When I first started using PPC marketing for my toner and ink ecommerce business back in 2002, I really did not know what I was doing. I kept using it because sales were coming in and i figure it was at least helping.
The most I did at that time was to set up separate adgroups for each of the popular products I was selling, and tried to come up with specific keywords for each. That worked ok for a while, as most of my competitors didn’t take the time to do the model by model adgroups.
But as more of the competition started doing what I was doing, I noticed bid prices going higher and higher, and saw less and less conversions. After some more testing, I realized that due to the high cost per click and mostly price comparison shoppers, PPC was a money-losing activity for this business. I had to reluctantly stop it.
Now, I’ve a firm believer of PPC because I’ve found it to work well for several of my current affiliate-type campaigns. But the reality is that PPC simply will not be profitable in certain markets, and we as marketers have to decide whether to keep the campaigns going or to stop it.
For certain markets with a residual/back-end nature built in, it may be ok to use PPC to acquire customers at a loss, and then hope to make that money back (and hopefully more) after a few repeat sales. That’s something that needs to be carefully considered.
Regardless of the market and the product, one fact will remain true in PPC, and that is he who can pay the lower bid and yet get a higher position for any particular keyword, will win, with all else being equal. Read that again and really understand where the power lies. Now what does it take to achieve that? The question is quite simple…You simply need to give Google what IT likes.
And in PPC/Adwords, Google likes high click through rate (CTR), meaning that your ad is very relevant for a particular keyword that people tend to click on your ad more than your competitors’ for the same amount of impressions. Google also likes a high quality score for your landing page. How do you get a high quality score? By having keyword relevant content on your landing page as well as other areas of your site.
If you can master PPC, namely Google Adwords, then you can enter almost any market and do well. From my personal experience, one of the best programs or systems for learning how to increase CTR and improve your quality score is actually revealed in the course Adsense Arbitrage Voodoo, which covers using PPC for affiliate sites with opt-in forms and also AdSense monetization techniques. Check it out if you are serious about using PPC to drive traffic to y0ur landing page and convert that traffic into Adsense clicks, opt-ins, and/or affiliate sales.
Yes, to become good at PPC, you need to learn the proper strategies, avoid the pitfalls, and continue to test, test, and test. And when you do that, your profits will skyrocket!
If you are serious about learning how to do PPC right, and save yourself from the expensive mistakes, I highly recommend Adsense Arbitrage Voodoo. Although it shows you exactly how to make money from Adsense by the means of buying cheap traffic through PPC and then channeling that traffic to your landing page with higher paying ads, the PPC section in this manual alone is worth gold!
