15 Pay Per Click Marketing Tips by Eric Darby

I have been doing pay per click marketing for too many years.
Sometimes I forget what I know. Not that I am bragging. It's just that
you can't help but learn stuff after staring at thousands of keyword
bids, keyword variations, competitors, and ad copy for hundreds and
hundreds of hours, month after month, year after year. So I thought I'd
make this a quick post with some good pay per click marketing tips. No,
this is NOT a treatise on PPC. That will come later. Anyway, here we
go...

1. Before you get started, I think the most important thing for
   you to realize is that you are not trying to reach everyone on the
   planet! You aren't using a shot gun here. You want a laser beam focused
   exactly on your target audience - your bullseye. That's why you start
   NARROW and slow. Then expand outward farther away from your bullseye
   only as you see success! Your initial goal with pay-per-click is to
   locate your "bullseye keywords" first. These are the words that get you
   what you want with as little expense as possible - your highest ROI
   words.
2. Define what you feel is a “successful event” or “desired action.”
   We’ll call this a conversion. Your conversion might be someone
   completing a form, purchasing an item, or visiting a certain webpage.
   Only you can run the money numbers and determine how much you are
   willing to spend for a desired action.
3. Install a robust web analytics package on your site. You want to be
   sure you can track things down to the keyword. DO THIS NOW. Thankfully,
   Google Analytics is still free, and you can use it for all your various
   pay per click adventures. (At least I think it works for all of 'em. If
   not, please let me know.) Whatever you use, you'll want to use tracking
   codes so you can see which keywords are performing best. You can
   install Google Adwords tracking code on your site and the data will
   automatically port over to your Google Analytics account.
4. Start with Google Adwords for your first pay per click test.
   Reason? They get a ton of traffic so you’ll know relatively quickly
   what your results are.
5. Brainstorm each target market for your product or service. If you
   are a professional photographer, you might have several different types
   of people – people getting married, families who need a portrait,
   pregnant woman who want to capture the memory, couples who just had a
   baby, on and on.
6. Develop separate “seed” keyword lists for each target market. In
   our example, the initial keywords you research might be: wedding
   photography, portrait photographer, pregnancy photographer, baby
   photos. The main point here is avoid lumping all your keywords into one
   big bucket. Divide them up into as many buckets as you think are
   relevant to your product or service. Does this take a lot of work? Yes.
   Will it pay off? Yes. In spades. (I have no idea what that phrase
   means, but it makes me sound smart and witty so I’ll use it.)
7. Within your Adwords campaign, create a different Ad Group for each
   of your target markets. Don't get lazy here. Go the extra mile and
   focus on each demographic. It will pay off, and you will learn tons
   just from the analytics alone.
8. When setting up your Adwords campaign, test your ads on the Google
   Search Network first. Then test them on their Content Network (also
   known as site-targeted.) The reason is that Google search tends to
   generate more targeted and motivated visitors. People how click on your
   ads from the Content Network tend to be less inclined to buy. But not
   always! That is why you test!
9. Use the built-in Google keyword tool to develop your keyword list.
   Only choose keywords that have green bars. Use negative keywords to
   prohibit your ads from showing (Ex> -thiswontshow). When starting
   out, I would avoid single keywords. That's a quick way to burn through
   your budget fast. Use keyword phrases that have a minimum of 2 words.
   Try out phrase match first. Phrase matches have quotation marks around
   them like this: "pay per click advice".
10. Write compelling ad copy. Think benefits and action! The reader
    could care less about you. They want to know: What's in it for me?
    Write 2 different ads so you can test the performance of each ad
    against the other. Then after 100 clicks or so, ditch the bad Google ad
    and write a new one. Also, don’t write one long sentence for your ad.
    Make it like a little 3-sentence poem with a title, benefit, and
    feature. Try to use your keywords in the ad. Make your ad obvious. This
    isn’t the place to get clever. Tell the reader exactly what they will
    get if they click.
11. Choose a specific landing page that matches your ad. All keywords SHOULD NOT lead to your home page.
12. Set a low budget to start to try things out. Don’t bid for the top
    position. Sometimes the 3rd position or even the 9th position may
    convert well for you. But don’t get cocky. Move your bids around and
    track your conversions.
13. Compare your spend with your conversions. Are you profitable? Note
    which keywords got the most clicks. Note which words got clicks but did
    not convert. Brainstorm more keywords. Add. Delete. Tweak. Note which
    ads performed best.
14. Expand only after you make your conversions profitable. Increase
    your spend. Try new variations of keywords. Try Google’s content
    network.
15. Try other PPC engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter, or other smaller engines like Industry Brains or Quigo.

This really is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to effective pay per click marketing, but I hope this helps!

By Eric Darby of Darby Works Inc.

Technorati Tags: marketing, pay-per-click, ppc