Part I: Launch

This is part II of a three part series on Pay Per Click (PPC). You can read part I here.

PPC marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to generate traffic and sales to your website. However, done incorrectly it can be ineffective and drain your marketing budget.

The method I am describing below is my own personal method. I have had a lot of success with it in the past, so I am sharing it here with you. Before you begin your first campaign you must have realistic expectations. Don’t expect to make a profit right away. In fact you are going to lose money. You have to be willing to find out which keywords convert best and in order to do this you have to test them out and see what works and what doesn’t. I would budget $1,500 for your Adwords testing. Now this is not just throw away money because you will get some sales. However, go in with the mindset that you are using this money to test keywords; not to make a profit. That part will come later.

Note: For this tutorial I am assuming you are using Google Adwords.

So now you have you long list of keywords from part I. It would not make any sense just to upload our entire list and let it go. It is way too broad. In order to make our list more targeted, we need to break it down into groups. Group all like terms together. You can create a many groups as you need, as long as all the keywords in each group are closely related. Continuing with our cell phone accessories example put all the keywords related to the “Samsung V400” together in one group. This way you can create targeted ads to correspond to those keywords.

Create a new campaign in Adwords, and set up as many groups as you need. Now depending on how many keywords you have this step is going to take awhile. Group all like keywords and also write at least 3 different ads for each group. Keep all the ads very specific and targeted towards your keyword group. Use the keywords in the ads to help increase click-through rates. You can also research your competitor’s ads to get some ideas of what they are doing. Another important thing to do is don’t just send everyone to your home page. Make the landing page as targeted as possible. If the ad group is for “Cell Phone Headsets” then set the ad to go to your cell phone headsets category. This is really important and will greatly your conversion rates.

So let’s recap a little. You have you list of keywords which you broke down into specific keyword groups in Adwords, and you have written at least 3 targeted ads for each group. Now we are getting somewhere. Next we need to set a budget and our ad prices.

We are going to break down out testing into three different sections. So if your Adwords budget is $1500, divide it by 3. We are going to spend $500 on our first round of testing. Because we don’t know which keywords convert well yet we are probably going to get the least amount of sales out of our $500. However this is fine, because we are collecting data which will help us further optimize our campaign.  I would also say, spread your $500 out over a week period. This gives you a good sample of data to work with. So in this case you daily budget is 500 / 7 = $71 per day.

As for cost per click prices, don’t bid for the number 1 spot. It is going to be way too expensive and you have no idea how well it will convert.  Try to be conservative and bid for spots 3 through 6. This will cost you significantly less per click and it will spread your budget further. After all at this point all we are really after is data.

Another important thing to remember is to turn off “Content Targeting”  in your campaign settings. This usually converts very poorly and is a waste of money. Content targeting is where your ads show up on other people’s website who have similar content to your ads.

Conversion Tracking

One last thing before you launch your campaign is to turn on conversion tracking. This is a small JavaScript code which you put in the footer of your invoice screen. It allows Adwords to track which keywords were used to generate each sale. This is very important and will tell us which keywords are converting best.

Once you have your campaign set up, turn it on and start collecting data. Again don’t worry about how much money it makes you. All we really want is the data.

This leads into part III – Test, Track and Repeat

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.