PPC marketing users offered tips on adCenter transition

Paid search marketers have been offered some tips on steps to take before the final round of transitions from Yahoo! to adCenter starts next week.
From October 11th, ad serving will switch to the Microsoft platform and the transfer of pay per click marketing accounts is expected to be completed by the final week of this month.
Yahoo! said advertisers should therefore ensure they have an adWords account – complete with campaigns and budgets – set up no later than October 25th, otherwise their ads will no longer appear on the Yahoo! Search network.
It added that as ad serving moves, marketers will notice clicks and impressions increasing on their adWords platform but declining on Yahoo!. Nevertheless, they should continue to manage their existing campaigns until the transfer process is complete.
Furthermore, the company advised advertisers to review their search engine marketing budgets as, based on comScore's August figures, Yahoo! and Microsoft's combined share of core searches in the US will be around 33.8 per cent.
This compares to a share of 60.5 per cent for Google.
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18 Tips For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads

18 Tips For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads

 

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When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, there are two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your CTR) or you can improve your ads (which will increase your CTR and your position). Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.
The real secret to writing “the best ad on the page” is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads over multiple test iterations. By doing this, you will improve your ad over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few tips you could use to give your initial ads a boost, or to help you beat your personal best performing ad time and time again. So without further ado, here are 18 tips for writing better PPC ads:

1. Write ads for small groups of keywords. By grouping your keywords very tightly, and writing your ads specifically for those keywords, you will give yourself a large advantage over your competition. Many people are too lazy to take the time required to do this properly, yet it is something that will increase your CTR every single time.
2. Work your keywords into the ads as much as possible. If you took the advice from the previous tip, you will have an easier time with this one. You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ad so that you can take full advantage of keyword bolding. I sometimes include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum bolding.
3. Give the ads some visual appeal. This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your ad to stand out. You can make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect, you can alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad, or you can make your ad intentionally extra short. All of these will help you ad differentiate itself from the competition and will hopefully attract some eyeballs.
4. Write ads with your audience in mind. When you are writing an ad, think to yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this keyword?” If you can “read their minds” and guess their internal dialog, you will be able to answer their exact questions and get their attention. This is another tip that is immensely easier if you group your keywords very tightly.
5. Create an attention-grabbing headline. Nothing in your ad is more important that your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it (25 characters with AdWords). Craft your headline wisely, but don’t stress over it too much, you will probably be split testing many, many different variations before you find the great ones.
6. Ask the audience a question. This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it impacts the CTR. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are likely to click on your ad. Additionally, the tone of the question, along with the question mark, helps differentiate your ad from the others.
7. Use specific numbers. This is a common copywriting trick that has been used for decades. Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your ad. If you can, include a very specific number such as “314″ instead of “300+” or “76.83%” instead of “75%”. You don’t have to be 100% accurate with the numbers either, as long as you aren’t blatantly lying.
8. Capitalize strategically. It is better to capitalize the first letter of every word? The first letter of important words? Just the first letter of words in the headline? Should you capitalize words in your display URL? You can never be sure until you have tested it, but it is something that you must test. I usually start out capitalizing everything, then try out any combinations I can think of.
9. Borrow ideas from others. Another copywriting principle that has been in practice for decades is borrowing ideas from other ads. Although you should technically only take “ideas” (such as rewriting an ad about “pens” to work with your “cheese” keywords), you won’t get into any trouble copying direct competitors. Take some of the top (or your favorite) ads that are being shown for your keywords and mix them up to create something new. It they are at the top of the listings, they probably have a pretty good ad (or are paying out the nose).
10. Emphasize the benefits of your offer. Yet another age-old copywriting principle. Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, in your ad, what benefit they will get from giving you their click, you will likely have a successful ad.
11. Use words that evoke emotion. If you can effectively get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words goes on and on, so here is a nice guide to emotion words.
12. Test multiple versions of your display URL. This was touched on in tip number 8, but needs to be expanded. While you should experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”), you should also experiment with “www”, sub domains, and pages. It usually, but not always, increases the CTR when you include the keywords in your URL. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.” Although some uptight editors might disable these ads if the pages don’t actually exist, you can resubmit them and a nicer editor will realize that there is no harm done.
13. Be cautious with prices. Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is the lowest, it is probably best to leave it out of your ad. You can, instead, state the savings as a benefit to the user.
14. Include a call-to-action. Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but is is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” is sufficient.
15. Double check spelling and grammar. This might seem obvious, but is can very easy to make a stupid mistake. Having a grammatical or spelling error in your ad hurts the credibility of your ad and will most likely get it disable by an editor, costing you valuable testing time.
16. Don’t waste space with useless words. Like I said before, the space available to you in a pay-per-click ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simply and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.
17. Use negative keywords. This isn’t directly related to actually writing your ads, but it is definitely important. It goes along with tip number 1. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you didn’t intend for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for, they will not click your ad, and your CTR will suffer.
18. Make the ad relevant to the landing page. I saved this suggestion for last because it will not effect the CTR of your ad in the least bit (it can, however, effect your landing page quality score). With that being said, it is still very important that you make your ad relevant to the landing page. If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through. Give them what you promised in your ad and you will experience higher conversions. Give them something that doesn’t match the ad and you will have a lot of confused visitors who reach for the back button.

There you have it, eighteen tips I have learned through my experience with PPC marketing. Keep in mind that these are merely suggestions, they can’t possibly be used all at once, and they won’t always make for a better ad. You need to test every change you make to your ads to determine if it has a positive or negative overall effect.

PPC Advertising – Tips For Newbies

February 28, 2010 | In: Social Media Tips

If you want to make a living (or supplement your living) with your computer, you need to learn how to market to people. Pay Per Click campaigns are one such way to do that. A large number of people are utilizing PPC campaigns though so it’s highly competitive and can be quite expensive. How does it work? You pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. When they click on your ad, they’re taken to your website where you will try to sell them something. It might cost you $0.25 cents to get them to your site but then you could earn money in profit when they buy something from your online store, download your ebook, sign up for your membership site, or click on a link that takes them to an affiliate program where they then buy something that earns you a commission. There are a lot of different ways to use pay per click to your advantage.
Is it simple to make money through Google Adwords?
Unfortunately it’s not simple. A lot of factors will dictate how much you spend on your Adwords campaign and how much you actually earn from your efforts. A lot of people who start marketing and advertising this way spend hundreds of dollars before they earn any money at all. When you learn as you go, this is the price you pay. There are programs and tools that are both free and fee-based that can help you learn how to do it effectively such as:
- Keyword tools. These tools can help you figure out which words might be the best to bid on for high volume and low competition
- Ebooks. Ebooks can explain processes and tell you the secret strategies that internet marketers have used successfully to keep clicks high, costs low, and conversion rates rising.
- Software tools. There are a number of software tools available that can help you save time, maximize keyword results , duplicate campaigns, split test, provide landing pages, and more.
Maximizing Your Advertising Dollar
It costs a lot of money to advertise. Some methods are more expensive than others. Whether you have a store, want to advertise your services, have an affiliate marketing business, or some other online business, advertising on the main search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Bing) can help you make money, gain recognition for your brand or niche, and grow your business. Online shoppers pay attention to ads. You can grab their attention not just in the search engines but also on blogs and websites that utilize contextual advertising. To be successful you need to learn how to market yourself and get traffic to your website. A lot of today’s successful online marketers use a combination of approaches such as: organic SEO, social media, and sponsored ads. Seasoned marketers have done split testing, done keyword research, created several landing pages, and spent time building campaigns. You could take the long road there and learn through trial and error but you could also invest in tools that save you money in the long run, bring you a big return on your investment, inform you of secrets, and help you shorten your learning curve., inform you of secrets, and help you shorten your learning curve.

7 Tips to Save Money on your PPC Campaign

1. Stop using Broad Match – A lot of folks doesn’t know or probably doesn’t bother to use the different keyword match types that are available in Adwords. By default if you type in a keyword in your adwords campaign it is set as a “broad match”. The problem with a broad match is that your ad is often displayed in other different variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. Even though Google says that the broad match always uses relevant keywords, but we (‘advertisers’) know that its not often best for your business. For example, if Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com wants to bid on the keyword “Shoe Money” on a broad match, Google will probably find a lot of shoe related queries as relevant. (Which certainly isn’t the case here). So if you have done some work on your keyword research and you are confident with a couple of 2-3 words and long tail keywords, use the “Phrase” or [Exact Match] instead of a Broad Match.
2. Use Negative Keywords Effectively – I have seen a lot of PPC campaigns that doesn’t implement this sweet Keyword matching feature – Negative Keywords. Suppose you run a web hosting business and you are bidding on the keyword “web hosting” on broad or phrase match. So now suppose If someone performs a search for “free web hosting”, its basically going to trigger your ad. But do you sell web hosting for Free? No! Then do you want to pay for that extra click and have those unwanted impressions which is probably lowering your CTR (Click-Through-Rate)?You can use Negative Keyword match feature to filter out keywords for which you don’t want your ads to show. So words like “free”, “cheap” are common Negative keywords. But its not limited to that. Its absolutely essential to have negative keywords if you have a lot of broad/phrase match keywords in your campaign. If you are confused about your negative keywords, Go to Adwords Keyword Tool enter your keyword and choose the “Negative” in the drop-down under Match Type. This will show you a whole bunch of negative keywords that may suit your primary keyword.
3. Smart Bidding – If you have played with some auction sites like Ebay you probably know this secret already. A smart way of bidding for anything is to do the unnatural. Don’t bid like any other Joe, always try to bid in odds (I personally prefers to bid in 1s, 3s and 7s). Now the question is why? Well the main reason is doing odd things gives you an advantage over others who are always playing by their ‘predictabe’ rules. Thus it sort of gives you a higher chance of winning the bid war. So instead of bidding $0.10, I’d bid $0.13, and for $0.15 I’d prefer to bid $0.17. So for someone who is bidding in 5s (like 5, 10, 15, 20…), would need to place 4 bids to outbid my ($0.17). Moreover lets say if the highest bidder was $0.10, you can outbid him by only 1 cent ($0.11) rather than paying $0.15!
4. Create Separate Ad Group, Ads and Landing Pages – If your PPC account looks like my friend’s (1 Campaign, 1 Adgroup, 1 Ad, 1 Landing Page, 20 Keywords) then you are doing the whole thing wrong. Try to group similar keywords in Individual ad groups and create Individual Ads for those and point them to their designated Landing pages. This will not only improve your CTR but also improve your conversion. Lets say you are running a web hosting business, and you offer different types of hosting (e.g. Shared, Reseller, Dedicated etc). So for best result, you may want to split your whole keyword list into 3 logical segments related to the 3 different types of hosting you offer. And then use those keywords to create 3 different adgroups & Specific ads for the specific services. Point all those ads to your relevant landing pages (e.g. www.host.com/shared-hosting.html). This will definitely help you to get a better quality score as your ads & landing pages will become more relevant to the term the user is searching for. It is likely to increase your CTR & and will eventually lead to higher sales. So at the end of the day because of your good quality score you will be paying less and getting highly targeted audience to the highly targeted offer pages – All this just for a little bit of initial hard work from your side.
5. Geographic Target - If you are just a bakery at queens, why would you want to pay for clicks that are outside your business zone? Use the GEO target facility to target your audience well, this will substantially help you to lower your ad impression, higher CTR, higher quality score and a better ROI.
6. Time your Ads, Show your Ads When They Matter – If you are a local Pizza Store, would you want to show your ads when people at 3 AM search for Pizzas? (Assuming you don’t. have a 24 Hour Delivery). It would be ridicules and a big waste of money if you actually pay for clicks after your business hours where none of the searchers can actually order your pizza during that period of time. So What would you do? Use Ad Scheduling to time your ads to match your requirements. Ad scheduling lets you control the days and times your AdWords campaigns appear. So if you are running “Special offers” for Fridays, you can use Ad Scheduling to only show ads (a specific one) on Fridays. Try to think of a time when your ad would actually matter to your customer. By default, your ads will run for 24 hours in a day by trial and error you might be able to find out that running ads on a specific time of the day gives you more conversion! (e.g. People would search for “morning headache” usually in the morning after getting up from bed..)
7. Don’t bid on Content Network – I know some might disagree with me here but this is purely based on my own experience & what works best for me and my clients. I feel that even though bidding at content network is often cheaper, but in terms of conversion the performance of content network is very poor. Again, I’d say that this may be different for your case as some niches do really well in content networks. But if you are really starting out fresh with PPC & adwords, I’d urge you to remove content network from your campaign. This setting is set in the campaign level, so once you turn this off all the other ad groups that are in that particular campaign will be affected. What if you want the content network, but you dont want to harm your quality score by having too many impression and low CTR? Easy solution is to create a completely separate campaign only for content network and test the results! Note: You should ALWAYS modify your content network bid as its much lower than the search network bids.

 

6 Tips How to Write Effective PPC Ads

Posted on Saturday, 6th December 2008

Nowadays, it became quite easy to start and maintain Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns. Looking from the dull side, there is a lot of money being wasted given that these Ads are appealing to the visitor, thus reducing the Click through Rate.
Writing effective PPC Ads can be quite easy. The most important thing to remember is that the one and only goal of your PPC Ad is to get clicked. There is no room for branding and no time to sell. You can do all that on the landing page, but only if you get the visitor to your landing page.

Keep in Mind: The Headline

Just as in all advertising, the headline is the most important part of your PPC Ad. In fact, studies show that Ads with powerful headlines get clicked even if the rest of the ad copy is below average. The number one tip is to include your keyword in your headline. And whenever possible, include active words and speak to your target market. Avoid exclamation points or other symbols which only take up space.

Keep in Mind: The Benefits

Again, writing a PPC ad is not much different than writing a display ad - except of course you have much less words to work with. Emphasize the benefits to your visitors, not the features of your products. In other words, what will your customer get when he uses your product or service?

Keep in Mind: Your Target Market

Display Ads work best when the reader believes the Ad is meant for him - and the same goes for your PPC Ad. While you might not have enough space to use "Attention: Small Business Owners" you can probably fit the word "you" into your Ad.

Keep in Mind: The Action

You don't want to waste your precious Ad space with the obvious "click here" but you can refer to what action the visitor will take on your landing page. How about "take the quiz" or "request and instant quote" or whatever fits your particular situation.

Keep in Mind: Your Secondary Goal

The number one goal is to get a click, but what do you hope to accomplish once the visitor gets to your landing page? Do you want to capture names, or do you want to make a sale? If you want as many names as possible, offer something free in your Ad.

Keep in Mind: The Competition

Before writing your Ads look at current Ads for your keywords. Next, do the exact opposite of what the industry norm is. Why? PPC is similar to the yellow pages with all your competitors lumped into one space, looking almost identical. Do something different so you will stand out from the crowd.

 

5 PPC Tips to Save You Money

1. Use Negative Keywords – If you’ve used the Google Keyword Tool, you’ve probably noticed the “Negative Keywords” function. If you’ve chosen certain keywords or phrases that relate to your site, for example, “affiliate software”, you want people who search for just that to find your site and buy your software. However, if a user searchers for “free affiliate software”, your site will still come up. They may click on your ad, costing you money, and then immediately leave when they find out that you do not offer affiliate software for free. Use negative keywords like “free” and “cheap” to avoid wasting money on clicks by telling the search engine that you do not want those keywords to show your ad.
2. Use Phrase or Exact Match – With Broad Match, when users search for other keywords that the search engine thinks are relevant, your ad will show up on the results page, even if you don’t want it to. By using Phrase or Exact Match, only the keywords that you specified will trigger your ad to be displayed, decreasing your impression count, which will increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) and add quality to your campaign and ads.
3. Target Location/Languages – Targeting only the English speaking countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, etc) will also help increase your CTR of your keywords and ads by creating a less diverse audience and targeting those who are more inclined to read your ad and buy your product.
4. Max CPC Bid – This is one of the more important PPC tips. For everyone 100 clicks that you receive on your ad, you can assume that your will get 2 conversions. So, you want to base how much your Max CPC Bid will be on the payout of the product. If you make $18.00 per conversion, multiply that by 2 and then divide that by 100 and you get $.36, which is what your Max CPC Bid should be for that product. Don’t waste money by bidding more than you have to.
5. Avoid the Content Network – The content network of PPC programs gets you a lot of impressions and for little money. However, the impressions are not as targeted and your CTR will go down and so will your conversions. If you’re just starting out with PPC campaigns and tools such as Adwords, MSN Adcenter, or Yahoo Search Marketing, hone your skills on the search network before taking on the content network, if you want to at all.
When you’re first starting out with affiliate marketing and PPC advertising, start with Google Adwords and once that is making you some money, move onto Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.
PPC can be tricky at first, so affiliate training programs like Free Site Signup offer complete PPC campaigns that have been tested and proven to be high converting. In order to help you get your affiliate marketing business up and running, Free Site Signup also provides pre-designed landing pages to use with your PPC campaigns so you can start earning your money immediately. It is recommended that beginner affiliates take advantage of affiliate training programs so there is no money wasted on trial and error. Let the pros handle that – you just get out and start making

Tips for Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy

Tips for Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy

  in a highly profitable niche has to go up against fierce competition. So the question is, how can you make your PPC ad copy stand out from the rest? There is a mega-ton of advice on the Web and in various search marketing books on how to write outstanding copy for Adwords text ads.  In spite of all the literature available on the subject though, it’s still far from being an exact science.
Most experts in the field agree you should use compelling and creative “buy language” combined with tricks for dynamic keyword insertion. One might argue, however, that the magic bullet affiliates can use when writing high-CTR (click through rate) ad copy is a lot more basic than that. So what’s it all about? CREATIVITY IN CONTEXT.
Being creative in context is about first knowing your competitor’s ads and then creating ones that are unique and which speak directly to your prospect in a style uniquely your own. Creativity in context means that you never write your ads in a vacuum, because you understand that those ads are always viewed by the user in relation to other SERPs. Creativity in context means that compelling ad copy originates from a strong understanding of your product or service’s competitive landscape. It means knowing that even though you might have the most original copy in the world, if it isn’t in the proper context, your ads will probably crash and burn.
Getting context right requires that you do some market research first.  Let’s start with paid search. Before writing new ads, you should take your top three converting keywords in the ad group you’re writing new ad text for, and Google them. Can you find common threads in the top competitive ads that might provide an opportunity for you to capitalize? For instance, if every ad has some variation of “fix error x”, your ad will stand out better if you write something along the lines of: “Don’t fix error x until you read this advice.” Trying twists like this can significantly improve your CTR.
What about content network ads? Some top affiliates assert that very few keywords or ad groups allow advertisers the flexibility to have the absolute 100% best possible ad text on both search AND content.  Again, originality and context are the keys to success here. If you’re writing search ad text to pop out on the SERPs, it stands to reason that you’ll also want to stand out on the content network.
The main challenge with the content network is that users see your ads in a different order and placement than on the search pages. If you use a content network conversion tracking solution (even the one in Google Analytics will do), take the time to scan the content network sites that send you the best traffic and get an idea of where your ads are placed on their site.
What do the other ads you see look like? What AdSense layout option are they using? Try to find common threads in all the other ads and then be creative and go a different route with your copy so that it’s still in context, but stands out from the crowd.
Note: It may also be worth your while to experiment with search-only or content-only adgroups to measure the success of writing copy for the individual delivery channels (i.e., search vs. content).