The Pay Per Click Trick to Saving Money and Driving Sales

The biggest “secret” to pay per click marketing is stunningly simple yet, until I learned about it, for some reason it never occurred to me. By using this very simple method I’ve been able to significantly improve the results and conversions from my PPC marketing campaigns .

So you know what PPC is, you have created a campaign and an ad, and you’re ready to pick keywords for that ad. (If you missed the beginning of this little mini-PPC lesson you can catch the first part here.) However, before you choose your keywords you’re going to make a second ad. Yup. Another one. And we’re going to test them. As I mentioned before I highly recommend reading Adwords for Dummies and/or Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords. These books go over Adwords in full and many more strategies for it’s use as well as this method in much greater detail. Both are less than 20 bucks each. They have totally changed the way I work PPC. Well worth it.

Understand that in Pay Per Click advertising with Adwords you only pay for the “click” and not for the number of times that ad is shown. If your ad appears a thousand times and nobody clicks on it then you don’t pay anything. So we’re going to make two ads that run at the same time. Always, always, always make two ads. And here’s why.

Google Adwords is going to keep track of all kinds of information for your ads including how many times they are displayed and how many times they are clicked on. From these numbers you get a “Click Through Rate” or CTR in the lingo. If your ad is shown a hundred times in a day and 10 people click on it your CTR is 10%. Got it?

In the example with our pretend charity, Bills Charity, I’ve made two pretend ads here. I’d run both ad’s at the same time. After a day or two I’d see which ad was preforming better as far as the CTR. I’d then rewrite the other, less effective, ad version. Then give it another day or two, find which of those two ad’s was most effective and had the highest CTR and rewrite the lesser of the two. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it. You can write something that hundreds, or thousands or millions of people will see and have a very quick “review” of your ad writing skills. This simple idea is often referred to as “split testing.”

I’ve started ad campaigns where the starting CTR was horrible - basically my ad’s stunk. No one clicked on them. Through the above process, which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty simple, I was able to improve my CTR by several hundred percent which of course drove more people to my target site and so on.

You may be thinking, “Okay, great. I got it. But how does this save me money?”

Like I said before when I first started playing around with PPC my ad’s stunk, my CTR stunk, my target website stunk and I thought the whole thing was a total bust. In desperation I started raising the amount of money I would spend per click…thinking that was the answer. All this did was get my ad’s into a little better position so when they did get clicked on I’d spend more. And because my ad’s stunk, I was making people dig for the information they wanted, and my website stunk so, naturally the conversion rate was horrible. (Conversion rate, for our example, is the number of people who visit your site against the number of sales they produce. Assume 250 people visit your site in a day and say 25 of those people buy a raffle ticket. Your Conversion Rate (CR) is 10% of site visitors.)

So always make two versions of an ad. Always check the CTR of those ads. Always rewrite the less effective ad. You can also expand this idea. Start with two ads for one “focus” and write another two ad’s for a different “focus.” The focus of one set of ads may be on the prize car (1970 Gremlin!) and the second focus could be on your charity cause (We help kids!).

Coming up next. Keywords. What they are and how to use them in your Raffle Pay Per Click Advertising.