June 22, 2008
Pay Per Lead Services Versus Pay Per Click Advertising
Tired of watered down, poor quality leads from your lead generation company? The last several years, we have been noticing a trend being discussed by our clients. They are telling us that the quality of leads that used to come in from their lead generation services have dropped off the map. At the same time, they’ve noticed that the quality of leads coming from pay per click has remained superb and even gotten better.
Many lead gen firms use pay per click (PPC) search to attract their leads. Once they have a lead, they will ship it out to a variety of vendors, charging each the same fee. If you are seeing your leads get more saturated, it might be time for you to go right to the source instead of letting the middle men do that for you.
Unfortunately, PPC search isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. These days you have a lot of competition and it’s getting increasingly sophisticated. Sure, you can set up a simple web site with contact info and point some ads at it. You’ll probably get a trickle of leads. But if you want to really increase your business and lower your cost per lead or cost per acquisition, you will most likely need to dedicate some resources to it.
We always tell our clients that everything in the pay per click pipeline needs to be optimized. Let’s take a look at a couple items.
Let’s start with your PPC ad copy. You can certainly just place an ad and let it ride, but with the PPC algorithms placing more and more importance on Quality Scores, you need to pay close attention to your ads. If you can’t conduct daily split testing on your ads because of the time and effort, then try outsourcing to a PPC management company. A good firm should be able to double or triple your click through rates.
Maybe that doesn’t sound important, but it is. Doubling and tripling your quality traffic can do the same for your number of leads. And, it can lower your costs per click in the process.
But this is just one place to focus your efforts. Take a look at the destination urls — the landing pages where you send visitors. Are you using a contact form? How simple is your contact form? Is your phone number too small? There are always a variety of items you can optimize and test to increase conversions.
If you can optimize your landing pages over time, you can now take that traffic and double or triple your lead conversions. We’ve seen it time and time again. So, put in the effort, it is worth the time.
Making the jump to PPC search may not be in your company’s core competency. If not, then outsource to a PPC management company. Their experts can mine massive keyword lists, pull keywords from your competitors, conduct the necessary and vital daily split tests, and give you insight into better landing pages.
So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.
Tags: affiliate marketing, internet marketing web site, internet marketing advertising
Filed under News, PPC Advertising by Josh Prizer
June 15, 2008
PPC Bid Management Techniques
In the world of PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stand out in a crowd. As more and more people move to this effective online advertising forum, many marketplaces are becoming increasingly competitive and cutthroat. But don’t worry – implementing the following three bid management techniques will help put you back on top.
The first thing you should do is stay within your budget. Don’t get caught up in bidding wars if you don’t have to. These are often initiated by rookies to the PPC game, and can cost you dearly if you get involved. If you spend too much on your clicks, you will erase the profit you earn from backend conversions. If you aren’t getting the number of clicks you desire, then try to make other small changes such as modifying your keywords or tweaking the text of your ads. Upping your budget is the last thing you want to do. After all, you set your budget for a reason – to make sure you turn a profit.
The next thing you should do is forget about what ranking you are on a SERP (search engine results page). Bid an amount that you can afford, not for the spot you want. If you are in the top spot or the fifth spot, it doesn’t really matter. It is a good idea to try and get on the first page if you can, but beyond this you shouldn’t worry about it too much. Also, consider this: people click on the top spot without even thinking about it too much. This will lead to many clicks that have no chance of turning into conversions, drastically lowering your conversion rate and reducing your margins. Only bid for the top spot if you are the dominant player in your respective industry – or you wish to obtain this title, and realistically have the resources to do it.
Another bid management technique that you can make work for you is bid jamming. Certain PPC services have a bid system that is public, allowing you to see the bids of all your competitors. If you have a very direct competitor, you can consider jamming their bid. Basically, PPC services operate similar to an online auction site. If you bid .25 per click, and the next closest competitor bids .13 per click, you will pay .14 per click not .25. So, if your competitor is bidding .25, you may want to bid .24 so that they pay full price for the bid. If you do, they may not be able to keep the top spot for as long.
These are some basic bid management techniques that can help you maximize ROI with your PPC advertising campaign. Remember that patience can go a long way to maximizing the efficiency of your PPC campaign. Don’t be afraid to wait for your moment, and then seize it when it comes.
Tags: targeted internet marketing, internet marketing software, internet marketing for small business
Filed under News, PPC Advertising by Maxine Stirling
June 13, 2008
PPC Management UK – What to Expect
In the UK, a PPC campaign can be a great way to boost your sales with some targeted Internet marketing. Sometimes, though, the required time to manage such a campaign is simply too much for the company to handle internally. At this point, there are a host of PPC management UK companies who will offer to manage your campaign for you. This is the basic idea of what is involved.
When a company offers PPC campaign management, they are usually offering to do 3 things for you. First, they will do a careful keyword analysis for keyword and keyword phrases related to your industry. Most access similar information to do this, and therefore will draw up similar results. The PPC management UK company will attempt to create the best possible mix of high-volume keywords and very targeted keywords, giving your campaign some diversity and, ultimately, giving it the best chance for success.
Next, most PPC management UK companies will offer to write your ads for you, though this depends on the company. They will usually break the keywords into groups, and then write a specific ad for each group. This will help your ads be relevant to each keyword, and increase the chances of clicks. Also, writing targeted ads will hopefully increase your conversion rate once customers get to your site.
Lastly, PPC management companies will offer to manage and track every aspect of your PPC advertising campaign and report these results back to you. This is probably the most valuable service to most companies, because it saves them so much time. Continually monitoring a PPC campaign and making the appropriate adjustments can be an extremely arduous and time-consuming task.
After taking these factors into consideration, you should determine if a PPC management service is a good fit for your needs. If you are conducting a smaller campaign, it will probably not be cost-effective to hire out a professional service. With a larger campaign, it may be worth it to save yourself valuable time. And, on a larger scale, you have a greater chance of offsetting these costs with increased margins. It is important to remember that a PPC management UK company will charge you for setting up your campaign, and then take a percentage of your monthly budget. If you can’t afford this double billing, then it may be best to run your own PPC campaign – something that is very doable.
Tags: internet business, home based internet marketing business, internet marketing course
Filed under News, PPC Advertising by Maxine Stirling
May 8, 2008
Pay Per Click Advertising for Beginners
The main benefit of pay per click marketing is how in a relatively short period of time, the amount of traffic a web site receives can be increased dramatically. For a while now, people have been using this technique as it is clear this type of marketing comes out far ahead of other methods of advertising. Many internet users will see the ads but don’t fully understand how pay per click works so below are listed a few hints to make this easier to grasp.
Essentially, when you decide that you want to try this kind of advertising, you will create a small ad referring to your site that will be put up on a larger site that many people frequently look at. Very simply, you will pay the site (that the traffic comes from) a small amount from your account but only providing the visitor stays more than 10 seconds. There are a couple of pints to remember about this: your advert will be related to the subject of the site it is being used on and these sites are generating huge amounts of traffic. However this is not the only advantage because you only pay for the advertising when it is used, which means if someone doesn’t visit your site through the link you do not pay.
Unlike regular advertising which you pay for whether someone takes any notice or not, this way you pay for what gets used. Some people are worried about competitors clicking to run up their bill or lose them from the screen completely but in practice this rarely happens. Pay per click is one of the most targeted types of marketing available which means it is extremely cost effective for businesses that often lose a great deal advertising to those with no interest in their product. People who see your ad are already interested in the product or service you are promoting.
By now most people have experienced the Google Adwords pay per click system which has grown dramatically in recent years. Your small ad will show up when people search on Google for a phrase or term that you designate. The searches that are then made on that term will bring up natural results and paid examples which may show at the side or at the top of the page.
These instant results cannot be beaten in any other advertising medium and it is that attracts pay per click customers. Many companies use this technique to gauge how good their advertising copy will be before they use it in more expensive areas. This is a simple and easy system to understand that is incredibly powerful and effective at the same time so it is not surprising that almost all companies use pay per click search marketing.
Because of the effectiveness and low costs of PPC, it makes an excellent method to do extensive keyword targeting for a site’s or business search engine marketing efforts. It easier to target the long-tail in PPC or SEO as a means of testing conversions or customer satisfaction.
Tags: internet marketing consultant, internet marketing for small business, internet business
Filed under News, PPC Advertising by Jack J Giovanni
April 17, 2008
Discovering How To Bid On Keywords
When you are creating ads for your Google Adwords campaign you will need to build them carefully around the right keywords. This seems like commonsense and many marketers have perfected this art. They do the proper research to find the best keywords.
There are other factors, apart from keywords, which will make or break your pay per click advertising campaign. A factor that should be addressed is the fact that surfers have even less attention span than consumers listening to TV ads. This means that they will not look beyond the first 5-10 pages of search results.
This means that it is very important to the success of your ad that you position it in the first 5-10 pages range. You will do this by putting up enough money.
This section may be boring for the experienced marketer, but the new businessperson may find it interesting. Adwords can be compared to a huge auction. There is a lot of competition on certain popular keywords. By contrast there is little if any competition on obscure key words, but there are also minimal searches.
So be aware that you are not the only person utilizing a certain keyword. How can these search engines determine where to place an ad? Because Adwords works by pay per click the highest bidder on a key word will earn the rights to a top position. These high paid keywords are welcomed by the search engines and will always gain top positions.
It does take time to find the correct mix for keywords and bids, as you test and try new things you will probably take some losses. Always remember that conversions are usually only 10% of your clicks and not every one of the clicks.
Nobody can deny the importance of keyword research but it is good to know that bidding is also significant. If you do not make sure your ad is in a good position you will not attract enough traffic to your ad, let alone sales. So make sure you fully comprehend the bidding process so that you can build a profitable campaign.
While working out the details of your Adword campaign be sure to keep these tactics in mind. Consider this, when you build a great pulling ad it is no good condemning it into oblivion. That is just a waste of time and money.
Tags: internet marketing software, internet business, internet marketing business
Filed under News, PPC Advertising by Brian Basch




