[Show Transcript]
I’m Randy Charach from RandyReport.com and THIS is the show that takes you from internet zero to business hero!
In this week’s report you’ll discover how to quickly and effectively drive targeted traffic to your website using pay-per-click advertising, or P.P.C. for short. The beauty of PPC is, as the name implies, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad!
If you think of the search engines like you think of the Yellow pages, you might see a few similarities. For example…instead of a heading, like “plumbers” or “dentists”, you have keyword phrases you type into Google, like “Milwaukee Plumbers” or “New York Dentists”. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages to find what you want; search engines sift through billions of web pages to help you find what you’re looking for.
Here’s where things get different. With the Yellow Pages, you basically pay them a lot of money to get full page or half page ads to grab attention. With the Search Engines, ranking on the first page is how you get attention. It’s important to show up on the first page of Google because studies show almost 50% of searchers never go beyond the first page. One way to get on that first page is with Pay-Per-Click advertising.
What’s so great about PPC ads? Simply put, there’s no other advertising channel on earth that lets you only pay when someone takes action on your ad! It’s ad tracking at its best! If you buy an ad in a newspaper, magazine or billboard, you hope people will look at it and visit your store. With Yellow Pages, you pay for a full year in advance and hope people find your ad amongst hundreds of competitors. Pay-Per-Click, on the other hand, only charges you when someone clicks on your ad!
Let’s talk about how to create a PPC ad.
Like the Yellow Pages, you decide on what “heading” or in this case, “keyword phrase”, you want your ad to show up under.
What is a keyword phrase? A “keyword phrase” is the word or words someone types into a search engine like Google, Bing, MSN, or Yahoo. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you wanted to find out how to build an igloo. You would type “igloo” or “igloo building” or “how to build an igloo” into the search. This is where it can get tricky. As you can see, there’s lots of possible keyword phrases. To use PPC effectively, you’ll have to do some ‘keyword research”…and you can do that using the free keyword tool that you’ll find when you log into your account with Google. If you haven’t already set up an account with Google, go ahead at google.com, it’s fast, easy and free.
Ok, let’s say you sell pet supplies. Don’t bid on the word “dog”! The keyword “dog” is highly competitive, not targeted — and will cost you too much money every time someone clicks on your PPC ad. You want to drill down. You could bid on “dog supplies”. You could be even more specific, like “dog treats” or “dog food”. You could bid with geography in mind, like “Rhode Island dog supplies”. You could be type-specific and bid on “German shepherd training collars” or “border collie puppy toys”.
Here’s a tip. When you drill down like that, you want to make sure the webpage you send visitors to match your keyword and your ad. Pay-per-click systems want to make their searchers happy. They make them happy by dishing up relevant content.
If someone searches for “Purple Puppy Chow”, and your ad says “Purple Puppy Chow” and it leads to a webpage all about “Purple Puppy Chow”, the searcher, the search engine, and you, the advertiser, all get what you want. If on the other hand, they search for something and get led somewhere else… they’ll get annoyed, the search engine will penalize you, and you’ll have wasted your time and money.
Once you have your keyword phrases chosen, and webpage set up, you’re ready to get visitors to your website and customers through your door!
So, how much does it cost to place these ads? Let’s talk about that…
Most pay-per-click systems use a “bid system” which allows you to dictate how much you’re willing to pay for each click. Your bid partially determines what position you’ll end up in the search engines.
There are several factors beyond your bid that level the playing the field and determine ad placement.
All else being equal, the higher you bid, the higher you rank. But all things aren’t usually equal – are they, so let’s see how you can raise the bar in your ppc efforts and pay less money to get higher rankings than your competitors.
In Google’s pay-per-click program called Adwords, they give each ad a “Quality Score” to determine where your ad will rank. I suggest you get more familiar with this at Adwords.Google.Com as the rules are always changing, but there are a couple key factors that will likely remain in place that determine where your ad will appear in their search engine.
Number one is click thru rate which simply relates to how many people click on your ad. If more people click on your ad than your competitor’s ads, Google assumes your ad is more relevant and appealing to their audience so they’ll serve it up more and give it more prominence.
Number two is keyword match If you bid on the keyword phrase, “My DVD Bible” to click through to MyDVDBible.com, then make sure you use the words “My DVD Bible” in the title of your ad – it’s a match made in heaven! And one of my domains by the way ☺
Next, on to number three, is the web page, or landing page you send visitors to. Google wants your landing page to be relevant too. So make sure you talk about what you promised you would in the ad.
So once again, three important factors to consider when building your Adwords campaign are: click-thru rate, keyword match, and landing page.
One last juicy tidbit before we wrap-up. Now that you know you can get results quickly from pay-per-click advertising… one thing you’ll want to do — before you do something like send out thousands of postcards in offline marketing – is test your sales copy on Pay-Per-Click! If you get a low click-thru-rate, that may be an indication that you won’t do well in the more expensive offline world either! It’s fast and cheap to test online before rolling out a more expensive offline advertising campaign.
Well, we’ve only skimmed the surface of how to set up a pay-per-click ad campaign in this report and I hope you’ll walk away with a better understanding of this powerful advertising medium. I’ll share more on this topic as we get to know each other better through this show and at RandyReport.com.
Our question this week comes from Colin C. from San Diego, CA who wrote:
Colin writes, Hey Randy, I got a bit of a problem here. I’ve started an Adwords campaign, but I’m not getting any clicks. In fact, I’m not sure Google is showing my ad all that much.
Great question, Colin. A major success factor to PPC advertising is keyword selection. That is, what keyword phrases you decide to bid on. Now, when choosing your keywords, this may sound strange – but you WANT there to be competition.
Look, pay-per-click advertising has been around for almost ten years now, and more than likely, if a keyword is profitable, somebody found it already.
When you do a Google search for your keyword phrase, if you see few or zero PPC ads on the search page, it likely mean there isn’t a buyers market there.
Also look at the volume of traffic for your keyword phrase. You may be bidding on words that simply don’t get many searches. You can quickly find out how many searches there are for keyword phrases using Google’s free keyword tool.
Finally, your bids may be too low. Google will tell you if your bid is “below first page bid”. Remember, it’s crucial that you appear on the first page of search in order to get clicks.
Well, that wraps up this episode of Randy Report. Since company’s websites, prices and quality of service on the Internet change rapidly, for my up-to-date recommendations on resources and for free tools and training, visit me today at RandyReport.com.
Today you learned:
How you can get your ad in front of potential customers who are searching specifically for keywords related to your business. You also now know that the company with the deepest pockets doesn’t necessary dominate the first page of search rankings. There are three major factors that level the playing field: click-thru-rate, keyword match and landing pages – your website.
Take extra time in selecting your keyword phrases – it’ll pay off for you in the long run!
Thanks so much for watching. Remember, if you’d like more free reports, resources and training then visit RandyReport.com and join me again next week where you’ll discover
how you can create your own online radio or webtv show and build your own loyal audience of raving fans as you deliver tons of value to your customers. We’ll be talking about podcasting; I hope to see you then.
I’m Randy Charach, and this is the show that takes you from internet zero to business hero!
[End of Show Transcript]
