and paragraphs. Keywords just laying around orphaned on the page are not worth as much as when used in a sentence.

Good luck, and feel free to email me with any questions.
garythescubadiver@gmail.com

As quoted below in #3 below, it was mentioned to install a log analyzer to battle against click fraud. I contacted my host, and they mentioned that they currently keep the log files for 7 days. Is this Log Analyzer a different type of software that is needed to analyze the files? Or can I just access the Log Files from my host and check to see if there is repetetiveness in a certain IP address.

Are there any Free Software that can anlayze the log files?
Thanks

In my experience raw log files are very large and hard to look at in their raw form in a way that is helpful.

AWStats has free versions but I'm not sure if the free version has a log analyser.

I've used WebTrends in the past and DirectTrack, but now I am using ZNet and its works very good.

GaryTheScubaGuy

well, i finally started a adwords program today. i set my daily limit at 100 a day and am only using 5 ad groups right now with about 50 keywords. All for some of my higher profit lines.
I feel as though i researched the words i want pretty thouroughly before i started this and will be monitoring it for a week, and making changes as necessary to see what i can get to work the best.
ill keep you all updated.

Hi

what is this "adwords program" and how can any one start this

Awaiting Reply

Go this site called Google and do what we Pro's call a "Search".
This means to enter your querie, hit send and examine the results.