Choosing A PPC Search Marketing Platform

Course Outline

In this Module, we will go through the setting up of PPC Search Marketing campaign on AdWords platform and how to set up your landing page. You would be shown tips you need to keep in mind when choosing a PPC search

marketing platform.

Setting up Your Landing Page

Before you can begin to set up a PPC Search Marketing campaign, you must have a landing page and that landing page needs to be focused on only one of your business goals or offerings.

Your PPC Search Marketing campaigns must have a clear and narrow focus. You must define one offering as your desired conversion for a particular campaign. Everything in the campaign from keywords to ads, to your landing page, must focus narrowly on your defined conversion.

Before you start building your landing page, however, remember from the last lesson that, when starting out, you should not expect more than 1/200 conversions per click. So, the value assigned to your conversion must be more than 200 times the amount you bid on the clicks—at least until you collect data showing that you can bid more without losing money. Since the major PPC’s platforms have a minimum bid—and since you are new to this and willing to learn the know-how as you go—you need to start out with a conversion that has a high value.

Make sure that your products like your e-courses or subscriptions have a relatively high conversion value. As your clients make purchases you are gathering your marketing campaign data as discussed in the previous lessons. You were told that you can get temporary data to use from an older coach or blogger to set up your campaign with. Until you generate your own data use the one from your older coach to estimate the duration of your e-courses or blog subscriptions. As an online coach selling your e-course at $400/month, and taking your total profit per sale to be about $280.00, your value per conversion is high enough for you to bid up to $1.40 per click without exceeding the recommended 1/200 ratio. Choosing this e-course as your focused conversion for the campaign gives you some working room to learn and experiment, without risking too much, due to its high conversion value. Note however that you can also use the historical data made available in your AdWords account.

So, using your e-course as our conversion, let’s get started building your landing page. There are many options open to you to create your landing page. You can go for free templates if you want at leadpages.com or at Google Docs or at other places. Some other places like Instapage give trial periods before you subscribe monthly for their paid subscriptions. The only disadvantage for free landing page templates is that they are not unique. What you need in your landing page is Call To Action Text telling your clients what you want them to do with the form. Provide space for collecting their names and their email addresses and other optional information. Color your send button in red or orange as these colors give better results. You can get a website designer to give you a custom landing page. Make sure your landing page has the same keyword as the ads you would use to send customers to your landing page.  

Opening Your Account With Google AdWords

                                                                                           

Now that we have a landing page ready to go, the next step is to create an account with Google AdWords. Open your Web browser and go to https://adwords.google.com/um/StartNow?sourceid=... and fill out the form to sign up.

When your signup is complete, go to https://adwords.google.com/u/sgnin to log in and get started.

Creating And Structuring Your Campaign

Click on "Get Started Now” button Google search page and fill the email address you want to use inside AdWords. Guided set up. This takes you to the next page where you fill in your name, password, and phone number. Click next to continue filling your details until you are taken to your campaign page. As you are just getting started, no campaigns will show in your account. You must create one. We would create a campaign and call it "Your PPC Marketing Success Course”. To do this, click on the "Create Campaign" button near the top left of the page. Leave the "New Campaign" selection in the first box. Then type in the campaign above for the campaign name. Select your time zone. Check to enable conversion tracking.

If you create a Search Network only campaign, your ads can appear throughout sites on the Google Search Network. This campaign type works by linking your AdWords keywords to the words or phrases someone uses to search on Google, then showing relevant text ads on search results pages. This campaign type is useful for advertisers who want to connect with customers right when they’re searching their products or services. For example, a small

home repair business that earns most of its revenue from plumbing repairs might create a “Search Network only” campaign to target its ads to high-potential customers searching for plumbing services. The other campaign types are “Display Network only” and “Search Network With Display Select”. We would only treat “Search Network Only” in this module.

Campaign sub-types

When you create any of the above campaign types, you'll also need to choose a more specific campaign sub-type; the most common types are the “Standard” and “All features” sub-types. Here are some examples of why you might choose the "Standard" or "All features" sub-types:

• Standard: If you prefer a simpler overview of your campaign and feature options, consider using the "Standard" sub-type. With "Standard" campaigns, you can use basic location and language targeting, bidding and budget settings, and common ad extensions. You won't be able to use the more advanced options that are available to "All features" campaigns and described below.

• All features: If you want to use all available campaign and feature options, consider using the "All features" sub-type. You'll be able to use more advanced options, such as social and experimental settings, ad scheduling and ad delivery methods, and advanced location options.

There are also specialized campaign sub-types you can use to reach more potential customers. Here are some examples of why you might choose a specialized campaign sub-type:

• Remarketing: Show text, image, or video ads to people who already visited your website when they browse other sites on the Display Network.

• Ads in mobile apps: Reach the growing audience of people using mobile phones and tablets by showing your ads in apps. Your ads will get matched to apps through the Display Network.

AdWords is organized into three layers: account, campaigns, ad groups.

• Account: Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.

• Campaigns: Each campaign in your account has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.

• Ad groups: Each ad group within a campaign contains a set of similar ads and keywords that you want to trigger your ads to show.

 Structuring your campaign

With AdWords, you'll organize your account into separate campaigns, with each campaign focusing on a single business goal, such as driving traffic to your websites, or offerings, like a particular product or service. If your business serves several geographic areas, you might want to create a separate campaign for each location. One effective approach is to organize your campaigns to reflect the structure of your website. This allows you to create campaigns around specific themes or products. For example, an electronics retailer might create campaigns for specific product categories, such as televisions and cameras.

Organizing your ad groups

Each campaign contains one or more ad groups. An ad group allows you to organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords that directly relate to each other, which can improve your Quality Score and help boost your return on investment. For Search Network campaigns, this helps you show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you’re trying to reach. For campaigns targeting the Display Network, you can create relevant ads to show to customers browsing websites about similar topics. Similar to your campaign structure, you'll want to create separate ad groups for each theme or product that you're advertising. Again, consider creating ad groups that are based on the sections or categories that appear on your website. For example, the same electronics retailer might create ad groups for sub-categories, like compact cameras and SLR cameras.

CREATING YOUR AD

Now is the time to create your ad. The first step is to create an Ad Title. You have an X character maximum. Type in "Your PPC Marketing Course." Next, you have X characters maximum to create your ad text. For starters, let’s try this: "Explode Your PPC Marketing Success With This E-Course”.

Next, you are asked for two URLs. The first is the "display URL" and the second is the link URL. There is a reason why two URLs are needed. Most people using PPCs utilize extensive tracking procedures. Such tracking usually requires that you add one or more CGI variables to the actual link. You do not want this long link with all these variables being published along with your ad. So, you use a "display URL" which is usually just your domain name URL. You then use the URL with the variables for your tracking system as the "link URL."

The first link on the Ad Management page is "Create a New Ad." You should use this link and create an ad like the one we have created above. That is, the ad title is "Your PPC Marketing Success e-course" and the ad content is "Explode Your PPC Marketing Success With This E-Course." Select "Text Ad" for the type of ad and leave "Banner URL" empty. Then click on "Insert Data."

Then, back at the Ad Management window, select the next link to "Enter a New Site to Place Ads." Then, select "PPC" for the type of ad location; put "adwords.google.com" as the location URL; put "Google AdWords" as the name of the site. Fill out the rest of the form.

When you have completed the above two steps (creating an ad and a location in your ad management database), you can now use "Generate a Coded Link" (from the Ad Management menu) to create a link with CGI variables attached to identify both the ad and the location the ad is placed. On this screen, use the drop-down box to find and select the ad you just created. Use the next drop-down box to select "Google AdWords" as the location for the ad. You are also given the option of entering another identifying variable, called the "X code." 

You can enter a number or letters, or a mixture of numbers and letters, to give you one more way to identify hits that come from this particular ad. Finally, use the last drop-down box to select the new page you created on your site as the landing page for this ad. When you have made all these selections, click on "Generate Link." Step number 4 on the resulting page will give you the "Link URL" that you should use at Google AdWords for this ad. (Be sure to review the link to make sure it is right. It should be something like the link below, where [yourfoldername] is your actual folder name (usually your last name) without the brackets:

http://yourdomainname.com/[yourfoldername]

Copy this link over to the Google AdWords as your "Link URL." Then close out the browser page you used to access your AdWords account.

So back at the Google AdWords, your "Display URL" will be HTTP://yourdomainname.com/[yourfoldername] and your link URL will be the one generated by the Ad Management system.

SELECTING KEYWORDS

Once you have completed your ad, the next step is to select the keywords you will use with the ad. The AdWords platform shows you a page where you use the AdWords Keyword Planner to generate keyword. On the left side, you see a form that has a drop-down box (which has pre-selected "Add multiple keywords"). Below this, it has a textbox and, below the text box, is a button to "Add to the keyword list." On the right side of the page is a table which shows the keywords as you add them.

Now, AdWords Keyword Planner would help to generate a few more keywords to use the keyword planner. On the left-hand side of the page, use the drop-down box and select "Find similar keywords." A new text box will appear. Type in "e-courses" and allow it to generate similar keywords. Choose some of the keywords that are suggested and move them over to the table on the right. Now, do the same for the remaining keywords (“your PPC marketing," "PPC marketing success" "success with e-courses") in turn. When you have selected a number of keywords and moved them to your table in this fashion, click on the "continue" button on the very bottom of the right side of the page (you will have to scroll down a bit to get to it). On the resulting page, you will have an opportunity to set your bids for the keywords.

SETTING YOUR BIDS

The next page on your Google AdWords is called the "Setting Bid" page. You use this page to set the maximum amount you are willing to spend per click (across all keywords), the individual base bids for each of the keywords you have selected, incremental pricing (if you desire - more on this later), your total monthly budget, and selecting how you want your budget to be spread across the month. Take some time and study this page very carefully. There are a lot of different things you can change on this page and a lot of places you can click. Do not let it intimidate you, though. Start with the simple aspects and it will all make more sense the more you work with it.

Your first step here is to set your monthly budget limit. Next, determine an amount you can afford to allocate to advertising each month. Then, if you have other advertising costs or plan to do other advertising campaigns, minus that amount from your monthly budget to know what is left for this campaign. Once the amount of your monthly budget is determined for this campaign, scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the textbox for "Monthly Budget." Type in the amount of your monthly budget there.

Just below the Monthly Budget textbox, you have a choice whether to allow your budget to be spent up as fast as your positioning will allow, or whether to spread your budget spending out across the month. Here again just set your bids so that they will likely last throughout the month based on your budget amount, regardless of the above setting.

Next, find the text box to the right of the caption "Enter your maximum base bid (CPC)." This is where you can enter the maximum amount that may be charged for any keyword. This is one way of controlling your costs. The other way to control your costs is in the setting of each individual bid for each keyword. There is a large table near the middle of the page. Each keyword or keyphrase you have chosen to use has a row in that table. Midway across each row is a textbox for the base bid for that keyword. Here you can change the bids for each of the keywords independently.

There is another feature of this pricing page that you should notice. There is a table above the keyword table that has headings of "Total Spend," "Total Impressions," "Total Clicks," "Avg. CTR%," "Avg. Position," and "Avg. CPC." This table provides estimates for you based on the base bids that you set for the keywords. The table values change automatically as you change either your maximum bid or the bid for individual keywords. Thus, this table is extremely useful for you.

Let’s work through setting your bids now. Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $50. Let’s say that you have come up with about twenty-five keywords that now show up in your table. Your goal, then, is to come very close to $50 as the value of the "Total Spent" column in the table which provides your estimated performance values for the month. Experiment by putting different amounts in the "Maximum base bid" box (and then clicking on "Apply to all Keywords"). Each time you change the value, look to see how it changed the "Total Spend" value in the table below it. I was able to obtain an estimated Total Spend of $50.02 with my keywords by setting a maximum base bid of $0.62.

Once you determine the maximum base bid that will result in your budget amount for the Total Spend, you can look across that table to see what performance you can expect. In my case, the "Total Impressions" (i.e. the number of times your ad would show up on a page that someone has visible in their browser) expected was 67,022. The "Total Clicks" expected was 109. The "Avg. CTR%" (i.e. the average ratio of clicks to impressions) was 0.16 (less than 1%). The "Avg. Position" (the position of your ad with respect to all ads that show up as a result of a search) was 10.49. Finally, the "Avg. CPC" was .46. The Avg. CPC is the average actual amount you will be charged for each click.

Looking closely at this data, I can see that for $50 per month I can expect to get about 109 clicks (at an average cost of $0.46 per click).

Now, analyze carefully this scenario. If I expect to get one sale out of 200 clicks, I can see that the sale is going to cost me around $92 in PPC advertising costs. If the sale were only worth $10 to me, this would be a cause for great concern. However, since we have estimated the conversion value of an e-course sale to be $280.00, we can spend $92 and still make a $188.0 profit.

On this bright note, go ahead and set your base bids to be within your budget and save and submit your campaign. Then, check your reports daily to see how things are going. Unless your budget is much greater than $50, not much will happen before the next lesson comes out, but you will be getting experience in seeing how it all works. In the next lesson, we will pick up from here and discuss how to set individual bids for keywords and begin to tweak your campaign for more profitable performance.

Please note that there is an approval process for every ad on Google AdWords. Read it and make sure your ads conform to the guidelines to avoid your ads being delayed from displaying on the Google search network.

CONCLUSION

In this lesson, we have walked you through setting up a landing page, opening your account with Google AdWords, creating a campaign, creating an ad, selecting your keywords, and setting your keyword bids. You have set your keyword bids to match your monthly budget.

The objective of your campaign is to sell your e-courses to SMBs seeking to Choose a PPC Search Marketing Platform to market their products or services or to get the subscription for your blog. You have set a value for this conversion of $280.00 for your e-course and $1200 for your blog subscription, based on an expected average two-year life of the subscriptions you sell. The next step now is for you to track your results, tweaking the components of your campaign to optimize your results as you gain more experience with your PPC search marketing campaign. This will be covered in the next module.

Your Strategies For PPC Marketing On Search Engines

LECTURE OUTLINE

In this second lecture of Module I, we will continue our discussion on PPC Marketing On Search Engines strategy. You will be shown the difference between PPC Marketing On Search Engines and other types of advertising, explaining why you must design your ads with a different strategy than you would for other types of advertising. Also you will be shown how to narrowly define parameters like the conversions you are seeking for particular PPC Marketing On Search Engines campaigns, and how to determine the monetary value of those conversions. This lecture will end by giving you some practical guides for making your strategy work as you begin your PPC Marketing on Search Engines campaigns.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PPC MARKETING ON SEARCH ENGINES & OTHER TYPES OF ADVERTISING

The key difference between PPC Marketing On Search Engines and other types of advertising is that with advertising in which you pay for exposure (such as newspaper or TV advertising), you need to attract as many responses as possible. Because your cost for the pay for exposure type ad is already fixed, you make the ad to attract as many people as possible in most situations. You do this to get the most results from your advertising costs.

With PPC Marketing On Search Engines however, your cost is determined by the number of people that respond to your ad b
y clicking on your link. So, in designing your ads for PPC Marketing On Search Engines, you need a much different strategy than you would use for a display ad like newspaper or TV ad. Rather than writing your ad to attract as many people as possible, with PPC marketing On Search Engines you want to design your ad to attract only those very likely to buy your  course products or your programs. With PPC Marketing On Search Engines, you don't want the unserious or the curious. 

You want clicks on your ad from only those who need your course products or programs and are inclined to take action. Every time someone clicks on your ad and does not buy your course products or join your program, you have lost money. Thus, your ads need to be designed as a highly "qualifying" ads, that is, ads that will interest just those people who are most likely to take your desired action.

DEFINING YOUR GOALS

To have a good PPC Marketing On Search Engines strategy define your goals or conversions and make sure you measure it. There are many actions that prospects can take when on a website and there are various ways to collect their contact information to develop a relationship with them. Even if they do not buy your course product or join your coaching program, perhaps they will subscribe to your newsletter or your RSS feed on your blog. 

Even if they take no other action at all, they may bookmark your site and return to it later. While your ultimate goal is usually to enroll clients, often the goal of a particular campaign will be to establish some continuing relationship with your prospects that can later be used to entice them to buy your course products and join your coaching programs.

In this PPC Marketing On Search Engines, the action you desire is to have your prospects buy or join your coaching programs. This you would call "conversion." You can also call subscribing to your Newsletter or RSS feed on your blog as a conversion. After your prospects become a customer you need a good system to keep records of those conversions.

KEEPING RECORDS OF YOUR CONVERSIONS (CONVERSION TRACKING)

Conversions records keeping requires a means of tracking prospects to your site when you do PPC Marketing On Search Engines . You need to know and record which search engine they came from, the search keyword used and which ad they clicked on. 

You also need a method of tracking each prospect through your site and recording any action that they take. Then, you need a means of predicting and recording any future action they might take. With these records, you can run reports that will give you feedback on which keywords and which ads are most effective in the long run. There are free software you can use to get these information, like Google Analytics and others.

VALUE OF YOUR COURSE PRODUCTS PURCHASES OR ENROLLMENTS

You also need to establish the value of the conversions you get in PPC Marketing On Search Engines. If your course products or enrollments pay you $300, the value of your conversion is $300. If a subscription to your membership program on your blog is $100 per month for the life of the subscription, you have to estimate how long on average the customers will maintain the subscriptions. Now take one year as the average life of the subscription, the conversion is worth $1200 to you. If the average life of the subscription is two years, the conversion is worth $2400 to you.

ATTACHING VALUES TO PROSPECT CONVERSIONS

Next you have to build statistics on how much you ultimately make from your client enrollment or subscription. Until you have that data, you have to make a guess. Use data from an older coach to get the cost of enrolling a client. Also  find out the estimated value of a client joining your coaching program based on the keyword and ad used. Note the ads that produce more clicks with little enrollments and those that produce less clicks, but more enrollments. This should help you keep track of what future actions to expect from those ads..

Please follow these steps in your PPC Marketing On Search Engines. You start by determining an average value per conversion based upon the cost of a conversion from older coaches. You use this figure until your own data suggests otherwise. In keeping up with your own data, you track not only the initial conversion into your coaching program (that is, determining how many clients you get to join your coaching program from each ad) but also the future actions taken by those clients. Your goal is to track the ratio of ultimate value (based on all action taken to date) per client for each ad. As you develop this data, you may need to increase the value you attribute to conversions from some of your ads because they have more future value – for example, they are more likely to get you referrals or to make purchases or sell your course products.

Remember that you must attach some reasonably accurate value to your conversions in order to know how effective  your PPC Marketing On Search Engines campaigns are. You must have some gauge of how you are doing to have guidance as to what to tweak to make your results more profitable. In order to have this gauge, you must assign a value to your conversions. You will develop knowledge and skill in making this evaluation more accurately as you gain experience.

DELAYED INCOME

. When you launch a campaign that has a subscription (that doesn't result in an immediate commission) as the defined conversion, you must budget for sustaining the campaign for several weeks or months without any return. It will take time for your conversions to get around to earning you returns. Thus, there will be a gap of weeks or months from the time you start paying for the clicks until you have money coming back in from them. Thus, if you define your conversation for a particular campaign as this type of subscription, you must budget to sustain the campaign until returns start showing up.

IMPORTANCE OF EVALUATING CONVERSIONS

When budgeting for your cash flow remember to plan for delayed income, The important thing for you now is to attach some reasonably accurate value to your conversions for each campaign. This way you will know what a conversion is worth to you in a particular campaign. With this information, you will know how much you can pay for the advertising to obtain that conversion and still make a profit.

Your strategy in PPC Marketing On Search Engines is to achieve conversions at an advertising cost that is less than the value of the conversions. The smaller the cost and the more valuable the conversions, the more profit you make. Your goal is to get your costs as low as possible relative to the value of the conversion – yet still obtain enough conversions to make it profitable.

DEFINING YOUR CONVERSIONS

In order to do this, you must first define for yourself the conversion you are seeking – and you must do this separately for each PPC Marketing On Search Engines campaign. That is, you should know exactly what action you want a prospect to take to consider the visit a success. For example, your defined conversion might be the sale of your coaching products or programs. 

A conversion is achieved when prospect sees your ad, clicks on it, and then clicks on a link on your landing page to your products and services page for coaching products or programs – and then actually purchases a course. You might have another campaign in which you define the conversion as having a client join your subscription on your blog. A conversion is achieved when someone clicks on your PPC ad, then clicks on the subscription offers link on your blog, and then actually signs up. 

Each of these would be different campaigns. You would use different keywords, different ads, and different landing pages for each of these defined conversions. You would track and evaluate your results separately for each of these.

In PPC Marketing On Search Engines, you should not build a crowded landing page with all sorts of different offerings on it. That can be confusing to your prospects. Rather, you should have one specific goal in mind for your prospect and design the entire process from keywords, to ads, to landing page to lead to that one action.

Once you have clearly defined for yourself the conversion you are seeking, keep your focus on that conversion. If you have more than one thing you believe will interest the same visitors, lead them through each offering one at a time, putting the offer for your defined conversion first. This way, your focus remains on that one, most attractive, offer. The second offer is just a fallback. 

For yet another fallback, there is no great harm in having a link from your landing page to another page on your blog with multiple offerings, so long as it does not get in the way of presenting your main offering for this landing page. To keep your focus clear in PPC Marketing On Search Engines, you should not rely on any income from these other offers to cover the cost of your advertising. It would complicate your business. (As discussed above, you can rely on the income from these fallback offers to cover the present costs verses future earnings issue, but to keep your evaluations simple and your focus clear, do not rely on them to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign.)

Here's what we mean by "keeping your focus clear." You should design your ad with the sole purpose in mind of attracting prospects willing and able to take the action you have defined as your conversion. If your conversion is defined as buying a specific coaching program, Your main focus of any one ad should be only one landing page. The main focus of that landing page, in turn, should be only on the sale of that particular program. In turn, the keywords or key phrases you bid on for this ad should be narrowly focused to attract only those who are highly likely to buy this coaching program.

COLLECTING YOUR ACTUAL DATA

Once you have defined specifically the conversion you seek and determined the value of that conversion in your PPC Marketing On Search Engines, it is time to experiment and collect data on how many clicks it takes to obtain a conversion. The search engines have already collected the data on how many hits you can expect for a particular keyword at a particular bid. This information will be available to you. Your job is to determine how many conversions you can get from those hits.

How many conversions you get from a certain number of hits is dependent on the effectiveness of your ad and your landing page If every single one of your clicks results in a conversion, you would have a 100% conversion rate.

But in real case scenario, you will never even come close to that in your PPC Marketing On Search Engines. There will always be someone who clicks on your ad and does not take action, it might be for reasons like computer malfunction or they lose Internet connection right after clicking on your ad. Even without mechanical issues, it is just not human nature to take action on everything considered. 

Even with a perfect ad and landing page, perfectly tied to the keywords or key phrases, there will be many prospects who would take no action. There is really no way to know for certain what the optimum conversion rate is for a certain keyword or key phrase; but, with some research of how other similar campaigns are doing, you can get some idea. Your job is to get to that optimum conversion rate as much as you can. You do this by continuously making adjustments to your ad and your landing page to improve the number of conversions in your PPC Marketing On Search Engines.

Regardless of what the optimum rate you target, you at least want to achieve a rate that puts you in profit. That is, you want to at least achieve the number of conversions necessary that your profit from the conversions will exceed the cost of the clicks. Once you reach profit, you can experiment even further to attempt to reach the optimum conversion rate and increase your profit even more.

Before actually collecting any data on your results in PPC Marketing On Search Engines, you need to start by setting your bids for your keywords and key phrases. To be on the safe side, you should initially expect no more than 1 conversion in 200 clicks. (This is lower than average; but, just starting out, you should expect lower than average.) Thus, to start out, you should set your bid at least 200 times smaller (.5%) than the value you have attributed to your conversion. If a conversion is worth only $100, then you should not bid more than $0.5 per click initially. 

After you collect some data on your results and you find that your conversion rate is better than .5%, you can up the bid. But, until then, to be safe, you should not exceed this ratio.

Some of the search engines have a $.10 minimum for the bids you may place. Others have even higher minimum bids. With these search engines, you need to have a conversion that is worth at least 200 times the minimum bid – unless you are very confident that you can exceed the 1/200 conversion rate right at the beginning of your campaign. Always start your PPC Marketing On Search Engines with your most valuable conversion. This gives you more room for exploration.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion note that before you go into a PPC Marketing On Search Engines campaign, you should define the conversion that you are seeking. You should also determine the value of that conversion to you in monetary terms. Then, starting out, you should bid no more than 1/200 of the value of your conversion.