If you find that your wallet is a bit thin these days, it could be because someone else took over. And if you’re using PPC (pay per click) services, that’s a good indicator of who you are. Using PPC advertising can be a great way to drive a lot of traffic to your website, but it can also mean spending a lot more money than you’re making if you’re not doing it right.
For a new affiliate marketer this can be very daunting and an expansive lesson. If you are going to advertise your service or product with PPC advertising, you need to do a lot of research. One thing you need to know for sure before considering PPC for advertising is the conversion rate of your product, to find out there are three main things you need to know. One is the conversion rate of your ad copy over the number of clicks generated per hundred impressions. The other thing you need to know is the conversion rate of your sales-generating keywords. And finally, the conversion rate of your sales copy per hundred page impressions.
And if you don’t have this information, you’re going to have to spend a little money and find out, because without this information you’re fighting a losing battle. The only way you can have a profitable campaign without collecting this information is by using a proven product and sales page with all the keywords known for the best conversion.
And if you don’t have this information for your product, you’ll need to do some pretty serious tracking of your campaign—tracking that will let you know which ad copy is getting the most clicks and which words in that ad copy are driving sales. You need both pieces of information to modify your sales copy. One way you can do this, requires you to slowly and medically test each factor one at a time.
With Google, as well as other PPC services, they allow you to test variations of your ad copy against each other. You use the same keywords in three variations of your ad copy, so now you have three ads running against each other. The only difference between them is the way the ads are worded. What you should do is use half a dozen keywords in each ad. The PPC service will send equal amounts of traffic to all three ads. This allows you to see which ad copy is getting the most clicks and which ones are not.
So after you have three ad copies and you’ve gotten fifty clicks, you can see which one has the most clicks and remove or change the other two that didn’t perform as well.
You keep trying to find a variation of your ad copy that beats your winning copy. Repeat this process over and over until you have strong, unmatched ad copy. So through the attrition process, you’re running strong ad copy that’s converting well.
You also have to find the keywords that are generating sales. Again, this is very similar to finding good copy; you test your top performing keywords from the ad text test above. You run one keyword at a time, on a single ad copy until you have about a hundred clicks, with this ad copy for the keyword you’re testing, and count your sales and how many clicks it took to generate a sale for that keyword. Repeat this process for each keyword one at a time, making a graph for each keyword. When you’re done, you’ll now have an idea of which keywords are generating the most sales and how many clicks it took. This may surprise you, seeing that the keywords that generate the most sales may not always be the ones that get the most clicks.
Now you know the ad text that is good, and you know the keywords that drive the most sales. You then need to test your sales copy with different variations of yourself, to find out which sales copy works best for generating sales. The best way to do this is one copy at a time. When you’re done testing, you now have the information on the top three factors you need to know. You will now be able to find out what is the maximum amount of money you can pay for each keyword in your campaign.
You can calculate this by taking your conversion rate, which would be the number of sales per 100 clicks (100 / sales) multiplied by the price of your product. This will give you the maximum price in dollars and cents, in terms of what you can pay for your keywords without overbidding for them. I also suggest that you do not bid for the maximum amount allowed for your keywords, but for 60 percent of this amount. So for every dollar you spend on advertising, you get $140 back.
The other thing you want to consider is that you don’t have to rank first with your keywords. In fact, I personally like to rank third or fourth for my keywords, what happens is that you will have a slightly lower click-through rate, but your conversion rate will be higher. I think the reason for this may come from the fact that people who are more discriminating and don’t click the first ad they see, but watch and read a bit, tend not to click on impulse, making you a more serious consumer, hence more conversions.