Google Pay-Per-Click / Testing the Water
Sponsored Search or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is generally viewed as either a bane to Google’s main search engine (by the user) and a horribly expensive way to do business (by the advertiser). While the first point may ring true, with the current state of lousy advertising standards, the second point is a vile myth.
First off, people who tell you that you’re going to end up spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars on a PPC campaign are dolling out bad advice. You don’t have to spend more than $20, if that’s what your budget is. The fact is, nobody knows what your budget is going to be until you TEST THE WATERS.
Creating a test account on Google to suss out the real numbers of people searching for your product or service is something every business should invest in. PPC is NOT for everybody but you won’t know until you check things out. If you come up to me and say, “Oh, nobody clicks on those Spamy links.” or “It just doesn’t seem applicable to what I do.”, then you need to have your head examined, because your making a financial decision based on rumor and not hard facts.
Do you have $100 lying around? I have bills bigger than that and for a serious business this is not a lot of money. Google only takes credit cards, so it’s not real money anyway, just a small pile of accumulated debt that looks insignificant to the $4K you spent on IKEA furniture last weekend.
Here is How You Do It: (for people who are under the impression they are professionals)
1. Come up with a bunch of keywords you feel are relevant to what you sell, who you sell it to and where those demographics are located. This is a trial and error process that should be constantly tested and reevaluated till you get the right mix of words and phrases (a whole other article in itself).
2. Go to www.adwords.com and sign up for a new account. Select the Standard Account setting. Fill out your personal information.
3. Time to write an Ad, you’ll notice you’re limited to how many characters per line so get to the point and don’t use words like ‘best’ or ‘most’ (outlawed by google). For now keep it simple, we’ll get into writing effective ads in another article. Type in your main URL and then type in the URL link to the product or service on your website (you can make them the same but the ads will be more effective if visitors are taken directly to what they are looking for).
4. Set up your advertising location, be as specific as possible, I like to use the polygon to draw an accurate shape around counties in a state my clients serve. DON’T sign up for national by mistake, you’ll blow out that $100 in less than five minutes.
5. Set your daily budget at $10, Set your maximum per-click rate at $0.01 (this is for testing purposes, use the minimum and we’ll work up from there, later)
6. Now all you need to do is give Google your credit card info and your ads are off and running.
Alright, what is the purpose of setting the keywords at one penny? Well Google will run those ads in their system for a very short while, but it’s enough time to gather data on how many Impressions each keyword get’s before the ad is shut off. Why is it shut off? Well because DESPITE Google saying the minimum bid is one penny, they lie. In fact you’ll be forced to bump your keyword costs up to a minimum after a few hours. Anyway, the Impressions are the numbers you’re interested in right now, not having your ad up and running. You’ll quickly see which keywords get more traffic, which you’ll keep for now and remove the keywords that don’t perform well.
Impressions are the number of people who typed in your keyword in a search engine. They viewed your ad, but didn’t necessarily click on it. If ‘super ball’ get’s 1000 Impressions but ‘uber ball’ only get’s 3, you want to keep ‘super ball’ in your list.
There are exceptions to this rule, such as when you’re dealing with a highly specialized product. Say the keyword phrase ‘waste oil collection’, you may only get 40 Impressions, but it’s exactly what your business does, so keep it on hand for when we get *serious with your $100.
*With any type of PPC campaign Clicks are your goal, getting people to your website. But we are assessing if you need this service, NOT how many clicks you can get for spending little or nothing. Don’t expect sales at this point, we’re doing a research project.
Raise your keyword per-click costs to their new minimums ($1, $5, whatever Google tells you it is, it’ll be highlighted for you). Make sure that you can pay for at least ten clicks with your daily budget, so you’ll have to readjust from $10 to whatever the cost ($5/click would be $50).
Let it run for 24 hours.
Come back and repeat the process of raising keyword minimums and daily limits. The goal here is not to gather a ton of clicks; in fact you’ll be lucky to get any but to access the amount of traffic out there for your product and services.
Keep doing this till A) you run out of money B) a month has passed
Now you’ve got good data on what keywords work and if the Pay-Per-Click campaign is viable for your business. If you’re getting Impressions by the thousand/per day, PPC is right for you. If you’re getting a dozen or less than a hundred on all your keywords or even 85% of your keywords/per day then PPC is not for you.
If you find PPC is right for you then it’s time to move to the next step. Creating a budget and keyword list for a real campaign. The less in your budget ($50), the less keywords you should try and compete for. So choose the best keyword that gets good Impressions and is most relevant to your business and put all your money behind it. The more money, the more keywords, but start low and slowly grow your list so that you can keep a handle on costs and good data on what works and what doesn’t.
First off, people who tell you that you’re going to end up spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars on a PPC campaign are dolling out bad advice. You don’t have to spend more than $20, if that’s what your budget is. The fact is, nobody knows what your budget is going to be until you TEST THE WATERS.
Creating a test account on Google to suss out the real numbers of people searching for your product or service is something every business should invest in. PPC is NOT for everybody but you won’t know until you check things out. If you come up to me and say, “Oh, nobody clicks on those Spamy links.” or “It just doesn’t seem applicable to what I do.”, then you need to have your head examined, because your making a financial decision based on rumor and not hard facts.
Do you have $100 lying around? I have bills bigger than that and for a serious business this is not a lot of money. Google only takes credit cards, so it’s not real money anyway, just a small pile of accumulated debt that looks insignificant to the $4K you spent on IKEA furniture last weekend.
Here is How You Do It: (for people who are under the impression they are professionals)
1. Come up with a bunch of keywords you feel are relevant to what you sell, who you sell it to and where those demographics are located. This is a trial and error process that should be constantly tested and reevaluated till you get the right mix of words and phrases (a whole other article in itself).
2. Go to www.adwords.com and sign up for a new account. Select the Standard Account setting. Fill out your personal information.
3. Time to write an Ad, you’ll notice you’re limited to how many characters per line so get to the point and don’t use words like ‘best’ or ‘most’ (outlawed by google). For now keep it simple, we’ll get into writing effective ads in another article. Type in your main URL and then type in the URL link to the product or service on your website (you can make them the same but the ads will be more effective if visitors are taken directly to what they are looking for).
4. Set up your advertising location, be as specific as possible, I like to use the polygon to draw an accurate shape around counties in a state my clients serve. DON’T sign up for national by mistake, you’ll blow out that $100 in less than five minutes.
5. Set your daily budget at $10, Set your maximum per-click rate at $0.01 (this is for testing purposes, use the minimum and we’ll work up from there, later)
6. Now all you need to do is give Google your credit card info and your ads are off and running.
Alright, what is the purpose of setting the keywords at one penny? Well Google will run those ads in their system for a very short while, but it’s enough time to gather data on how many Impressions each keyword get’s before the ad is shut off. Why is it shut off? Well because DESPITE Google saying the minimum bid is one penny, they lie. In fact you’ll be forced to bump your keyword costs up to a minimum after a few hours. Anyway, the Impressions are the numbers you’re interested in right now, not having your ad up and running. You’ll quickly see which keywords get more traffic, which you’ll keep for now and remove the keywords that don’t perform well.
Impressions are the number of people who typed in your keyword in a search engine. They viewed your ad, but didn’t necessarily click on it. If ‘super ball’ get’s 1000 Impressions but ‘uber ball’ only get’s 3, you want to keep ‘super ball’ in your list.
There are exceptions to this rule, such as when you’re dealing with a highly specialized product. Say the keyword phrase ‘waste oil collection’, you may only get 40 Impressions, but it’s exactly what your business does, so keep it on hand for when we get *serious with your $100.
*With any type of PPC campaign Clicks are your goal, getting people to your website. But we are assessing if you need this service, NOT how many clicks you can get for spending little or nothing. Don’t expect sales at this point, we’re doing a research project.
Raise your keyword per-click costs to their new minimums ($1, $5, whatever Google tells you it is, it’ll be highlighted for you). Make sure that you can pay for at least ten clicks with your daily budget, so you’ll have to readjust from $10 to whatever the cost ($5/click would be $50).
Let it run for 24 hours.
Come back and repeat the process of raising keyword minimums and daily limits. The goal here is not to gather a ton of clicks; in fact you’ll be lucky to get any but to access the amount of traffic out there for your product and services.
Keep doing this till A) you run out of money B) a month has passed
Now you’ve got good data on what keywords work and if the Pay-Per-Click campaign is viable for your business. If you’re getting Impressions by the thousand/per day, PPC is right for you. If you’re getting a dozen or less than a hundred on all your keywords or even 85% of your keywords/per day then PPC is not for you.
If you find PPC is right for you then it’s time to move to the next step. Creating a budget and keyword list for a real campaign. The less in your budget ($50), the less keywords you should try and compete for. So choose the best keyword that gets good Impressions and is most relevant to your business and put all your money behind it. The more money, the more keywords, but start low and slowly grow your list so that you can keep a handle on costs and good data on what works and what doesn’t.
posted by Seigfried Designs | 7:11 AM
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