I Just Changed Everything I Thought About PPC

[johnnylew]

I have read blogs, books and even paid a so-called professional firm (well known in the Yahoo Store World) and I have not improved my metrics. Doing the same thing over will never get you different results.

Until now...I have completely changed the way I structure my account.

I will use AdWords for all my examples.

1. I am always afraid of overspending and thought the way I controlled that is through setting my daily spend at a certain amount (for our example $100/day). Well what this does is limit the number of times your keyword is shown, not good you want your keywords to show as often as they can.

I now set my daily spend at $9,000 / day. Thats right $9,000 per day. I never come even close to this. In fact, I spend less, much less than when I had the settings at $100 / day. HOW?

2. I created my kewords (and I have tens of thousands) in these group types. For longer term phrases I use BROAD Match, for two or more kewyords I use PHRASE & EXACT.

This limited my traffic and not what I really wanted. My CTR went up, My Cost/Conversion went down...but I want more qualified traffic. HOW?

3. Broad single, two keywords are the way to get a ton of traffic and I mean a ton, but I want Qualified those that may buy what I have at www.johnnylew.com. What I have learned is how to effectively use the Negative Keywords. For example I see 5 Quart Galvanized Pails with NFL and MLB team logos. So of course I have "Dallas Cowboys Metal Bucket" and every variation of "Cowboys Bucket/Pail" imagineable.

But I now bid on "Metal Bucket" and "Beer Buckets" etc... This has increased traffic exponentially. Of course when I first turned this on I was getting traffic for "Metal Buckets for Horses" and "Buckets of Beer".

HERE IS A HUGE AND VALUABLE learning: Watch your server logs like a hawk, hour by hour in the beginning and daily look at all the search terms. Google AdWords even has a search term report you can use.

All the words you dont want traffic for simply add to your Negative list.

4. Back to Why $9,000 a day...Oh yeah I also set the ads to accelerate and not show evenly. Why? Because you want your ads to show as often as possible. Back when I was at $100/day and show evenly, my ads were shown sporadically. Now they show much more often, and like I said before I never come close to even the $100 /day. My traffic is converting higher and lower CPC's because my Quality Score is higher.

Its awesome, throw out everything you thought about setting the PPC campaign settings.

[ompundit]

Your off to a good start with the negative keywords, but after looking at your site, you might consider using some of the other features to stop traffic that is not going to be high converters for you. I would limit my traffic to males, 18-60 or 65, and turn my campaigns off during work hours when people are surfing the web at work and not serious buyers. I would of course add one change every few days and monitor what the adjustments do to my numbers. If one affects you negatively, then you can always roll it back.

Since you didn't give a URL to one of your landing pages, I will just throw a few suggestions out there see if anything might work for you.

Include a "tell a friend" or "show a friend the cool stuff here" link on every landing page. Make sure it opens there default email program and you put in the code what it puts in the email subject line and body, including the link to your website for what they want to show them. This generates extra free traffic for your site from the single paid lead who uses these CTA's to tell their buds.

Also make sure to have a sign-up for your mailing list, which you do in your cart, but it should be everywhere. You can also promote sign-up by mentioning you occasionaly pass out subscriber only deals and coupons for your loyal customers.

Last but not least, if your spending the dough for paid leads, fix the image issues on your site. They make it look like a badly run mom and pop operation. I can tell the difference because I see the care and work you have put into all of the content, but your basic customer want be like me, a professional web guy.

[johnnylew]

What "image issue" do you think I have? Is it every product image or certain images? I do have a tell a friend on all product pages.

Will work on the email signup...thanks.

[ompundit]

I am not having all images load properly, biggest issue is the home page, the product pages look ok.

[Logan]

i'm seeing all images ok, can you tell us what browser/version you are using ompundit

[johnnylew]

Man, thanks guys for looking into this..I am unaware of any homepage image issues.

[F4F]

Your off to a good start with the negative keywords

I agree that negative keywords are a great way to increase the quality of click-throughs that you get from AdSense. But I don't think there's a strong correlation between the size and scope of your keyword campaign vs the conversion rate you achieving with that traffic.

I'd recommend keeping the ad campaign just large enough so you can achieve enough conversions for your testing to be statistically significant, and continuously tweak your landing page and general offer until you achieve your target conversion rate.

Once you've got a formula that makes AdSense profitable, turn up the volume on those keywords.

Include a "tell a friend" or "show a friend the cool stuff here" link on every landing page.

Solid advice.

[johnnylew]

I cannot underestimate the landing page. With the best CTR must be ROI. CTR benefits Google, ROI benefits the advertiser. Without an optimized landing page your CTR is worthless. You must be able to convert to stay in the PPC game.

[sahota]

Originally Posted by ompundit

you might consider using some of the other features to stop traffic that is not going to be high converters for you. I would limit my traffic to males, 18-60 or 65, and turn my campaigns off during work hours when people are surfing the web at work and not serious buyers.

can you tell me please how you restrict your Google adsense traffic to a particular sex and age group.

I think nobody picked up the another point you made about WORKING HOURS. I have always seen this happening. I think everyone need to experiment with this specially business who sell to an end customer rather than a business. As far as our business is concerned we get 80% of orders in evening and Night.

[ompundit]

RE: the images I am using IE8, well I use all the major browsers. but that's the one I was using the day I had issues with the site.

RE: how to set demographics and time scheduling in Google, I figure it will be easier to reference Googles Help than to rewrite it so just click the links in this sentence to get the "How To"

Using these features to really get the best potential leads is one of my favorite tools. You can pretty much do this in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, although watch out for the Yahoo and MSN as they manage how they sort the traffic a little differently and you can end up going through some serious money if you don't understand their system.
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I just checked your site and the image issues are still there for me, I took a screenshot, hope this helps.