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.