The Soccer Touch

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The last time we talked about Pay-Per-Click advertising, I told you about the massive advantage paid advertising has over traditional search engine marketing. It can all be summed up into two points:
* PPC advertising allows you to bring traffic to your website in just minutes .
* PPC pays for itself AND your other SEM expenses (like link-building) while leaving you a decent profit margin .
Yes, PPC advertising can really take your ads live, and bring your website traffic, in just a few minutes. In fact, once you have set up your advertising campaign (we’ll talk about this a little later) and gone “live”, it takes less than a minute for the first visitor to show up at your website.

Instant Traffic
And this is not random traffic. We are talking about laser-targeted visitors who are actively looking for the services that YOU provide. To take a real world example – instead of promoting your newly-opened restaurant, if you had the option to implement a marketing strategy that would bring you hungry customers to your doorstep, wouldn’t you take it up? Of course you would! PPC advertising is the Internet version of this scenario. It will bring you “hungry” searchers – people who have a “need” for the information and / or solutions that your business provides.In the rest of this article, I’ll spend some time telling you a bit more about Google AdWords, and then cover some basic strategies that will help you succeed at Google AdWords in particular. If you aren’t using AdWords as yet, I would strongly recommend that you switch over (I’ll tell you why in a minute). If you are already using AdWords, or are contemplating starting your PPC campaign, then read this article very carefully – it includes techniques that form the foundations of a successful PPC campaign. In other words, to benefit from the methods below, it doesn’t matter what PPC engine you use – the basics remain the same.

Why Google Adwords?
Many people have asked me why I support AdWords when there are much cheaper alternatives, and also why I choose AdWords over Overture (now known as Yahoo Search Marketing). I’ve addressed the first question in part 1 of this two-part series on PPC – while AdWords and Overture may be more “expensive” in terms of cost per click, they are far more effective than other PPC engines when it comes to the following:
* Market Reach – combined, Overture and Google AdWords cover over 80% of the search engine market.
* Quality of Service – AdWords is far easier to use and set up compared to any of its competition, even when compared to Overture (which requires a manual review of your keywords and ads, leading to a 3-5 day delay before your campaign can actually go live).
* Quality of Traffic – The top 2 PPC engines bring in significantly better quality traffic – especially when you measure traffic in terms of conversions. Add to that the fact that these two are less afflicted with click fraud than the rest of the industry and you have your case made.

Between AdWords and Overture, there is little to choose except for the emphasis on user-friendliness that Google maintains. Not only do you get instant traffic, it is ridiculously easy to make campaign-wide changes to your ads, and this is a big concern when you are managing several ad campaigns or have a large list of keywords. Now, let’s look at how to guarantee that your “instant traffic” translates into “ instant sales ”.

PPC Basics
Quite like search engine optimization, PPC advertising is a lot about getting the basics right. If you have solid foundations, your campaigns will invariably be a success. Let’s go through the core elements of any PPC campaign.

Keyword Research
When compiling your keyword list, consider using a professional tool such as WordTracker or NicheBot instead of coming up with all the keywords yourself. Why? Because quite frankly, no one has the time to manually compile a list of several hundred keywords. Also, these tools will tell you exactly what people are searching for AND give you a lot more options that you may never have even thought of. Using either WordTracker or NicheBot, you can easily compile a keyword list of even a thousand keywords in under an hour.

Once you have your keyword list ready, break it down into sub-lists . Essentially, instead of lumping together all the keywords, you can use the main keywords as “headers” build your list around them. These headers will be the keywords receiving the most traffic. To give you an example, take an online soccer store. Possible headers would include “soccer store”, “soccer equipment”, “soccer goals”, “soccer accessories”, “soccer merchandise”, “soccer nets” and even “soccer supply”. All these terms have hundreds of related keywords. What’s the advantage of creating sub-lists? For one, it helps you focus your campaign even further – you can send visitors clicking on your “soccer goals” ads to an internal page on your store that is dedicated to soccer goals, and so on. Second, your campaign becomes more manageable – if one theme of keywords is not working well, you can improve it without affecting the rest of the lists. However, the most important reason to using sub-lists is that you can create ads that are customized towards your header keywords. An ad for “soccer equipment” will not be as effective as an ad for “soccer nets” if they both appeared next to search results for the term “cheap soccer nets”. Customized ads will give you higher click-through rates , and a high ad CTR can help lower overall costs .

Ad Copy
Your ad copy will make or break your PPC campaign, so it is important to get it just right. There are two sections of your ad, the title (or the heading), and the ad description . Apart from adhering to the basics (place your sub-list “header” once in the title, and once in the description), there is a lot to learn about writing winning ad copy. Think of PPC ads as intensely summarized version of a regular sales letter – approach ad copy with that view will help you write better. The ad copy has two key components – a riveting title/header, and a compelling description. Taking Google’s example, you have space to write 25 characters in the title, and two lines of 35 characters each in the description. Eventually, writing winning ad copy boils down to convincing the skeptical searcher into clicking on your ad (amongst several others) in a maximum of 95 characters. Put each ad that you write through a stricter test than you would put your sales letter. The title is the key to attracting the searcher’s attention – if it contains the keywords that are being searched for, the keywords will show up in bold and help make the ad more visible. The description, on the other hand, has just two short lines to convince the searcher to click on the ad. Focus on the user and the benefits your website / product will provide. If it helps, you can make a bulleted list of key terms that highlight your business and spread them throughout your ads. Use the title to grab the searcher’s attention , and then reel them in with your ad description. If you follow the principles you have used to write your sales letter, you’d be at an advantage compared to most of your competition.

Ad Optimization
Setting up the ad campaign is, believe it or not, the easy part. Managing it is tricky (though your work is reduced if you get the basics right). There are two main challenges facing a PPC campaign:
* You don’t know how well your ads will work
* You don’t know which keywords will convert into sales
The result is that managing a PPC campaign is a continuing process of tweaking your ads based on results – it ultimately involves regular improvements in your ad copy, to keyword lists and maybe even in your website.

The main aim of managing a PPC campaign is to constantly try to increase your CTR . While the quick and dirty way to do this is to pay high enough to rank on the top of the ads list, this can easily break your budget. A better option is to regularly review your ads, weed out the ones that don’t work and improve on the ones that do work. Like sales letters, this involves reusing the working elements (titles and descriptions) and modifying them slightly to test if the CTR improves.

Mike Benner