PPC advertising

[Cloughie]

Hi everyone,

Whats the best PPC companies to use?

I used google adowrds ages ago and dinlt have any success and it seemed quite hard to use.

Can they really be useful and which one is the best?

What do people think about hiring someone to set up your campaigns?

[Cutter]

If you want volume for a targeted niche, you've got to go with Google. Second would be Yahoo Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/index.php) /Overture. Third is MSN AdCenter (https://adcenter.msn.com/Default.aspx). In general the have the best prices; the downside is you'll only get a fraction of the search volume you can get from Yahoo and you have to wait to get in since its still in beta.

There are other options available, but you have to be very careful. You hear a lot about Google and clickfraud; its the other smaller networks that are the real problem.

Here are my suggestions on running a profitable campaign. To be fair, shoemoney made a post about this on his blog today, however I have been experimenting with PPC for over two years.

First, you have to be super-targeted. Being profitable for general terms is often impossible because of advertisers bidding for image. In other cases you have to have a strong back-end profit source. Example, you spend $100 per customer, average customer generates $25 profit from order, one out of three re-order products that generate $350 in profit over next 6 months. Basically if you are an affiliate you can't play that game.

For super-targeted, that means each ad copy is written for each keyword, and goes to a specific landing page. Ever search "X brand shoes", you click on the ad, it goes to the front page of BuyShoes.com, you have to research "X brand shoes", and then it turns out they don't even have the shoe? Each step is not only killing your conversion rate but also Google's algorithm will charge you more for poor targeting.

Second, seperate content and search bids. This isn't because content will perform worse (something its better), but just so you can tweak your campaign more accurately.

Third, get clickfraud monitoring software. Adwatcher.com has a hosted solution with a free 30-day trial, and only $19.95 a month following if you host it youself.

Fourth, test ad copy. You can ad multple ads, and Google can automatically adjust them based on clickthrough rates (but if you are in a high cost market, higher clickthrough rate may actually be whats killing your profitability.)

Fifth, tweak your landing page for conversions. I regularly read case studies, books, and test my own theories for increasing conversions. Believe it or not, something as little as the background color of you page can affect sales. Between Google Analytics and Google Conversion tracking you can get almost all the data you need for this.

Bottom line, PPC is a ton of work. You need to not only understand but master copy writing, design, budgeting, and keyword research. You will also have to put in a lot of manual hours of work. With site publishing, I just find out how much money I made during the day, with PPC I have to check to make sure I'm not losing money, or find out why a campaign stopped.

You might be wondering why I just made this long post. Correct me if I'm wrong (if so, I'm sure others can learn from this), but if you couldn't get Google to bring you a profit you probably can't turn a profit from any other network either.

As for hiring someone to set up your campaigns, I've never tried it so I don't know.

[Chris]

Nice post.

Other (Smaller) networks to try:

Kanoodle
SearchFeed
RevenuePilot

[Masetek]

Nice post cutter. I have been looking into ppc for a while too. And now that Shoemoney has been posting about it there's quite a bit of hype about it. I think I'm just going to stick with what i know for now. Like you said, there's so much work involved. I think my time would be spent better producing sites atm.

[Cutter]

That might not be a bad choice. Long term, I think the PPC market is just going to become less and less profitable -- for advertisers. For publishers, this is great.

[ozgression]

Nice post.

Other (Smaller) networks to try:

Kanoodle
SearchFeed
RevenuePilot

Search123 (a Valueclick company) can also bring in some decent results.

I've heard of people doing ppc through Adbrite aswell. I've never tried them myself, though.

[Masetek]

That might not be a bad choice. Long term, I think the PPC market is just going to become less and less profitable -- for advertisers. For publishers, this is great.

Well if there is enough hype PPC prices will rise, thats always a good thing if you're not paying :)

[Cutter]

I'm running campaigns on Adbrite right now.. basically your ads will show up on sites like eBaumsworld. If your product works for that market, then you should do ok.

Adbrite does have some problems. If you submit an ad Friday night, you'll have to wait until late Monday for it to be approved. Their support sucks, and I've run into quite a few bugs.

[Cloughie]

Thanks for everyones help..

Cutter, great post, I am going to make sure I follow your points...

I'm gonna give it a try this week :)

[john190]

Adwords is the best followed by Overture and probably MSN.