Pay Per Click Advertising for Beginners
If you would like to learn more about Pay Per Click Advertising and get a grasp on the concept without getting confused, please do continue reading. I will try to explain PPC as simply as I can, laying it out to a grade schooler, and even provide a rather crude image to help… an image looking like it was actually drawn by a grade schooler with a spelling error which was actually not done on purpose. My spelling skills are apparently not as good as my marketing abilities.
There is this interesting story I need to tell about PPC and a newbie’s dilemma, or so I thought at the time.
It was Valentine’s day, February 14, 2007.. a Wednesday and single friends of mine thought of getting together at a local restaurant. As far as I remember the first people to get there were myself and a friend of mine Bing Torre, who is also a colleague in the marketing and events world. Bing then began to tell me about Pay Per Click advertising, how she had to run some ads on Google on a very limited budget for a client. At the time I had very recently crossed over into the online marketing space, leaving behind the marketing/advertising industry that I had been a part of for over 15 years. I was managing PPC accounts that was spending up to $1,000 a day. Yes a DAY!
I then went on to tell her about how AdWords worked, which is pretty much the same way I will describe to you in this post.
Incidentally here is picture taken of some us, the “un-valentiners.”
So about Pay Per Click Advertising.
PPC is simply a method of advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN/Bing, where your ads get shown to people who are looking for what you have to sell. It is targeted advertising in the sense that, you target people who are already looking for what you have to offer them, your ad only appears when specified keywords are being used on the search engine. You make a bid for a certain keyword and when that keyword gets searched, your ad appears.. typically on the upper or right section of the results page, and usually appears boxed.
The bid is an amount you are willing to pay the search engine if your ad gets clicked. For instance if someone searches for Nike running shoes and you are bidding $0.50 on that keyword phrase, your ad will appear only when that phrase is searched for, and you will only get billed 50 cents if your ad gets clicked. Of course when an ad gets clicked the clicker gets sent to a website or webpage which has more information about what you are offering.
So there are 3 key elements that you need to pay attention to.
Keyword or Keywords
- these are words you bid on that will trigger your ads if searched
- your keywords have to be very specific to what you are selling or offering
- group together very similar keywords in a cluster called an Ad Group
- for instance a cluster of related keywords can be… Nike running shoes, Nike running shoes for men, Nike running shoes for women, men’s Nike running shoes, Nike running shoes kids..
The Ad
- this is the text that search engine users read on the search engine results page
- ad text needs to be related to the keywords you are bidding upon
- ad text needs to be very specific to the specific cluster of keywords or Ad Group
- for instance your ad text can say “Nike Running shoes at amazing discounts, Free overnight delivery”
- the ad must tell the visitor what you are selling, and tell them why they should buy from you, as an added motivating reason to get them to click your ad
The Landing Page
- this is the page where a clicker of an ad lands on
- this page should also have exactly what the ad offers, so if your keyword was for Nike running shoes, and your ad text tells the reader that you have Nike running shoes at great discounts and that you deliver overnight for free, then your landing page must have all that information on the page PLUS..
- the landing page makes it easier for the viewer to find more information and to get exactly what they want, for instance the page shows not only Nike running shoes, but the viewer can choose a specific size, color, model, check out reviews from other buyers about the product or about your service, and an easy and secure system to make a purchase
Here is that grader level illustration I told you about… click the image to enlarge.
Why Test Advertising Messages?
Every business owner needs to test advertising messages. If you do not test messages before rolling out your ad campaign you might be doing more harm than good, wasting your advertising budget on an effort that is destined to fail, or will fall short of your expectations or targets.
I have spent a significant part of my advertising life producing radio commercials for small to medium businesses. These are typically the type of companies who do not have the budget for a full service advertising agency, or might have their own in-house marketing department who needed someone to produce their ads. I have also been hired by advertising agencies to produce commercials for their clients. In fact, I still do radio commercials today. I have a simple radio commercial blog where you can find samples of my work… you can find it my just simply searching for radio commercials on Google… it is ranked number 1 for searchers in the Philippines, primarily because my primary client base is in the Philippines. I have also spent some time producing TV ads and local travel shows. This is how it usually works and if you are a business owner, you might know this to be true.
Let’s say you need to advertise a dated promo or a sale, or maybe even an institutional radio commercial for your business. I am sure the first people you get to talk to about this would likely be the radio station where you plan to advertise on, they would likely offer to produce your radio commercial for you free of charge, and include it in the advertising package. This happens when the Account Executive for your account also produces radio ads, if it is a big enough account then he makes a hefty commission from the placement and so would not mind producing the ad himself. He can also opt to pay a colleague a nominal fee to produce the ad. Either way what they usually do is just get information from you, then put together the radio ad copy, get it approved by you, then produce it. After they produce it, they start airing it, and voila.. your radio ad is now on the airwaves.
Ask yourself this question, what basis or data do you have to say that the advertising messages in the radio copy are going to be effective. How do you know that the wording or offer in the ad will cause a listener to take action? You don’t! There is no data, there is no testing.
This is pretty much the same on TV; where SME’s who wish to advertise on TV tap a TV company to give them a proposal for TV advertising spots and maybe a budget for the production of a TV ad. Some companies engage the services of multimedia or video production companies like Eight Thumbs to produce their TV commercial. Again the process works the same as above, production company puts together a concept or story, presents client with concept/budget, client approves, production company gets to work and submits final and approved product to the client.
Again, no testing of messages or offers to see which would be most effective in getting the TV ad viewer to take action.
This is also the same for print and design.
So how do you test your advertising messages? Here is the process I recommend.
Step 1 – Create Your Offer (O)
Write down 1-2 offers or a unique selling proposition that you want to get across to your audience.
You would need 1-2 offers to see which one is the most compelling as far as wording. This pretty much can be the same offer, but only worded differently using power words that catch consumers attention fast.
Step 2 – Create a Call to Action (A)
Identify specific and quantifiable actions that you want your target audience to do. Ask yourself this question, at the end of the advertisement, what is it you want your audience to do? Call a number, send an email, visit a website, visit your store? Write down 1-2 of these.
This way, you are able to identify which action is likely to be the most effective, and then use that action on your ad copy or across the board (radio, tv, print) to ensure that your ad will deliver the highest number of actions from your audience.
Step 3 – Create a Fast Action Bonus or One Time Offer (B)
What added fast action bonus or one time offer can you give them to serve as an incentive to immediately take the action you want them to do? Do you want them to call today and get an added 20% on a purchase? Or if they email you with their contact details they get a free product (tie up partner) with their purchase? Again, write down 1-2 of these.
You want to find out which bonus is most appealing to your audience that serves as the right motivation for them to perform the desired action.
Step 4 – Testing
You would need to combine the elements above, with the ultimate goal of finding out which combination of the three above, delivered the highest number of conversions.
To do that, you would need to put them to the test on the web, since testing on the web is affordable and accountable, and allows you to track behavior of your audience. Behavior in relation to the wording of your online advertisement text you use for the test and behavior in relation to the offer on the page they land on.
Landing Page Creation
So given the 2 variants of each element above, you would have a total of 8 different test messages. You would then need to create 8 different landing pages on your website, each landing page focused on each of those messages.
Let me give you a legend.
O=Offer
A=Action
B=Bonus
So the different versions would yield the following combinations.
Test Message 1
O1=Offer Version 1
A1=Action Version 1
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 2
O2=Offer Version 2
A2=Action Version 2
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 3
O1=Offer Version 1
A1=Action Version 1
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 4
O1=Offer Version 1
A2=Action Version 2
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 5
O2=Offer Version 2
A1=Action Version 1
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 6
O2=Offer Version 2
A2=Action Version 2
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 7
O2=Offer Version 2
A1=Action Version 1
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 8
O1=Offer Version 1
A2=Action Version 2
B2=Bonus Version 2
Send Traffic to Landing Pages
There are man ways to send traffic but I will keep things simple and recommend 2 methods. What is important is, you would need to use Google’s Free Web Optimizer so that you send traffic to one URL, but the web optimizer will rotate all the 8 pages displaying a different page for every new visitor that lands on the URL. Each time a new visitor lands on that URL they see a different page/advertisement, but if they go back to the URL, they will only see the same page that they saw when they first landed so they are not aware that you are testing and rotating different pages with different messages.
Make sure that you have Google Analytics tracking installed on your pages so that you are able to see the behavior of visitors on those pages.
Email. You can simply send out a message via email with a link that you want them to click.
Social Networks. You can post a link on your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, Linked In) for people to click.
Step 5 – Evaluating Results
There are generally two things I would look for to establish if a web page and content on a page (your test advertising message) is effective.
First, is engagement. I would check how people that landed on a page behaved. Did they stay long and browse other pages or did they leave in a matter of seconds. Staying long on a site and browsing more pages are signs of good engagement, which means the offer on the landing page (page that they first landed on your site) which you are testing is effective.
Second, is conversions. The Google Optimizer and Google Analytics asks you to create a goal page, this is a page that visitors arrive at only after performing a certain action. Find out which of the 8 different pages you are testing has the highest number of conversions, then you have found your winning advertising message. If however an action you want to measure is a phone call, and are testing two different actions, each action should have its own phone number. So that if people call phone number 1 (associated with A1) more times than they call phone number 2 (associated with A2) you know which offer or bonus is more effective.
An even simpler method of testing is to simply create two different advertising messages, and put them on two different pages. Then send a batch of visitors to one page and another batch of visitors to the other page and track which converts better.
If you do not want conversions as a metrics gauge for your test, you can simply get a poll or survey. Where you send out an email to people asking them to rate which of the two pages had an advertising message they were more likely to take action on.
What is important here is, you have been able to methodically develop data to support your choice of advertising messages that you use on your radio, TV or print ad copy. Advertising messages that are either proven to work or voted by people as messages that would work on them.
Using this strategy will help improve conversions on your advertising efforts, allowing you to maximize on your advertising budget.
If you have questions or comments about Testing Ad Copy, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
PPC Vs SEO
New blog post title on WebProNews reads PPC Vs SEO; the new post features a video clip showing an interview with Kristine Churchill of KeyRelevance shot during the recent SES in Chicago.
Some people will say PPC is better because of this and that; the others on the other side of the fence say SEO is better because of so and so. With all that is being said, you now believe that you actually need to pick a side; you feel the urgency to decide whether you are pro PPC and anti SEO or vice versa.
What many people do not realize is that both PPC and SEO, being the traffic generation methods that they both are, are actually equally important for any online marketing strategy since they both achieve specific goals that are unique for each, objectives that the other may fail to accomplish.
You cannot absolutely choose one over the other because doing so would be like deciding what you want to have all day long — daytime or night, which is just not possible. If you are not familiar with the distinct features and difference between SEO and PPC, click this link http://www.magrointernational.com/PayPerClick/SEOvsPPC.aspx
Again I stress, PPC and SEO are both important. PPC delivers quick traffic especially to websites that have just rolled out and without any incoming links or organic rankings. If you were one such website owner, PPC allows you to get stats rolling in that you may examine, evaluate and use as basis for optimizing your content to improve engagement or conversions, and optimizing your traffic generation or online advertising activities that would likely include ranking for search queries organically which are the result of SEO activity.
Here is that interview with Kristine Churchill.
Image Source: www.magrointernational.com
Banner Ads or Pay Per Click Advertising?
Banner ads or Pay Per Click advertising? Are you trying to decide which medium to advertise your business on?
I thought of writing this post after some time trying to explain to a friend of mine over Yahoo Messenger how one is different from the other and I realize a lot of people are undecided when it comes choosing which online advertising medium to use.
So if you were to advertise a product or service, what would you choose… banner advertising or pay per click?
For those who are new to this, let me give you a quick description of each.
Banner advertising is simply the process of purchasing banner space on other websites for you to display a banner about the product or service you wish to advertise.
When choosing the right website to advertise on, you have to take into consideration the website’s traffic (how high or low, and their demographic), how many page views or impressions your banner could get, if the website is using an ad-serving software that allows you to control delivery options, and of course cost which can either be in CPM (cost per thousand impressions), monthly fee or CPA (cost per action).
You can either do the research yourself, by identifying the right websites to make banner ad placements on, or you can advertise through an ad network which have a network of websites who will publish your banner ad on their sites.
Pay Per Click advertising on the other hand is the process of advertising on search engines such as Google. All major search engines have an advertising feature that allows you to advertise on them, but I will talk about Google AdWords since the latter enjoys 65% market share, a commanding lead over Yahoo, MSN and other smaller and regional search engines.
Google AdWords gives you two advertising options, advertising on their Search Network or the Content Network.
If you advertise on Google AdWords’ Search Network, your ad which is in text format, appears only when a keyword you are bidding on, gets searched. Keyword searches trigger your ads. These text ads are typically found in the upper box and the right side box that surround the regular search results. You only get billed by Google if someone clicks your ad, hence pay per click, and you only pay the amount your are bidding, or less, never more.
If you advertise on the Google AdWords Content Network, you can choose to place text, image, or media type ads on websites that belong to Google’s AdSense program, this is a network of websites that publish ads served by Google’s Content Network.
Google AdWords has since inception, added more targeting and payment options to include CPM and CPA, other than pay per click.
What is similar for both banner ads and pay per click ads is that, when the view clicks the ad, the viewer/clicker is taken to your website, or a page on your website specially created to get the visitor to perform a conversion; this is commonly known as the landing page.
What is significantly different for both, aside from the manner of distribution is that banner ads appear to the viewers of the page where the banner ad is found. PPC ads however only appear when a search engine user types in specific keywords, thus presenting itself only when there is a demand. This often yields to higher conversion rates because your service or product is put in front of a search engine user who already has a demand for that type of service of product.
One might be quick to conclude that PPC advertising would then be more effective than banner ads, but banner ads can actually serve a different purpose.
To answer the question about which medium to go with, I would say go with both.
Banner ads tend to work more effectively with high volume websites simply because the impressions are served to all website traffic which are not necessarily as targeted as a pay per click ad served to someone who is in the research phase of a buying process.
Thus, banner advertising can actually help a campaign if its goals are more branding and recall in nature and may not require direct response as a conversion goal, but will still deliver conversions but not as high a percentage compared to conversion rates delivered by pay per click ads.
At the end of the day, any business owner, marketer or advertising specialist is after one thing, return of investment, and the medium that delivers that ROI, after proper campaign planning and optimization, would have to be the best medium to use in advertising your business, regardless of what others may say.
If you have any questions about banner ads, pay per click or other forms of online advertising, feel free to leave your question in the comment section below.
