How to run an online PPC Ad campaign (Part 1)
Well, PPC has been alive and well for a while now and Google has the millions in ad revenue to prove it. But, what exactly is PPC advertising ? PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising is using the online ad tools that the various players (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask etc. ) provide to place ads alongside their search results in order to drive traffic to your website. Since Google is the dominant search engine, we’ll reference them in the rest of this article.
Since you’re working with the search engines on this, you have to understand which search queries or keywords related to your business bring visitors to your site. Once those keywords are determined, then y
ou have to bid on them to get a position with that search engine results. When someone searching on the Internet enters one of your keywords, your PPC ads appear alongside the ‘natural’ search results (usually the highlighted ads on the top of the results or on the right. If the searcher is intrigued by your ad and clicks on it, you are charged for that click. Of course, what you’re charged is based on a couple of factors that Google uses to calculate your cost-per-click (CPC).
Where do you start?
SEO’s younger brother : Beginning PPC is pretty much like SEO where one of the first steps involve analyzing the relevant keywords for your website. Use tools like Google keyword tool or Wordtracker to get a sense of how many keywords are in play in the big bad search results game out there. Start with 5 keywords which are most representative of your business – move on to variations and long-tail keywords. For e.g. if you’re selling teas. Naturally, tea is a hot keyword for you – variations would be black tea, green tea etc. Long tail keywords would be black tea with orange rinds or white green tea lemon.
Keyword tests : Once you have your keyword list and have them sorted in terms of relevance and traffic – relevance meaning how closely related they are to your business and traffic meaning how many people are searching those terms on the internet- start testing them yourself. Type in those keywords and see what comes up. You’ll see ads that are competing with each other on that keyword displayed. Note the ‘relevance’ part again as you’ll view these results and accordingly decide if they work for you. You don’t have to do this for all your keywords just the highest trafficked ones.
Be as negative as possible : With keywords, that is! You’ll find that there are typically broad terms, phrase terms and exact terms that are used in PPC campaigns. Broad terms get you the most traffic and exact terms get you limited traffic since the search results will only correspond to the ‘exact’ search query typed in as opposed to broad terms which show up if they’re a part of a search query. For e.g. if you have the broad keyword ‘tea’ in your list and someone is looking for Tea Leoni and your ad is displayed, they might click on your ad and though they might leave right away, you’re still paying for that click. In such cases, just take the words that are not essential to your business and add them to a negative keyword list. This will let search engines filter out your results and only show your ad when it matters.
Set a daily budget : How much are you willing to spend to get visitors to your site? If this is your first foray into PPC, set a low daily budget until you learn the ins and outs of how this works. I always start with $50 per day. I know, it’s small potatoes but I’d rather experiment with a small budget than a large one, and only when I’ll convinced will I open up the floodgates.
Bidding on keywords : Google has a great traffic estimator tool that helps you determine how much potential traffic a keyword receives and how much that keywords typically costs on average. I usually begin my PPC bidding at the low-end and let the ads run for a day or two on a limited budget. Then, based on the search results, I modify the bids and increase them accordingly so as to get the optimum traffic. Note, this exercise is to manage my CPC and my CTR (click through rate) to improve my ad ranking. (there are other things that I’ll do to help improve the rank – see part 2 of this article for details)
Displaying your ad : Where do you want your Ad to run? With geo-targeting, most PPC ads can be shown all over the world or just in the city of St. Louis, Missouri or around a 30 mile radius around the university of Michigan. Select your appropriate location.
Finally, hit the ‘start’ button and let your campaign begin. Results do not occur overnight. CTR’s are abysmal to begin with – folks don’t trust those sponsored link things. I’ll have more on this on part 2 of this article. Till then, adios!
- Lowell D’Souza
Tips on how to promote a Facebook Application
Someone on Linkedin asked a question on how to promote a Facebook application that he had created. My answer was simple and clear. The guy faced a challenge . 3 months after Facebook opened up their API about 4000 apps were released so he was competing with other players including players who are firmly entrenched like the Bumper Sticker guys or the Top Friends chaps.
That being said, there are a couple of ways to spread the word about a cool Facebook application :
1. Create Groups : Create a group highlighting the benefits of your app. Seed the group by inviting folks from your friends list. Try to begin a network effect by asking your friends to invite their pals in turn to join this group and install the app.
2. Identify similar groups : Find other groups whose members have strong commonalties with your target demographic. Join those groups and post messages on their walls describing your app and link back to your app description page.
3. Use Events : Have a virtual web event launching the app on FB. Like the groups seed the same using your friends and ask them to invite their friends in turn.
4.Identify Livewire members : If you know someone who has more than 1000 friends, send them a message asking them to plug your app for you to their network. Negotiate a fee depending on how many times you want ‘em to message their friends. Again, this is dependent on which demographic you’re going after to install this app (I checked out the app briefly and saw that it’ s a utility to help kids/parents/teachers manage their school activities, right?)
5. Email blast : If you have a permission-based list, send out a cool email blast highlighting the benefits of your app. Use a tool like Constant Contact or Exact Target – it’ll help you see stats of who’s viewed your app. Have a call-to-action button somewhere on the email – something like : ‘Install now’. Don’t forget the color scheme of the promo, have it match the colors of Facebook and your app.
6. Simply ask : Ask your close friends to install it and ask them to forward the app to other folks in their friends list.
7. Other avenues : Use other platforms to advertise your application – I’d do Stumble upon, Furl, Digg maybe. Do more however. Go onto Squidoo and create a page for your app. Do the same on Mahalo. And do more on other platforms.
Start with the above…hopefully, the application will gain traction and you’ll have signups. A caveat however, till date, only 45 apps have more than 1 mil installs and close to 100 have more than 100K installs. It’s a challenging game. But, kudos to the guy for taking the leap and all the best to him for his efforts.
Click Sensei - The Beginning…
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tzu
The above sentence is inspiring. When Jeremy and I pondered about setting up a platform like this to disseminate our knowledge on all things ‘web’, the big question we asked ourselves was what would we provide to all of you. True, we had sufficient experience in the web marketing arena where we had worked on various projects with different exciting companies to market their products online in the B2B and B2C spaces, apply metrics to those efforts to ensure that ROI objectives were being met, explore new incarnations of marketing to web communities (social networks facebook, bebo etc etc) and advertise someone’s products on the web. but, what would we offer you?
Well, here’s the deal : We will provide you with information, opinions and thoughts on current trends, best practices, research and categorize them as follows :
1. Website trends
2. Web 2.0
3. SEO/SEM
4. Web Analytics
5. Social Network marketing
6. Online advertising
7. SMO
8. Email Marketing
We shall not be :
1. Boring or Dull
2. Over analytic or overOpinionated (Is that even a word?)
3. Disrespectful
4. Repetitive (Except for some common sense suggestions because as we all know people always listen to common sense)
5. Biased
Be on the lookout for some awesome stuff. We’ll have statistics and resultant analyzes on what works best for marketing yourself or your products online. We’ll discuss the various tools available online that you could use to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. We’ll talk about social trends on the web and how you could use the same to promote your products. We’ll talk about how to structure your email marketing effectively so that you can get the most benefit. We’ll get guest writers on her to write about what they perceive are relevant trends but most importantly, we’ll have tons of fun doing so.
So, sit back, relax and let this journey begin…
- Lowell & Jeremy