When it comes to traffic, there are two proven ways to get targeted and interested buyers to flood to your websites or affiliate offers. That is organic (search engines, writing articles etc) and paid traffic (Pay per click being the most effective).
Whilst both methods are capable of bringing in huge amounts of targeted traffic that are ready to buy from you, the paid option has certain benefits over organic search engine listings.
First of all, paid traffic is able to bring in traffic in lightening fast time as opposed to organic traffic. Whilst organic traffic from the search engines might save you money over time, it's also important to realize that time is also money!
So why do a lot of struggling marketers still shy away from paid advertising such as Google Adwords? Is it because it doesn't work? Well, maybe it didn't work for them personally but it sure does work for millions of other marketers. So the real question is how to make it work for YOU.
If you are promoting affiliate offers then the first thing to consider is whether you will be able to link directly to the merchant's website using your affiliate link in the PPC ad, or if you would be better off sending your traffic to a landing page hosted on your own domain (or on a free domain elsewhere if you don't own a domain yet).
This is a common hurdle for affiliates and there are pros and cons to each method. Let's look at why you'd want to link directly to the merchant's website instead of using a landing page on your own site:
1. You can quickly throw up an entire campaign and test the water with a product
2. You don't need to worry about writing sales copy or actually creating web pages
3. You eliminate one less hurdle for the visitor to go through before making a purchase
Whilst all of these benefits seem pretty conclusive, the truth is that there is actually a greater effectiveness of using your own landing pages to pre-sell the visitor on the affiliate product that you are promoting, such as:
1. You can warm the visitor up and prepare them for the sales pitch
2. You can tell your story and make the visitor connect with you emotionally, which rockets conversions!
3. You can get the opportunity to capture an email address so that you can send out multiple offers to the same person (all for the same product if they don't buy straight away).
Another problem with directly linking to affiliate offers is that Google Adwords will often penalize you for doing so, if other advertisers are also doing this on the same keywords that you're bidding on. Google doesn't want a ton of duplicate ads for a keyword, so you need to be unique.
Ultimately, tests have proven that sending people to a pre-sell landing page that either contains a personal recommendation, a review or a chance to capture people's email addresses is likely to rocket your conversion ratios beyond belief.
And in the lucrative but competitive world of PPC advertising, where every click cuts into your profits, then a higher conversion ratio is your ultimate goal.
Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
4 crucial building blocks to stop Google Adwords destroying your wallet
For many affiliates, pay per click advertising is the seemingly untamed beast for making a killing or losing your entire month's profits. We've all read the horror stories of people losing thousands overnight and if that didn't put us off, trying to dabble ourselves and getting burned certainly did.
But did you know that there are millions of successful affiliates using PPC advertising as their license to print money. But how can so many people be killing it as an affiliate using PPC to get traffic where so many other mere mortals are getting stung left, right and center with huge ad costs and low sales ratio conversions?
Well, luckily it's not as complicated as you might think and some fundamental yet simple changes can be applied to join the wealthy affiliates using PPC advertising. So let's look at 4 crucial building blocks that you need to get right straight out of the gate...
1. Stop bidding on untargeted, broad keywords
It's tempting to bid on keywords such as "home insurance" if you're a home insurance affiliate in order to get some heavy traffic, but what will happen is you'll crush your server, empty your wallet and get very poor conversion rates as a result. PPC advertising is all about tightly targeting your traffic. So, bidding on "home insurance company in the town of X" is far better and will get higher conversions providing your offer relates to the town being searched on.
2. Stop paying the same price for all match types
Match types are broad, exact and phrase. An exact match type means that the exact phrase you're bidding on was typed into Google. Phrase means that the same words were used, but not necessarily in the same order of your keywords, and broad means that your keywords were used amongst other unknown keywords.
If you pay .15 per click on a broad keyword and .15 on an exact keyword, you're wasting money. You should pay higher prices for exact keywords because they are more relevant to your ad and offer. Subsequently, you should pay far less for broad match type keywords because they could be totally off base and irrelevant for your offer, despite containing the keywords you're bidding on.
3. Use the negative keywords list
There's a feature in your campaigns to use a list of negative keywords. This is used to stop your ads being triggered for search terms that include particular keywords. An example would be the word "free". By adding the negative keyword "free" to your ad group, you will stop freebie seekers from seeing your ads.
4. Hold in there, then test, track and monitor
When you first start out, you'll be fumbling somewhat to see how things pan out. The big mistake is that people drop a campaign after getting a couple of hundred clicks and no sales. But the truth is, in many cases your sales might come in random batches. So, you might not make money for a few hundred clicks then the very next day you could get 4-5 sales at once. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
The next thing is to test your ad copy by using Google Adwords' built in split testing service for each ad group you have running. This will help you to improve your click through ratio for each group of keywords and therefore prompting Google to increase your Quality Score. The higher your Quality Score, the less you pay for clicks and the higher you are placed in the ad listings at the same time!
But did you know that there are millions of successful affiliates using PPC advertising as their license to print money. But how can so many people be killing it as an affiliate using PPC to get traffic where so many other mere mortals are getting stung left, right and center with huge ad costs and low sales ratio conversions?
Well, luckily it's not as complicated as you might think and some fundamental yet simple changes can be applied to join the wealthy affiliates using PPC advertising. So let's look at 4 crucial building blocks that you need to get right straight out of the gate...
1. Stop bidding on untargeted, broad keywords
It's tempting to bid on keywords such as "home insurance" if you're a home insurance affiliate in order to get some heavy traffic, but what will happen is you'll crush your server, empty your wallet and get very poor conversion rates as a result. PPC advertising is all about tightly targeting your traffic. So, bidding on "home insurance company in the town of X" is far better and will get higher conversions providing your offer relates to the town being searched on.
2. Stop paying the same price for all match types
Match types are broad, exact and phrase. An exact match type means that the exact phrase you're bidding on was typed into Google. Phrase means that the same words were used, but not necessarily in the same order of your keywords, and broad means that your keywords were used amongst other unknown keywords.
If you pay .15 per click on a broad keyword and .15 on an exact keyword, you're wasting money. You should pay higher prices for exact keywords because they are more relevant to your ad and offer. Subsequently, you should pay far less for broad match type keywords because they could be totally off base and irrelevant for your offer, despite containing the keywords you're bidding on.
3. Use the negative keywords list
There's a feature in your campaigns to use a list of negative keywords. This is used to stop your ads being triggered for search terms that include particular keywords. An example would be the word "free". By adding the negative keyword "free" to your ad group, you will stop freebie seekers from seeing your ads.
4. Hold in there, then test, track and monitor
When you first start out, you'll be fumbling somewhat to see how things pan out. The big mistake is that people drop a campaign after getting a couple of hundred clicks and no sales. But the truth is, in many cases your sales might come in random batches. So, you might not make money for a few hundred clicks then the very next day you could get 4-5 sales at once. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
The next thing is to test your ad copy by using Google Adwords' built in split testing service for each ad group you have running. This will help you to improve your click through ratio for each group of keywords and therefore prompting Google to increase your Quality Score. The higher your Quality Score, the less you pay for clicks and the higher you are placed in the ad listings at the same time!
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