The PPC doctor is in and the diagnosis is good. I am a little over a $100 a day via PPC and its increasing everyday. By the end of next month, barring any suprises, I am positive I’ll be at some ridiculous amount per day. Up until now most of my monetization was via consulting.. let me tell you this is a lot more fun. Thats not to say that there haven’t been a few bumps.
Notes from the road..
- Yahoo Panama, not so bad but it could be better. With no ability to add large amounts of keywords I was forced to rethink my strategy with this. So far I am just taking proven winners and running with them on this network. Seems to be working well enough.
- MSN Adcenter… awesome little gem thats great for testing. I make a money off of this but not much, the testing ability is what makes it super awesome. Since they are pretty liberal with the number of keywords you can add and the prices are low you can test a crap ton of words
- Adwords.. still baffled.. at the time of this writing 99.8% of my keywords are deactived for search. Over time it only got worse. I am thinking that I need to customize ads for groups of keywords based on a root word they all contain. I’ll likely be getting to that later.
- You need a lot of data to make it work initially… I don’t think I could have done this without my own kickass keyword database. Paying someone else for that data would have been prohibitive.
- Adsense makes a great way to monetize if the user doesn’t want to convert on your main offer
- Landing pages.. the simpler the better.
- Conversion effeciency is important to monitor but if you don’t have cutting edge analytics thats ok as long as you have some sort rudimentary automated analytics going on. Whats important is that your making money consistently you can go back and tweek later
Thats about it ! I’m posting light while I get all this sorted.
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Glad to see you’re doing well Scott. The initial investment can seem a lot to some but worth it.
I invested $7000 in one week to get the data I needed from Adwords for my first (successful) venture into PPC marketing. Setting up goal tracking in Google analytics is also an important factor.
If you can afford it, have a read of Marketing Sherpas “Landing Page Handbook”. I assure you, it’s worth it’s weight in gold :)
Finally, for your keywords deactivated for search, use the adwords editors inbuilt “Keyword Grouper”. Make sure you go back and check manually, as sometimes it gets it wrong.
Then, as I said on previous posts, work on your QS. Not just adcopy QS but landing page QS. Bear in mind too that the landing page QS may not be just for that particular landing page but for the whole site. On some of my campaigns, I am paying three times LESS for a position higher then my competition. (Don’t ask how I know that). Brad Geddes has a great qrite up on improving QS here: http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/google-adwords-case-study-improving-landing-page-quality/
Some of the stuff might seem a little…. stupid, but believe me, he has it SPOT ON.
So that’s my rant. I should really post something on my own blog. I always end up putting my blog posts as comments on others! You’re my latest victim!
That was quick, congratulations are definitely in order.
“I am thinking that I need to customize ads for groups of keywords based on a root word they all contain.”
I’d suggest that and playing with your match type strategy. I have the best luck using exact match on every permutation of a phrase plus a liberal dose of broad match to catch the long-tail stuff.
Care to share what type of offers you’re using? Not so much the niche, but are you sending your clicks to a contextual PPC program, such as Adsense, or are you promoting affiliate offers?
Congratulations again. It looks like you’ll soon be able to cut down on the hours spent on consulting.
@Dave.. thanks for the advice and I’ll pick that book up. :)
@your_store.. I am focusing on CPA offers. I have done PPC -> Adsense and the margin wasn’t there. It was quick but I have been around the block, I have great analytics, and some money to play with so all that together made it easier. Had I tried this say 3 or 4 years ago I am sure the story probably would have been much different. The experience I have in other feilds has really made this easy.
Thanks for the update. I had a feeling you were doing CPA, as Adsense seems to have fallen out of favor for monetizing PPC traffic.
I’ve been mainly doing online retail for the past eight years, but I think it’s time to start dabbling in the CPA game again. Thanks for the kick in the butt :)
Well done Scott! That’s a nice one to hit.
I’ve been having similar problems with AdWords myself and can agree with your_store that “exact match on every permutation of a phrase” seems to work much better.
Cheers,
Al.
Once you get the ball rolling (and sounds like you’re well on your way) .. it is DEFINATELY more fun than consulting ..
You are a whore, and add nothing of value to this world.
lol.. ok so whats so great about what you do Mr. Anonymous?