“Hi Docs.
 
When creating a PPC campaign for a retail website, what is the best way to organise the various permutations and combinations of keywords?
 
Take the following ‘widget’ example – all of the following ‘widget’ related keywords should be bid on, as tightly within the account structure as possible:
 
‘widget’
‘buy widget’
‘cheap widget’
‘blue widget’
 
That would be logical I’m guessing – an ad group for each.
 
But how do you account for the combinations e.g. ‘buy cheap blue widget(s)’?
 
Then, as is often the case, how do you factor in synonyms of ‘widget’ which people will also be searching for?
 
I know the importance of negative keywords to tighten each ad group in this situation, but without having an optimal account structure in the first place it kind of feels like wasted effort.
 
I know this is a problem because the keywords that get the most impressions and clicks in my campaigns tend to be broad and phrase matches rather than exact.  That said, I do get a good CTR on the broad and phrase, and nearly always have a QS of 10 (a few 7’s but really not many, and none below 7).
 
This feels like the missing piece in my PPC puzzle so any help much appreciated!
 
Thanks.
 
Julie.”

Here’s what Shane had to say …

Shane

Hi Julie.

This is a good question and one which crops up even in well set up and well managed accounts, basically just how granular do you go, at what stage and what’s the best way to do it?

Split into Themed Adgroups

We would definitely split the account down into themed adgroups, so in your example, yes, we would make those separate adgroups for sure: 

‘widget’
‘buy widget’
‘cheap widget’
‘blue widget’
etc …

For combinations of multiple theme phrases like “Buy cheap blue widget” then there are three options:

1) Create a ‘fishing’ test adgroup and load all the terms (but link them to the most relevant landing page for each term via the individual keyword url option). See which of these terms gets enough volume to create other smaller adgroups from them, and then either move those keywords to the most relevant existing adgroups on a keyword by keyword basis, or to newer adgroups if enough of a common theme with volume came up.

Or

2) Add the terms straight to the most relevant adgroup (isn’t always clear cut, as some could go in two or more different adgroups i.e “cheap” or “blue”)

Or

3) Create lots of small and very targeted adgroups knowing most of the work will be a waste of time.

The problem in large scale PPC is to know how granular to go from the outset; you want to cover the main terms, but avoid wasted time and maximise the number of sales in a short timescale whilst you are working on the campaigns. If you think about it, you’ll see the data is there for you to figure out in most cases.

Taking “blue widget” as an example, let’s say this has 1000 searches per month, what’s the odds that “buy blue widget” is more than this!? … very little! In fact, with every variable added, you’ll find the search volume usually drops significantly, so you know this will be a lower volume term. Taking it one step further, “buy cheap blue widget” will be even less often searched, so you can quickly figure out the order of priority when breaking the keywords down by looking to the search volume of the next most popular phrase up.

“Buy cheap blue widget” – A Case in Point

So Julie in your “buy cheap blue widget” example: depending on how big the volume is in the first place for “widget” and “buy widget” etc., you could end up with the following combined variables:

action, price, colour, item etc.

… then you could figure out all the “action” words such as:

buy, find, compare etc.

… then the “price” ones such as:

cheap, cheapest, discount etc.

… then the “colours”:

blue, red, yellow etc.

… and finally the item and variations, synonyms like:

“thingybobs”, “thingymajigs” etc.

Now imagine the scenario in doing this by creating an “optimal account structure” from the outset. When combined into two, three and four keyword combinations, that’s around 350 adgroups just to cover these four variable themes.  In most cases, many won’t result in any impressions let alone clicks or sales (we used to do it this way years ago when 2000 keywords per adgroup was a target, not a redundant feature as is the case now).

The solution is in which way to tackle the workload, we hate messy structures too, but optimal account structure is what you strive FOR at a point in time; usually always ahead as the landscape is constantly changing, but at the outset you can have “an” optimal account structure for now that will do to get going, and then quickly refine and expand as you go.

The main point I’m trying to get across is that you can’t always start out with it as optimum unless you are willing to waste many hours (in some cases hundreds of hours).  Once you step away from the main terms and add variables to keywords to other variables, most of what you do from guess work won’t actually get many impressions in most cases. So you can either sit down and create huge campaigns with every possible variation of multiple keywords, tens of campaigns, hundreds of adgroups and tens of thousands of keywords, OR you can do the volume terms first, then get those live and break it down based on volume into smaller adgroups. Once you’ve done that, you can keep re-refining those adgroups to smaller ones as new keywords bed in etc..

In your “buy cheap blue widget” example, I’d be tempted to do just a couple of shorter keyword adgroups first to see what traffic is out there:

“cheap coloured widget”
“buy coloured widget”

Basically, we would see which of the new terms gets a viable volume of searches, and then create groups out of those starting with the most searched and clicked terms. So if “price blah blah widget” gets more traffic over “coloured blah blah widget”, create your adgroup to be predominantly price based and put the lower volume coloured yet priced keywords in there too (but link to the coloured landing page by each keyword url). Do this until such time as there are enough keywords and/or traffic in them to earn the right for an adgroup of their own.

Broad, Phrase and Exact Match

When you say you get most clicks on broad and phrase, move your mindset to think like this:

Every broad match click you get from now on is a phrase match you missed that you could be getting a better CTR for in a tighter adgroup with relevant adcopy going to a targeted landing page (*some will be clicks you’d wish you had on negative matches too!) and paying less for overall.

Every phrase match click you get from now on is a click you missed adding as an exact match that could be getting a better CTR in a tighter adgroup with targeted adcopy going to a targeted landing page (*some will be clicks you’d wish you had on negative matches too!) and paying less for overall.

The higher the CTR, the lower the cost per click as google earns more, so even though you may have a QS of 10, you can still lower that click cost with more highly targeted matching. This will benefit the overall health of the campaign, as CTR of the url itself is taken into account with QS in conjunction with the health of adgroups, campaigns and the account as a whole.

Synonyms

As for synonyms, use the search query reports to see exactly which terms are driving traffic. Search google for synonyms etc. and then do adgroups for these based in order of the search and/or click volume on the main “widget” variations you already have. You’ll find you have to stop after a few adgroups as the volume is too low. There’s no real point doing every adgroup exactly copied from “widgets” campaigns if the main synonym for it is “thingamabob”. If it only gets 10% of the volume as a keyword as widgets does to begin with, you’ll just bloat your account up with useless adgroups which is pointless work.

On the plus side Google is beta testing a new matching option called modified broad match. I blogged about this recently at http://www.revenueaddict.com/broad-match-gets-cleverererer-good-news-finally.html. This should help in the targeting as you could go ‘+cheap widget’ or ‘+cheap blue widget’ and catch all variations on a broad but more targeted match, as the term after the “+” must be in the search term, but the rest is still broad match. However, it’s no excuse for not running frequent search query reports to identify the keywords you need to phrase and exact or negative match.

Hope that helps!

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, however, we are now back in the driving seat and on track to deliver some more answers to those burning questions and headaches you’ve been having.  To softly kick those booze drained brain cells back into gear for the New Year, Brenda wrote in having completed an online course and setting up her first blog.  Unbeknownst to Brenda, she found herself doing something that started to trigger emails from an Affiliate Network about “Brand Bidding”:

“I’m a newbie to affiliate marketing, but I’ve done a 6-hour course on the net (hopefully legit) and I did a first blog.  Not good, but I thought I’d just put the theory into practice a bit early on in the course.

It was for a car insurance company.  I did put the name of the car insurance company and the group name in the text of the blog.  Also, I put in a banner for them.

I’ve now had an email from the company I’m being paid by saying that there will be a zero tolerance policy for anyone caught brand bidding.  What does this mean?  Also, they say members of their programme are not permitted to bid on (name of co.), insurance brand keywords, phrases or brand mispellings.

It then said please ‘negatively’ match on (name of company) and all variations.  Also, it said using their display URL is banned.

I don’t know what all this means in relation to a blog.

Please help.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Kier

Hi Brenda

‘Brand bidding’ is a bit of affiliate jargon and it refers to when an affiliate purchases clicks from a search engine like Google for keywords based around the site/company’s name.  The reason that this is frowned upon is that a lot of users perform searches on Google as a ‘navigational search’, that is to say rather than bookmarking or remembering the URL they simply type it into Google and click the first result.  As such users which have already been successfully marketed to by other mediums (newsletters, display, offline etc.) can then be cookied by an affiliate’s paid ad and they then get a commission for doing very little.

This can add considerably to a merchant’s bottom line costs and also tends to negatively affect the performance of other affiliates on their program, and so it’s banned on a lot of programs.  Some merchants also ask affiliates to add a ‘negative match’ for their brand keywords to their paid search campaigns.  This simply means that you can list the merchant’s brand term in your account and no queries with it in will have your ads shown.  This is done as there are various matching types for keywords in paid search, some show up just for a very specific query, but some will be broader and so can show up on keywords that you haven’t explicitly bidded on and thus could contain the merchant’s brand term.

If you are only using a blog for natural traffic and not buying paid traffic (which seems to be the case from your question) then you have nothing to worry about!  If in doubt speak to the network and they can help you out.

Mark

Hi Brenda.

Thanks for submitting your enquiry to the Doctors, and I hope the following will help you understand what the communication you have received from the merchant means.

Firstly I will explain what the merchant means from the email you have got:

This email means that they don’t want people to place Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on the name of their company on any of the search engines through paid search.  When they said any variations of the brand name, they mean you can’t bid on any terms that relate to their company name.

As an example, I will use the car insurance company Norwich Union or Aviva as it is now known:

You can’t bid on any terms that include the name Norwich Union or Aviva in any way, so if you were to bid on these terms your sales would be rejected.  So you couldn’t also bid on terms like “Norwich Union Car Insurance” as this would still be a variation, or “Norich Union” as this would be classed as a miss spell.

‘Negatively’ match on (name of company)

This means that you would have to add the name of that company as a negative match on any PPC activity.  So if you were bidding on car insurance, you would need to negative match the name of the company, so for the example you would need to add both “Norwich union” and “Aviva” as negative matches.

Using their display URL is banned

This means that if you are doing a PPC campaign you must not use the merchant URL on any PPC adverts you place in search engines, so you would have to use your own URL and landing page to direct your traffic to, and then the customer would come to your site and then go onto the merchant site.  So again, using “Norwich Union” and “Aviva” as an example, you would not be able to use http://www.aviva.co.uk/ as your display URL on your PPC ad.

From reading your question, I don’t think to be honest that any of the above affects you as you are talking about your own blog on which you are simply advertising the merchant and are not directing traffic via PPC to the company in question, so these terms don’t relate to you as you are not using PPC to generate traffic to your site.

I hope this is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Shane

Brand bidding is a term used in regard to pay per click (PPC) marketing such as Google adwords, Yahoo or MSN paid search.  It has nothing to do with organic search listings, so unless you are buying traffic from any search engines you have nothing to worry about.

If you do start paying for traffic, all it means is that you cannot bid for your adverts to appear on the terms the merchant says they don’t want you to or they will not pay you commission earned and may kick you off their program entirely.

Today it’s the turn of Kier and Kirsty to give us their advice on how to cut those Adwords bills…

Kick us off then Kier..

Your best bet is to work on improving your CTR.

Ensure that your ad groups are all tightly focused for the keywords and that your site/landing page has been properly built out to be as ‘valuable’ to the end user as possible (there’s plenty of advice on this out there, check out Kieron Donoghue’s blog post on Google Adwords landing pages for some starting points). Also, constantly try new variations on ad copy and kill those that perform worse. The higher your CTR the better your quality score and the less you’ll actually pay per click.

Kirsty says…

There are two main things I tend to do when my PPC campaigns aren’t quite cutting it on the margins front, or if I want to give them due dilligence to make sure I’m not spending money I don’t have to:

Step 1

Once the campaign/adgroups have had a bit of time to “bed in” I will gradually reduce my CPCs and see how the campaign reacts. Sometimes I have managed to shave a fair whack off of my PPC spend doing this. I have one campaign running at the moment that I have reduced CPC on by 50% and I’m getting the same traffic levels I always did. I do suspect I’ve been able to do this because the campaign has been running for 2 years and performing well though.

However, that said I recently shaved 30% off the cost of an adgroup that was 8 weeks old overnight. If you are working in an area with very competitive CPCs this technique will often not work, but is always worth a try before throwing in the towel. If my attempts to reduce CPCs without affecting my traffic too dreadfully don’t work, I tend to just wholesale cut my bid levels back to where I will make a profit and take whatever traffic I can get. Sometimes traffic levels increase after a while. In either case I always follow up with STEP 2 …

Step 2

I look for cheaper, laser targeted longtails to add into my adgroups. These often have much less competition, cost less, convert better, and have the gratifying side effect of increasing the overall CTR on my adgroup which can assist with STEP 1!

Oh, and if you have any terms or adgroups that are pulling down the CTR of a campaign generally, move them to a campaign of their own. This will help your campaign perform at its best. Finally, the reverse engineering Shane talked about in the How Much Cash For PPC post is absolutely essential. However, you do need to follow that up by making damned sure that whatever you are sending traffic to is indeed converting and making you a profit. You need to analyse profit right down to keyword level by making sure you are at least using network keyword tracking and sending your traffic to highly targeted landing pages. That way, you will be able to weed out keywords that are just burning spend and concentrate on more lucrative areas. To take a “campaign wide” view of your affiliate profits can often lead to you missing out on a valuable niche product or strongly converting keyword that you can subsequently build good revenue on.

So in short, Step 3 (yes I know I said I did two things!) is making sure all your spend is working for you and you’re not carrying any rubbish performers in your campaign!

Editors Note: Thanks to all the doctors who took the time to give some fantastic advice over these last three posts – Advice that should make a huge difference to affiliates’ PPC efforts, and should see the end of unprofitable PPC campaigns forever!

Don’t forget if there’s a burning question about any aspect of Affiliate Marketing that you’d like to ask, then the Affiliate Doctors would love to hear from you! Happy New Year everybody!

So.. “Previously on Affiliate Doctors..” Mike wanted to know “How to bring down the CPC for maximum profit or getting sales” and wanted to know if “something can be done even if the “Reverse Engineering” doesn’t work, or where you spend more than you earn, even if you have high QS (Quality Score)”

Over to you Dan..

Hi Mike, how are you?

I don’t know whether you’re using landing pages, sending clicks straight to merchants, and even whether you’re able to see which of your keywords are converting on merchants’ sites, so I will keep things simple & offer 2 simple tactics & one process to hopefully help you out.

TACTIC ONE: BE AS NARROW AS POSSIBLE

A very easy way to cut costs is to target everything as closely as you possibly can.

Move away from broad & phrase match & use exact match wherever possible.  For example, instead of targeting ‘Oak Beds’ with an ad group, split that down to ‘oak single beds’, ‘oak double beds’, ‘oak king size beds’, ‘oak bunk beds’.  Once you’ve done that for all of your products, take it a step further, splitting those down into one set targeting the same phrases with the word ‘cheap’ & one without, e.g. this might be a small selection of keywords from one group:

– [cheap oak single beds]
– [buy cheap oak single beds]
– [buy cheap oak single beds uk]
– [buy cheap oak single beds online]
– [buy cheap oak single beds online uk]

You could split that down even further still, for example by region – either by city in the adwords tool, or by city in the search string:

– [cheap oak single beds London]
– [buy cheap oak single beds London]
– [etc.]

In that instance you might have a line in the creative along the lines of ‘Free 24-Hour Delivery in London’.  A nice thing about this is you may find something is profitable in London but not in Manchester (for example).  Turn off areas where the terms are unprofitable & you save money.

And again, you can keep splitting your groups down & down to a really granular level, avoiding costly broader terms & allowing you to tweak them at a very low level.

TACTIC TWO: USE TONS & TONS OF NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

If you are using broad or phrase match ads, you will always show for a load of things you hadn’t thought of.  It’s important to use as many negative keywords as possible to avoid this as it can both A) lower your CTR by receiving impressions you don’t want and more importantly B) increase your costs by receiving clicks you don’t want.

To do this, I’d use some keyword research tools (e.g., your own internal stats, google keyword suggestions).  A super-simple example to illustrate this might be ‘Acer Laptops’.  A very small handful of negatives might be:

– ‘review’ (I don’t want people who are just researching, I only want people who are ready to buy)
– ‘broken’ (I don’t want people who are just problem solving)
– ‘bag’ (I’m selling laptops, not accessories)
– ‘toshiba’ (this catches people who are searching for comparisons between laptops)
– ‘cheap’ (unless I am actually selling cheap ones)

etc.

The easiest way to do this is to:

1. Use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
2. Put in your search term (and a few other similar terms)
3. Add anything that doesn’t match what you’re selling as a negative.

TACTIC THREE: COME UP WITH YOUR IDEAL ‘COST PER SALE’

The easiest way to cut PPC costs is to remove bits that aren’t working.  BUT it’s often difficult to draw the line between “doing ok” and “not working”.

Coming up with your ideal ‘cost per sale’ is a nice guide for this and it allows you to both grow your campaigns & trim the garbage at the same time.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Decide on an ‘ideal cost per sale’ for a particular merchant

For example, your average sale through a merchant is £15.  You decide “I’m happy to make £5 profit per sale with them” therefore your ideal cost per sale is £10.

2. Once a week/once a day (depending on how much time you have & how much you’re spending!) pull a report of all of your ad groups for that particular merchant.

3. Go down the list and, for any ad groups where you are spending more than £10 per sale, decide whether to ‘delete’ or ‘tweak’ them.

4. A ‘tweak’ might be either:

– Remove specific keywords converting at too high a price
– Swap vague keywords for narrower keyphrases
– Split broad adgroups into more targeted adgroups
– Bump bids down
– Add a new ad creative

If you add all of these 3 tips together you can grow big campaigns, where you can turn off lots of tiny bits that you know are wasting money, rather than risking turning off bigger things & removing something profitable in the process.

Hopefully there’s something here to help you out!

Dan

Editors note: Thanks Dan!  That’s great advice that I think everyone can put into practice very easily regardless of their current PPC budget.

We’ll be back with the final instalment of this thrilling series next week, so all that remains for me to say on behalf of all the docs here at Affiliate Doctors is to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas, and of course a hugely profitable 2010!

“Posts about PPC on Limited Budget and How Much Cash for PPC are a fantastic resources for newbie “PPC Am’ers”, with a lot of good information to make sure that one shouldn’t burn their fingers.

But one of the important issues that isn’t really covered is, “How to bring down the CPC for maximum profit or getting sales”.

It would be really nice to see a post or answers from the Doctors covering this important bit.  Is there something that can be done even if the “Reverse Engineering” doesn’t work, or where you spend more than you earn, even if you have high QS (Quality Score).”

The responses we had from the doctors was nothing short of exceptional, and their take on this incredibly vital element of PPC which can help you cross the line between profit and loss was so detailed that we felt the only way we could do their responses justice was to split their answers into three parts, which we will post over the festive period.  So forget watching the Sound of Music or Mary Poppins for the umpteenth time this year – Grab yourself a glass of Egg Nog and settle in for a PPC Master Class!

First up to answer Mike’s question is Shane:

Excellent question Mike, this is like the nirvana of PPC … so just how do you bring down the Cost Per Click (CPC)?

A side note on positions before we get stuck in …

PPC Positions

In general, I see number 1 position as the “Idiot spot” in most (but not all) cases, that’s not to say it doesn’t work and shouldn’t be used, but we typically see that the best Volume and ROI combination is found between position 2-5.  So if you are in position 1, don’t be afraid to step out of it and test different positions, as people do click a few ads to compare, and you may actually even see a jump in sales by dropping to position 2 or even 3, especially if your offering is the same price or better quality as those who take position 1 or 2!

So firstly consider dropping a position to test the difference, as the CPC should drop and the conversion will probably rise resulting in a better ROI percentage.

Don’t Focus on the Cost Per Click Directly…

Okay, to answer the main part of the question; to reduce the CPC we don’t actually focus on the cost per click directly, we focus on getting other factors sorted which then directly affect the cost per click … it pays to always remember that Google rewards relevancy as they figure it leads to a better user experience and thus indirectly yields more cash for them in the long run when happy users keep coming back.

So it’s factors which affect the Quality Score (QS) that we focus on, as in general, the higher the QS, the lower your costs and the better your ad position, which in turn leads to a better Click Through Ratio (CTR), lower costs etc..

Focus on Relevancy!

We focus on relevancy as the key point.  The first thing we do is look at the campaign structure, then adgroup structure, we may move adgroups into more suitable campaigns or create new ones, then we’ll look at the keywords and assess the relevancy of the keywords to the adcopy and landing page.  If the relevancy isn’t good enough, we will then split those keywords out into very targeted adgroups with 2-4 ads each.

… Then Focus on Click Through Ratio

We then focus on getting the Click Through Ratio of each keyword as high as possible.  We do this by use of exact matching as well as using phrase match, but the most important point is we spend as much, if not more time looking for negative keywords to cut down the number of wasted impressions.

Reducing your impressions by say 25% boosts your click through rate by that same amount, which in turn gives that element of the QS boost leading to benefits such as a CPC discount, better position etc..  This is also where smaller adgroups with targeted adcopy come into play; we try to get the main keyword into the advert headline, body and even url sometimes so that it bolds up when searched for, but this is hard if your adgroups aren’t tightly themed enough around one or two main keywords and their variations!

Review the Adcopy

Once we’ve done the above steps, we regularly review the adcopy in use, editing the lower performing ones so that over time, we find the best 1-2 ads to use that really do connect with the users that are searching the keywords we bid on.

We also make sure that the landing pages are highly relevant to cut down the bounce rate and maximise conversion, so we may create a specific page for each adgroup or even keyword! so that the user sees the keyword in the page that they have in mind etc..

Google is now offering a tool to some advertisers try to help them boost relevancy; very useful for targeting on broader/brand terms.  If your account is eligible, then their “sitelinks” feature may help boost your CTR and could also cut the index page bounce rate down dramatically for some advertisers – Google Sitelinks

Quality Score

You could say the overall benchmark for doing all this targeting work is Google’s QS – that’s their measure of how good they think things are running.  So if we fire up adwords editor (so much faster than using adwords site) and take a look, we generally see that the keywords that are rocking and making us/clients tons of cash are generally scored 7-10 (which is a by-product of us doing the work detailed above).  In addition, our CPC’s on those keywords will typically be tens of percent less than when we started.  If you bare all of these factors in mind, you will have the answer to the main part of your question on how do you reduce the CPC!

Quality Score is based on several factors … pay attention to the points in bold:

1. The historical click-through rate of the keyword and the matched ad on Google – (do good work from the start! Negatives, phrase and exact match, targeted ads)

2. Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account –  (don’t run slack accounts with just a few winning campaigns in there)

3. The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group – (don’t let bad history develop … start targeted well and then target harder over time etc.)

4. The quality of your landing page

5. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group – (tightly themed adgroups)

6.The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query – (tightly themed adgroups use of negatives and good matching with targeted adcopy to keyword)

7. Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown.

8. Other relevance factors (it’s Google, so they reserve the right to sting you and not tell you why! Lol)

You can read more here:

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=49174

One thing to bear in mind though is just because someone else is active on a keyword, it doesn’t mean there’s money in it for you. They could be broad matching some other term, they may not be measuring their sales on a keyword basis (some lazy affiliates especially ;)), or they could have a better deal than you etc., so the CPC may never come down low enough even with a TQ of 10 for YOU to make money.

The second part of your question relating to if you have keywords with a 10 QS yet need the CPC to come down still further, this is possible but again it’s more to do with targeting harder in the long run.

The obvious thing is to drop a position, it should be cheaper for you, which may not be as bad a thing as you fear, especially if you are in position 1 or 2, although with lower positions come less traffic, but there is usually a higher conversion rate so the ROI is higher but with less volume overall.

If you would rather hold position, then you may find that the following helps

– Create an adgroup for each of the keywords on exact match
– Use that keyword on each line and work it into the adcopy that promotes any unique selling point

This may boost the CTR enough to bring the CPC down. Even on high volume traffic we’ve regularly hit high 20’s to 30%+ CTR’s this way, so even with a 10 QS if you increase the CTR your CPC should lower.

A Case in Point

Here’s an example of the CTR’s of 3 exact matched keywords spending almost £120k in tightly themed adgroups with laser targeted adcopy!:

The £91k spend keyword ran at 32.30% CTR, sales worked out at £2.21 in commission for every 96p inbound click, which equates to a profit of £1.25, just over 130% ROI.

Just lowering the bid amount itself means that over time your ad position will probably begin to fall, especially if it’s a volatile sector where competition is strong.  So if you want to maintain position, it would also be wise to focus on boosting the CTR and QS instead, but remember that buying the traffic is only one part of the equation!  Once you have users on site, you need to maximise your landing page conversions as it effectively makes your clicks cheaper.  When conversion increases, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) comes down, so you can effectively pay more to get that traffic in the first place.  This is sometimes why sending direct to merchant isn’t ideal and you may do better as an affiliate by creating comparison pages.

A friend of mine who sold his company for several millions of pounds last year said he didn’t worry too much about micromanaging the CPC (his account was very well managed), but he focussed on squeezing every single conversion out of their landing pages as possible.  This way, even though he was paying the same high CPC (finance sector is so ouch!!) as everyone else, he was converting that traffic around 30% better than the competition which in turn effectively lowered his CPA.  So dropping the CPC is only part of the solution!  You should be using Google’s free website optimizer tool (and other feedback/testing tools) to really hone your landing pages to maximise conversions!

PPC is quite easy .. well the fundamentals of it are, you just have to do the work … that’s the hard bit

There is no shortcut to relevancy!

Editors Note:  Wow!  Thanks Shane for a fantastic master class lesson in reducing CPC spend on PPC campaigns – Hopefully Mike and our other AD readers will have found it useful (I know I did!) … Don’t forget to check out Affiliate Doctors throughout the festive season for the other Doctors take on this question.

“I was just wondering if any of you thought that one could make a living purely by doing PPC?  We have a few sites, but are looking into concentrating solely on direct to merchant PPC and wondered what all of your experiences have been like with this?

Have you found that it’s better to build your own sites and then PPC direct to your landing page so you have control and get the benefit of natural search?  Or have you found that direct to merchant PPC is faster, more profitable and has a quicker turn around time should you be penalised (e.g. if you were running a site that got a google penalty, you would be looking at trying to rectify it and this taking a few weeks min; with ppc direct to merchant obviously you can change this in a few hours).

Thanks a lot

Rach”

Here’s what the Docs had to say:

Shane

Yes, a very good living can be made purely by PPC and it’s possible via direct PPC or building your own sites, or a mixture of both.

Doing Direct PPC is hassle free and fast to get going, but your revenue dies the moment you turn the traffic off and the cookies run out.  You could also be competing with one or more affiliates for the right to use the display URL, so your bid may end up higher than it would be if you were sending users to your own site, as your ad would feature alongside the direct ad being used by other affiliates sending their traffic direct.

On the flip side, doing a site which you then PPC to has benefits in that you are creating something which will be bookmarked and referred by word of mouth to friends in many instances.  It could also be used to harvest email addresses and build up a loyal user base which are emailed regularly.  This type of site would grow in intrinsic value as its user base grew and could be sold off at some stage for a tidy sum depending on the sector.

Your own site could also get natural listings and thus free traffic.  However, on the adwords side of things, Google could flick the affiliate site switch and deem it unworthy if they saw fit.  In these situations, your quality scores would drop to 1 and you’d be asked for silly money per click, so it’s not wise to get too attached to sites lately.  Some people now concentrate on a core site for SEO/Brand building which they don’t PPC to, but they then use throwaway domains with the same database content etc. for PPC purposes.

I guess it depends how you want to play it personally as to which way to go.  Direct PPC is quick yet only works well whilst the ads are running – there’s no value being built and you are solely bouncing clicks through and taking a onetime kickback.  With your own site it’s much more work, but value gets added with each user who registers and there’s the chance to get SEO listings.

I personally made the mistake of doing far too much direct PPC in the early days whilst others were doing it to their own sites.  As an example, I was sending around half the volume direct as a friend of mine who was sending traffic via his site … he later sold the site for well over a million pounds!!!

Kieron

10 years ago it was very easy to make a living entirely from PPC, I should know, I made a great living from it.  Back in those days you could brand bid until your heart’s content, send traffic straight to merchant or via your very own crap landing pages.  All at 5p a click   However … Google put a stop to most of that, merchants and affiliate networks matured and terms and conditions went from being half a page long to the equivalent of War and Peace.

On saying that however, there are still opportunities to brand bid, send traffic direct to merchants etc., but you have to look a LOT harder to seek them out.  You are right when you say PPC is instant, but beware that Google can “slap” you at any time and put your 10p bids up to £10.  Just as equally a merchant can close their programme, change their terms or drop you.  Instantly.

My advice would be to have a healthy mix of PPC and sites that get traffic via natural methods.  That way you’re not reliant on 1 channel bringing in the cash.  Trust me, after years of spending millions on PPC, when you start to see natural traffic and sales coming to a site for “free”, it’s the best feeling ever.

Kier

Hi Rachel.

It’s certainly possible to live on PPC alone, but if you already have some successful sites why would you want to get rid of them?  I’d advise keep your sites, maybe work on them less if you want to develop the paid search side of your business but don’t rule out natural traffic altogether.

Landing page vs direct to merchant will depend a lot on the product you are selling and the merchant involved.  Direct has the advantage that you don’t need to spend time building a site but a well constructed landing page can presell effectively, increasing your conversions.  As such, a good method is to try a merchant/product with direct and if it works well, then consider building some landing pages for them to try and increase your profit.

Mark

Direct to merchant PPC will have a better conversion than to a landing page, but please make sure you check every merchants restrictions on the use of Brand Bidding, and also restrictions on use of display url.

If a merchant restricts use of url, then you can alwys build landing pages for products or services, and if these are targeted well, they can return a good conversion.

When building landing pages you don’t have to stick to one merchant, you could list 4 or 5 that offer that product or service, you could also consider using Easy Content Units to add some nice formatted content units from more than one merchant on your page.

“What would be the main Do’s and Don’ts when running PPC campaigns with Adwords?”

Whilst it’s impossible to cover such a broad subject in one fell swoop, we hope today’s post gives you some pointers.

Shane

 The main points for Adwords campaigns are:

Research your keywords well before hand

Use the Google Keyword Tool to sort your keywords into tight groups of related keywords, then put the most targeted keywords in on phrase and exact match.  You can use broad match too but Google’s algorithm takes liberties far too often, so it needs using carefully and watching very closely!

Use negative keywords

You need to focus just as hard on the negative keywords so as to reduce wasted impressions.  This in turn boosts your click through ratio as you get the same amount of clicks from less impressions.  Work out a realistic cost per click based on the expected conversion ratio and resulting commission/profit from each sale so that you don’t overbid.

Make your adcopy relevant to the keywords

Your adcopy should be as relevant to the keywords as possible, and it should contain the main keyword(s) so that it bolds up when searched for as this boosts the click through ratio.  Try to feature a unique selling point/reason to click your advert; so if you’re the cheapest, feature the price, or if it’s free delivery or same day dispatch then say that.

It’s wise to create a few ad variations.  I’d suggest at least 2 but no more than 4 initially, although for one of them you could use dynamic insertion feature {KeyWord:Default Text Here} so that the keyword searched for is contained in the ad every time.  Your adgroups should be tightly themed, so whilst an adgroup will take 2,000 keywords, you don’t want to fill each one with that many, you should be aiming for small and highly relevant adgroups that go to highly targeted relevant landing pages.

It is this tight relevancy between keywords, adcopy and landing page that helps to attain a good quality score.  In theory, this means that you will pay far less per click than someone with 2,000 keywords in one adgroup and one advert who is sending everyone direct to their site’s index page!

Review, refine, replace … rinse and repeat

Once the adgroup has had some traffic, take a look at the keywords.  If your phrase match keywords are getting traffic, and you have the same keyword on exact too, then you know that users are searching for something including the phrase match keyword, otherwise it would be the exact match getting the traffic.  You should aim to find what extra words are before or after your phrase match.  Run a search query report and see which terms people searched for, saw your advert and then clicked it, and then you can harvest some new negatives and extra keywords to bid on from this report.

Don’t just leave adgroups to run for weeks on end, go in and tweak bids to get the positions you desire; the sweet spot on most campaigns is position 2-4 for a good combination of volume and conversion.  Get the poor performers out of there; either delete them or put them in an improvers adgroup so that the main adgroup is as healthy as possible and filled with keywords that have good click through ratios.

Don’t forget to review and change the adcopy too, tweak the lowest performing advert and let it run again.  Over time you’ll hone your ads to maximise the click through ratio.

I’d also recommend using Adwords Editor it rocks! and saves hours of time.  It’s very easy to use, you can copy and paste, drag and drop etc. and you can even work offline then upload later.

PPC is an ongoing war with many variables in play, so adgroups need regularly reviewing.  Setting them up is only the first step of the process!

Kirsty

Potentially a very broad question, however off the top of my head:

DO

– Keep your search terms and phrases very highly targeted initially to get a feel for your conversions.
– Make proper use of all the different match types and learn what they all mean.
– Use exact match only if a lot of your terms have more than one meaning, broad match can be unpredictable at times!
– Research your potential campaign thoroughly before setting it in motion. 
– Try and work out roughly what a merchant’s AOV and conversion rate might be – and tailor your CPC to suit.  You’ll have a much better chance of making a profit!
– Make use of the Adwords daily budget cap in case something goes wrong and you get thousands of dud clicks for some reason (it DOES happen).

DON’T

– Bid on generics unless you’re pretty damned sure of your programme performance.
– Bid high when you start a new campaign unless you can afford to lose a few quid.
– Engage in any dodgy trickery whatsoever – Google has seen it all before and it’s just not worth basing an income on unsustainable techniques.
– Do anything in gambling or finance if you’re a first time PPC-er and don’t have deep pockets!
– Listen to anyone who says they have some kind of “foolproof scheme” to make you millions on Adwords PPC – they don’t

Mark

Make sure that you always check the merchant PPC restrictions, and communicate clearly with the merchant to make sure you are getting the best coverage and conversion from any PPC campaigns.  Check the performance of your PPC campaign regularly to make sure you are getting the best return on your ads, and make use of Broad and Exact match.

Kieron

Don’t gamble (because that’s what it is) more money than you can afford to lose.

“I have just started in affiliate marketing and love the concept. I do strongly feel that this has a huge part to play in the future of marketing and product delivery. My question is – from the time I set my site, get my PPC campain up – what is the average time it SHOULD take to start generating orders? I have started with The Clickbank Code – I use Clickbank for now.

I do have a few other ideas for some sites but am trying to learn as much as possible for now.”

Answers:

Kieron

Impossible to say unless you give us some more information about your sites, what you are selling and how you are generating traffic.

Shane

Clickbank is highly competitive and it depends on how well you set up your PPC campaign. If you target poorly, you may find that you run out of daily budget before sales happen.  I’d guess that you should be able to get traffic converting the same day if you work on your adgroups and pick good action orientated keywords which target searchers in the buying/acquiring mode, rather than people in the research phase. Make sure you create targeted adcopy with the main keyword(s) worked into the adcopy along with the benefits associated with your product etc., and don’t forget to use negative keywords so your ad only shows to those you want it to.

“Hi, the site is www.house-parts.com which has been around for years in various guises.  At the moment, it’s in limbo through indecision in which direction to take it.

Fingers have been burnt with the first couple of ventures on Google! PPC is something that is needed but with good direction … funds are limited!

Long term plan is to have a site that should be bringing in some regular income.

Appreciate any assistance.”

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Here’s what Kieron and Lammo had to say:

Kieron

It would really help if you were to ask a specific question. My first thoughts when looking at the site is that I don’t really know what it is or what it does. After digging a little deeper it seems to be nothing more than datafeeds from merchants split into categories. TBH I would bin it and start again with some direction and clear idea and purpose.

Lammo

I feel your pain Mark – PPC can be a fantastic little earner, or it can swallow your credit card balance, and I’ve had both happen to me over the years!

House Parts looks “interesting” – I note you mention a lack of direction a few times in your question. I think it shows in the site tbh – you’ve tried to cover everything and anything in the site, without really narrowing your focus on any one thing.

No-one is going to land on your homepage and think “What do I want today? A Plasma TV or a Dog Kennel?”, and your internal pages are bereft of any unique content or any decent on-page SEO – for example I’ve just looked at the page for baby items such as pushchairs, highchairs, intercoms etc (we’ve just had our first little boy!) – the content is duplicated from a product feed, and your meta title is “House, Home and Garden Shopping – Product list by Category 0” – not targeted towards any people searching for baby items!

I’d rip the whole site apart, lose 90% of the categories, and focus, focus, focus on a particular sector/area. Add unique content, get the basic on-page SEO right and make it a site that real people could use – don’t just build it for the search engines. Until you’ve done that, I wouldn’t spend a single penny on PPC, as I don’t think you’d get much of it back.

Editor’s Note:

Thanks for sending your site in for review Mark – it takes balls to send something for review in the first place, and although it may not have been exactly what you wanted to hear, hopefully it doesn’t come across as too harsh! At the end of the day, the docs reviews are ‘as is’, and are designed to help you – even if it is to say, “draw a line through it and start again”. Don’t let it put you off though, you obviously know how to put a site up, so just keep plugging away and narrow it down to something more specific.

That concludes the Affiliate Doctors first round of Surgery reviews. There are a couple more Clinic reviews and then it’s time to crack on with the second round. We’ve already got some great submissions in for the third round, so if you haven’t submitted a site or question for review yet, get ‘em in quick!

On another note, there will be some additions to the Doc panel over the next couple of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for some added expertise to help you out with all the questions you’ve been asking!

“Whenever I give PPC affiliate marketing a go, I always end up blowing my budget in a few weeks and find myself not having enough time to find those profitable keywords I need. When my budget is gone, I am a little scared to continue as I could lose a lot more money.
 
My question is, do you recommend having a large amount of capital to give it a go properly and if so, how much, €1k?, €5k?, more? … “

Answers:

Kieron

If you’re not making a success of PPC now, then throwing more money at it isn’t going to help. Forget about a budget, just spend what you can afford and nothing more.

Shane

I don’t think a bigger budget will help if you are strapped for time, you’ll just have more data to crunch and at more expense, although that may be the incentive you need to get stuck into the optimisation if it’s just the lack of capital at stake that’s meaning you don’t give it the attention it deserves.

It seems your main issue is time and not money, so perhaps make use of the day parting option and run for a few hours each day, or lower your daily budget right down so you gather data over a longer period, but only for several hours per day instead of all day.

This way you’ll get any weekend/payday traffic and more sales if it’s a product that converts better at weekends than in the week or vice versa.  Then once you have time, analyse the data, run search query reports, add negatives, break adgroups down, write more targeted adcopy etc. and aim to improve your Traffic Quality (TQ) scores etc. to get cheaper traffic.

I’m not sure how you are measuring keywords to find out which ones work, but one thing you could do is pass a keyword in the url if it’s direct to merchant PPC (ideally I’d say pass a keyword ref id rather than the exact keyword).  If you are doing traffic to your site then bouncing to merchants, you could use php to do the same, or at least use an out page and add google conversion tracking to it to record off site clicks as “sales” to track which keywords actually drive traffic into the site, and result in clicks leaving site to the merchant. It’s not ideal but it’s better than nothing, and at least you’ll see keywords which drive traffic to your site and result in no action.

Gathering data is the key regardless of budget; it’s as important to find out what doesn’t work as what does, so you should be tracking keywords as deeply as you can on every campaign.

Editor’s Note:

Don’t forget, if you’re running active PPC campaigns, why not take Shane up on his offer of a Free Adwords Healthcheck at www.freeadwordshealthcheck.co.uk.