AMA about PPC Advertising. Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, whatever...

[HsrJames]

Thanks for the reply. It is definately a weird situation. I did these affiliate marketing programs through clickbank and other independent sites about 7 years ago and advertised them through adwords, which was okay back them. I stopped advertising them probably 6 years ago when they weren't profitable. I created my own site in 2010, deleted all the previous campaigns, and start a campaign for my own site. I them paused that campaign and redid the site to better meet the needs of my customers, before I was completed I got the suspension email. I've been through customer service on the phone and the person said my site looked fine and they would review it. I didn't hear back, so I email them and they sighted those past campaigns landing pages being against TOS and said not to open another account. It's messed up because my site is designed to create legit value. And eventually I would be spending a ton of money on Adwords if things took off.

 

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[cants]

In my continued effort to contribute value to this forum, I thought one good way would be for me to take questions on PPC advertising and marketing online, since it has been my core strength in the past few years.

Some of you have probably advertised your businesses online for years already with SEO and/or paid traffic, but I’m sure there are a lot of others here who are just starting out – or are unsure of the best way to approach paying for traffic for just their website, product, or service.

My own qualifications and background:
I first got heavily involved with PPC advertising back in 2004, at first primarily with Google Adwords (both for search, and their Content Network, as it was called then). Since then, I have spent many a large budget on Adwords and various other platforms, including Yahoo Search, MSN Adcenter (which are now merged as Bing), 7Search, Pulse360 (self-serve media buy network), Facebook Ads, MySpace Ads, and a bunch of other PPC platforms. I have ran campaigns both for my own businesses, for affiliate campaigns, and as a consultant on behalf of clients.
I feel that I have gathered some solid experience on running both small and larger PPC campaigns (especially on Google and Facebook), and I’m happy to answer any questions you guys might have here.


So…bring it on!

Great thread! Big thanks!

Is it possible to set up an affiliate site without relying on SEO? Google doesn't approve sites affiliate sites that link to amazon, do they?

 

[Likwid24]

When you run a Facebook ad, and it gives you the suggested bid per click, is it necessary to stay in that range?

 

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[Wuping]

Eskil: Thanks a lot for your very detailed answer! Really answered my questions
Now I've got another question - hope you don't mind

The last couple of days I've run an Adwords campaign. I managed to get a 2% CTR, however the CPC where way too high.
It was around 1$. Now I've lowered it to 0,6$ and I'm almost not seeing any impressions

I thought starting out with a rather high CPC and gradually lowering was they way to go? Perhaps I just lowered it too much?

Once again I hope you will share your insight!
Thanks a lot

 

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[Deleted11391]

Thanks so much for your in depth reply Eskil!!!

Very much appreciate you taking time to respond.

All the best
Brian

 

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[JJ]

Thanks for this! I used some of your advice and my Facebook CTR has gone from less than .01% to .031% within a few minutes.

I know that's nothing to write home about but it's cool to see it improve.

 

[sammich]

thanks, must have just missed that!

 

[Deanna]

Are you still helping with AdWords? I need help. Im lost. Can email the ads and site info if you have time/inclination to look at. My other issue is my landing page stinks...but i dont know what to do about that either. Never done any of this til last week.
Thanks

 

[DeletedUser11]

I understand that you were involved in the supplement field ? Me being on the other side of the spectrum (I sell direct ads), how much do you think is fair to charge for ads on a health/fitness site, CPM wise ?

 

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[H. Palmer]

Hi Eskil

Very kind of you to share your knowledge!!!

I have a question for you...

In your opinion is PPC a viable option to promote a paperback book?

What im getting at here is that over the last few years ive dabbled with adwords but have found the CPC to be too high to make it a profitable venture.

Obviously due to the relatively low margins on a paperback book it is tricky to find PPC sources at a price which makes it worthwhile (in my opinion)

What would you recommend for this type of promotion?

Thanks in advance
Brian

Brian, I have also been trying out Adwords for promoting a book.
I found that the only profitable word combinations were almost word for word the title of the book.

Other keywords or combinations were difficult to make profitable because people don't expect a book in the first place. They expect a consultancy.

Another tip is to upsell your customers to buy other stuff as well. Like a PDF with some specialized information or a hardcopy workbook. That way your margin will go up and you have more room for experimenting with Adwords.

 

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[Talisman]

You mean the image ads showing up alongside the regular text ads? Those are Google PLA ads (Product Listing Ads). You can set that up through the Google Merchant Center, and link them to your Adwords account. In your Adwords campaigns, you can then target the product(s) in your various adgroups to trigger the images.

Not surprisingly, the CTR and conversion rate on those are often much higher than the text ads.

Sorry should have been clearer - yeah I got the images into my products, google merchants is great (shopping or whatever they're calling it now).

How did they get a little text box there, and a "subscribe" button, inside their ad?? Is that in shopping somewhere too??

 

[DeletedUser11]

CPM rates can vary greatly (from $0.25 to $25), but you can get some ideas here Buy Ads | BuySellAds. Since you are in the fitness/health niche and if your site has good volume, good content, and ad placements that are strategically located throughout - I don't see why should charge less than $5 CPM - and perhaps upwards to $10 or more. But these are just rough estimates, not knowing your site volume or having seen it.

Would CPM rate increase as volume increases or is it the other way around ?, I mean it would be tough to find companies willing to pay 150,000$ per month for 30 million impressions.

 

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[Chris_Willow]

Hey Eskil,
I seem to be having an issue with Adwords QS. When I set up a new ad group with a few targeted keywords, most of those are rated at 7 or 8 initially. Then it goes down to 4 for all keywords.

Now at this point I'm getting 2% CTR, but have to keep increasing the bid to keep them on the first page. CTR goes down as a result and QS is still stuck at 4.

Do you have any suggestions for increasing quality score and/or click through rate?

Thanks for sharing your knowledge :driving:

 

[Chris_Willow]

Thanks guys, solid advice.
My site is basically a one page sales letter. I've got links to legal pages and a blog with some content on there as well. Right now I'm linking to the homepage, so keyword relevancy might be one of the issues as you mentioned.

Will see if creating a targeted page for the main keyword makes any difference and go from there.

 

[Talisman]

Good advice about the QS - it's a strange one, which I hate having to mess with. Just because stupid Google doesn't think my page is optimised.. blah!

Speed+.

Edit: Was just reading that link you sent. Can't believe I didnt think to make a generic landing page with full product injection.

Take template > Inject data. Nice. Simple. Should be pretty easy with my asp.net sites (I dont use php).

Thanks again. I'd give you more speed, but you'd probably get booked.

 

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[Yussef]

Eskil,

Your always giving up the goods bro. I would like to know what you use to track your campaigns and what do you think about software like CPV Lab for tracking? I own it but have not yet used it for tracking my campaigns, but plan to in the future.

You have been doing this for a while and I would like to know what you use to test, track and rotate campaigns, and what you recommend based on your past experiences?

Thanks in advance.

 

[brycer9]

Hey Eskil! Many thanks for helping me start my business before

I have expanded my inventory since then and am ready to start advertising now. Which type of advertising would you recommend i invest in for a good ROI? This is for the cosplay ecommerce site

 

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[Rawr]

I apologize if there is a better thread,


Is there a way to get some free facebook marketing dollars, like a voucher deal, etc? I know they used to give away $50-100 worth before.

 

[Hong King Kong]

Hey Eskil, Thanks for the thread.

I was wondering how much data do we need in order to know if the campaign is successful or not?

I'm currently running my first campaign which are product listing ads for google shopping, I've had about 350 impressions and 11 clicks in 10 days... no sales...

Should I wait longer for more data? Or are those numbers already a sign of a bad campaign?

 

[puckman]

The PLAs are still relatively new (Google shifted from the old free product ad system to PLAs last summer), so not everything about their ranking algorithm is yet fully understood. However - it is known that both CPC and product feed relevancy are definitely contributing factors.

There are only 6 ad spots for Product Listing Ads. The good news is that if Google thinks you have more than one product that should show up in PLA for a search - they will sometimes put your ads in more than one spot along with competitors. This is something you don't see with text ads, where only one advertiser can show up on a page at any time.

That being said - the best way to try to 'rank' your PLA ads better is to optimize your merchant center data feed. Give Google as much detail as possible in your feed. Be as descriptive as possible with titles, product descriptions, and also be sure to set the most appropriate category or 'product type' as they call it.

Google gives you 70 characters for the title. Use them well, with the best keywords suitable for that product (without looking spammy). Descriptive, relevant, and to the point.

Make sure descriptions are clean and free of odd characters and unnecessary numbering, part numbers, things like "call us to ask about our specials" etc. Basically anything that you as a customer wouldn't care to see in an ad. Think of descriptions and titles as a way for you to personally tell someone at Google what that particular product is and what it is for.

If you have a large datafeed, this can be done with a script or Excel macros. Otherwise, a VA or someone can go through it and clean them for you. Again, include keywords you want in there that would match with what you are trying to get your Adwords campaign to achieve.

Also, make sure your uploaded feed contains no warnings or errors after submitting. You can check this by going to the 'Data Quality' screen in Merchant Center.
You don't want to be seeing things like this:

Note that some recommendations are not errors. That means that they will accept those submissions - but those problems can hurt your ranking.

Set up scheduled feed updates and make occasional tweaks and changes to your titles, descriptions, or images to keep things fresh. Although there is no proof to support this - it is likely that Google will favor (rank) merchants more who are keeping things up to date vs. stagnant ads that remain unchanged for months. (It's known that Google prefers frequently updated sites over stagnant ones when they rank websites, so there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do the same with product listings).

When setting up your product targeting in Adwords - do NOT attempt to target 'All products' in more than one campaign. This will actually result in conflicting targeting, and according to Google - may result in none of your PLAs showing up at all, or not very often. Instead, target only those product id's that are relevant to that campaign or adgroup and keep them out of others.


I'm not sure what you mean here exactly. Care to share a screenshot?

it looks like Google is tweaking the program to be more like a display campaign, rather than just traditional search and product feeds. Essentially, Google.com has gotten display ads. It would be nice at the campaign level to just create ad groups with creative rather then deal with the constant feed mess.

 

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[5holiday]

Howdy Eskil,

Thanks for sharing your experience with us!

My question is, in your experience, how much have your best skills made up for your worst skills, in relation to starting and running successful businesses?

I ask this because I've always assumed that people with great marketing, advertising and selling skills could in some instances pick products and make them into successful businesses with relative ease when compared to people of other skill sets, such as legal.

Thanks!

 

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[Tourist]

Madly taking notes, scratching head, taking notes. About to start a ppc campaign and feeling so green I don't even know what questions I don't know to ask! So thanks to Eskil and everyone who's contributed to this thread!

Got any extra advice on landing pages for physical products? Is it necessary to create multiple urls with keywords? Is it ok to send people to a 'shop' page? I sell raincoats so think a copy laden 'sales' page would be odd at the same time I only have six styles so worry it could be a bit empty.

In the meantime, I'm off to read more about which keywords to go with, got a list as long as your arm just now :sigh:

 

[LightHouse]

To add to Eskils comprehensive answer, the question of multiple LP's depends on how much you want to blow for clicks. Relevancy and CTR boil down to your quality score. The closer you tie your KW groups together with a LP, will not only get you a better QS and a lower CPC in return, you will also see a higher conversion rate as well.

Also, set up conversion tracking, even if it is a simple snippet on the sucess page. You will want that data later to see what KWs actually got you sales. Working off of only clicks and raw traffic is a huge mistake and waste of time, unless you have nothing to sell or acquire

 

[Gsuz]

Hi Eskil! I started FB Ads today. I read one of your posts recommending to start lower than the bid range FB recommends. Is this still valid? I'm bidding fairly high within the range, but do not get any impressions. However, the campaign was just approved 2 hours ago. Potential reach is 250k. Do I simply have to wait longer? Any suggestions what to do in order to get impressions?

Speed in advance

 

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[1PercentStreet]

Hey Eskil,
Any advice about getting a new FB account up and running if for some reason you got banned?

 

[Vance]

Eskil,

Just came across this thread, thanks for the great advice! I haven't gotten a chance to read it all yet but I will, however I was wondering if you had any recommendations for someone looking to generate quality insurance leads (niche market, but still competitive) via PPC, perhaps on Bing/Yahoo?

I've run very large campaigns on Google in the past however the big dawgs with big wallets have come out of the woodwork so I thought about the Bing market which I've never tried. Not just looking to save money but for quality as well, so I was just going to focus on buyer long-tail keywords.

Thanks!

 

[royalasg]

What strategy we should follow to roll ad on facebook?

 

[perdanny]

Thank you very much Eskil for this amazing thread (among others), in order to validate the demand for a product im looking into - Baby Monitors, i uploaded my landing page: LullabEye, i'm not quite sure this product is ideal for dropshipping (margins, being electrical) but i picked it up as a case study.
Reading your your thread i came to realised Google is not going to favour my lean landing page that much ,and the copy is not going to convert well because im a newbie (i'm reading CA$HVERTISING as you suggested in your INSIDERS call's thread - i'm going to listen to your INSIDERS call tommorow aswell while jogging).

I would like to share with you my adwords copy:

I got one campign running for less then 24 hours, i got 2 variants for the ad-text rotating equally as follow:

Baby Monitors
Affordable, Easy To Use Baby
Monitors, Money Back Guarantee
promosepian.com/baby-monitors

Baby Monitors
Look For Top Quality Yet Affordable
Baby Monitor? Check Our Deals!
promosepian.com/baby-monitors

Im redirecting my potential customers to an "out of stock" page, after collecting email addresses.

my ads appeared 43 times with one click (the first ad), by reading your suggetions i might used keywords not targeteted for those in the "buying mode" group, im going to change it.

Prior to running my campaign i watched a video on youtube reccomanding setting the Max. CPC to 0.9$ and Default bid $0.01 so i did that, and i get "Below first page bid" for some of my keywords.

Thanks for this thread, the INSIDERS call and the supplement thread i'v read atleast twice, speed++

if you or anyone else got any constructive critique regarding anything i posted go ahead and educate me.

 

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