It grinds my gears to see how often some basic rules of PPC are overlooked even by so-called PPC experts.

When I participated in a teleconference with some of the leading PPC experts in the world, two of them got into a scuffle over whether it made sense to buy exact match traffic at a premium cost per click or broad match traffic through Google.

But neither of them was making sense because both were ignoring the most important element: it is not how much you pay for traffic.

The only thing that matters is how much your traffic converts at.

Knowing your conversion costs for every keyword eliminates any discussion about whether broad or exact is better, and so on.

You should be taking advantage of advertising your keywords in all ways and in all places.

You should be measuring each way/keyword individually.

And you should be adjusting your bids based on the conversion cost.

Things like ad position rank or bid amount are completely irrelevant. You only need to track your cost per conversion.

Quit thinking that there is a perfect ad position. There is no such thing. It is different for every circumstance. Instead, realize that your goal is to bring in conversions. You probably already have an idea of what you are willing to pay for a conversion.

If a keyword is bringing in conversions at a higher spend amount than you want, then lower your bids to bring your cost per conversion down for this particular keyword.

If a keyword is bringing in conversions at a lesser spend amount than you want, then you can increase your bids to bring in more conversions.

It really is this simple. I have no idea why people get caught up trying to manage other things.

Your goal in PPC should be to bring in the most customers for the least cost. You only accomplish this when you learn to manage every keyword by its conversion rate and forget about things like ad position or bid amount.

Jeremiah Thompson

Give Customers What They Want… All the way through!

Let us imagine a customer is currently Googling “titanium ping pong paddle.”

Just from this little knowledge, we can begin identifying the customer in some ways. First, the person is likely male. I don’t know a lot of female ping pong players. And those who play are generally not avid enough about the sport to want to Google something like this, so we can probably assume he is an expert ping pong player.

So let’s assume we have a male who is Googling something I didn’t even know existed: a titanium ping pong paddle. I don’t know anything about titanium ping pong paddles or that much about the sport, but let’s give a shot at selling to this customer.

Here is what a PPC ad would look like:

Titanium Ping Pong Paddle

Improve Your Ping Pong Skills

#1 rated by Champion Xica Gobba

www.fakestore.com/TitaniumPingPongPaddle

Now when the person enters your product page, you want to make sure you are repeating what the customer wants in your page headline.

Here is an example:

You searched for: titanium ping pong paddle

Webber Excalibur Ping Pong Paddle featuring Titanium Construction

* Indestructible paddle
* Raise your game to new levels with more control over the ball
* Learn to hit the ball faster with precise accuracy

$99 suggested retail

Save $20

Super low Fake Store price of only $79

FREE Shipping for orders of $150 or more

Order by 3 PM Eastern time and receive yours tomorrow!

Now in order for the above to work best, you need to eliminate anything else on the page that is not directly talking about titanium ping pong paddles. In other words, don’t try to sell the customer anything other than what they want until AFTER they have committed to buying. Then it is OK to push other products, but until that happens, keep the focus of your page on the product you know they want.

Now we have a nice PPC ad and a decent landing page for the titanium ping pong paddle.

Our next step is to get them through the buying process. This is where the majority of your sales are lost.

The first thing you should do is make sure you have eliminated any unnecessary steps. After you do that, identify how many remaining pages are in your shopping cart process. A good example to follow is the shopping cart checkout process used by Amazon.com. Their process is actually much longer than necessary, but if you can keep your process to the same number of steps or less, you are good to go.

The second thing you should do is remember to keep selling the product again and again. Everyone works their butts off to get a customer to put something in their shopping cart, but after that they completely stop selling. They think the biggest obstacle is getting the customer to put something into the shopping cart. But that is not true. The majority of sales are lost within the shopping cart.

The reason is that the shopping cart is full of friction to the customer. They are constantly bombarded with things that make them think about clicking away. They are asked to create logins, enter shipping and billing addresses, phone numbers, emails, and worse of all – credit card info!

To overcome all this friction, you have to keep selling the product to the customer. In fact, you need to oversell it!

For example, the product can be listed on shopping cart pages as just this:

Webber Excalibur Paddle $79

But it is better to list it like this:

Webber Excalibur Ping Pong Paddle featuring Titanium Construction

* Indestructible paddle
* Raise your game to new levels with more control over the ball
* Learn to hit the ball faster with precise accuracy

$99 suggested retail

Save $20

Super low Fake Store price of only $79

“I just had to write and say how great this product is. I purchased it after my game had stagnated. Now I am beating everyone I play and it’s all thanks to the Webber Excalibur Ping Pong Paddle!

Gratefully,

Chuck Simons

Lansing, Kansas”

Constantly reminding the customer of why they want to move forward is crucial to keeping the highest percentage of sales. Every page of your shopping cart should continue to preach the product the customer is buying, and this includes repeating the product’s picture and the summary of its benefits. Placing a different testimonial about the product for every page of your shopping cart is also a great idea. This will keep the customer focused on the product instead of the money and time they are spending to get it.

Third, repeat the slogan of the company on all pages. In this case, our store was called Fake Store and their unique selling proposition was:

FREE Shipping for orders of $150 or more

Order by 3 PM Eastern time and receive your order tomorrow!

This should be repeated on every page of the shopping cart process! It is a very important strategy to increase your sales.

Now, if you managed to close a sale, here is when you can and should begin to up sell customers on other related items. For example, perhaps you have a nifty leather carrying case for the titanium paddles. Offer it as a quick two-click purchase. First click to say they want to view more details of the product, and second click to confirm they want the additional product after viewing it.

Jeremiah Thompson

How To Earn The Trust Of A Skeptical Consumer

Marketing Sherpa/Experiments

Always strive to provide the maximum exposure to your product while paying the minimum for each view

Don’t ever let your ads get turned off because of budgets

Your ads need to run 24 hours per day

Don’t ever pause campaigns in order to lower costs

Your costs are effectively managed by lowering bids for individual keywords

To illustrate this as clearly as possible, imagine your product is a magic broom. This broom will sweep floors without human effort. Pretty cool, huh? This should be an easy product to sell. You go online and start a Google PPC account.

The first mistake you make is using a budget to control your spend. This is a mistake because there is more demand for your product than you realize. In fact, you are getting so many clicks that your ad stops showing by 2 PM. So from 2 PM till midnight, your ad is not shown at all.

You will always get more signups when your ads are shown to more people, even when the ads are shown lower on the page.

It is better to show your ads 24 hours per day, and you can do this while still spending $50 a day if that is your budget. Just lower your bids so you are spending less for each click. If you have no need to spend within a certain range, simply increase your daily budgets.

Ultimately you need to remember this rule: If your ads are getting turned off because your budget was reached, you are mismanaging your account. And you are paying more per click than you would otherwise be paying if you reduced your bid amounts and maintained those ads for a full 24 hours.

Lowering your bids will cause 4 things to happen:

1. Your daily spend will drop

2. Your ads will get shown lower on the page

3. Your cost per acquisition will drop

And the fourth thing that will happen is really cool: You will find yourself getting customers for the same cost!

How long it takes for your daily spend and targeted acquisition cost to be within your desired amount depends on how aggressively you lower your bids.

A fool’s way to reduce spending is to pause weaker campaigns. The ultimate goal for PPC is always to obtain the most customers for the lowest cost per acquisition. The only way you can achieve this goal is by providing maximum exposure while managing each exposure so it will bring in customers at your acceptable cost rate.

In other words, you must manage every campaign in your account at its lowest level: the keyword. The campaign may be weak but perhaps it still has some strong keywords. Turn off the entire campaign and you say goodbye to those potential customers. Instead, why not lower the bids for individual keywords? To manage a campaign effectively, every keyword should be managed individually.

Never pause campaigns. Only pause individual keywords. And the only time you pause a keyword is when you have lowered the bid to the absolute minimum and you still find customer acquisitions coming in too high for that particular keyword.

To recap: if you have a budget and that budget is reached, then:

1. You will be limiting the exposure to your ad

because

2. You are paying too much per click

To combat this, you must:

1. Manage your campaigns at their lowest level: keywords

2. Strategically lower your bids until you reach your desired daily spend rate (always lower the worst performing keywords first!)

To further reduce your cost per acquisition, make sure you are bidding on every keyword you can find and for every engine. Anyone who just uses either Google or Yahoo instead of both is automatically paying a much higher customer acquisition fee then they should.

To see why, just do the math: If you are bidding on a keyword that gets 1000 impressions a day with Google, it’s likely to receive approximately the same with Yahoo.

For this example, let’s say they are identical. So currently you are paying $1 per click to rank fourth with Google for 1000 exposures. This costs you $50 per day.

Now you decide to cut your Google spend in half so you can use the other $25 for Yahoo. First you lower your Google bids. You find out you can stay in the seventh position in Google and still get nearly as many signups as you were getting in the fourth position. Now you take your other $25 and spend it on Yahoo.

By lowering your bid and page ranking, your signups with Google dropped slightly, but doubling your ad exposure to a new group of clients at Yahoo caused your overall conversions to go way up.

Now you are spending the same amount of money but gaining more customers! Isn’t that the goal of PPC advertising? Why do we forget this by sometimes doing things that work against our goal?

Always strive to provide maximum exposure for your product while paying the minimum for each view. Be sure to do everything you can to maximize your exposure, and remember to manage at the lowest level: keywords.

Jeremiah Thompson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Brazilian Vacation Dreams Come True for Missoula, Montana-Based Photographer

“Girls of Brazil 2009 Swimsuit Calendar” makes big waves in world of amateur photography

MISSOULA, Mont., Aug. xx, 2008 — Last year, the famously exotic, culture-rich country of Brazil welcomed over 5 million visitors to its homeland. Some came for the sun and the beach. Others came to indulge in Brazil’s ecotourism or its numerous adventure-based sports. Many more traveled there for industry fairs, conferences and conventions.

However, one American amateur photographer — a former “dotcommer”  — went to Brazil for the girls … or, rather, to follow his dream of photographing beautiful women and making a name for himself as a professional swimsuit photographer. Jeremiah Thompson of Missoula, Mont., has just released the fruit of his vacation “fun” in the form of the “Girls of Brazil 2009 Swimsuit Calendar,” which is now available online at http://girlsofbrazilcalendar.com .

“Many men dream of being a professional swimsuit photographer, but my dream was much more than that,” Thompson says. “This project, called ‘The Girls of Florianopolis’ — so named for the beach town that was home to these breathtakingly beautiful women — took a life of its own and is very, very real. I simply took a vacation down there, started taking pictures of women who just loved and wanted to be photographed for free, and the result is this amazing calendar of the most gorgeous women in the world.”

A photographic debut of sorts, Thompson’s “Girls of Brazil 2009” calendar is packed with 15 models who are local to Florianopolis, the capital city of the Santa Caterina State in Southern Brazil. Within the calendar, each featured spread reflects the models’ unique styles and moods — playful, seductive, thoughtful and more — that combine to create a calendar bursting with energy, emotion and serious sex appeal.

Among the surf and sand, the girls sport their own bikinis in most cases, although Thompson bought a few swimsuits for the shoot, giving them as gifts to several of his models. It was this bikini shopping and photographing of such exquisite beauty that made Thompson wake up and realize this life, at least for him, wasn’t such a dream but the real deal.

“I believe people should follow their dreams, and this project was so successful that it was a reality check of sorts in terms of what one can achieve,” Thompson states. “I shot this entire calendar with simple but classic gear – a Canon 40D, plus a Canon lens and some flash equipment. I didn’t use any crew, lighting reflectors or others kinds of support that professionals typically use.”

“I did solicit the help of Mother Nature … incredible sunrises and sunsets lit my ‘stage,’” Thompson continues. “The results were simply amazing, and a true show of what I’ve been able to do with my talent for scouting out the women, taking advantage of Brazil’s natural environs, and using my camera to its fullest potential.”

For more information, visit http://girlsofbrazilcalendar.com/.

Contact:

Terri Braun
terri@girlsofbrazilcalendar.com
406-532-3712