Andrew Jones’ Blog

Note that it is possible to set up an internet marketing business without using Pay Per Click or other paid methods of advertising.

E.g. you can submit reviews, articles etc. to blogs free, with a link to your page (or the sales page you are affiliated to), but this can take a long time to build up. A paid advertising campaign, properly set up, can produce quicker and bigger response. This is because your ad will be displayed to a percentage of the (possibly) thousands of people who key in a related search each day. Whereas only a few people may read your blog article each day (or ever)

(The ads circled in red above are paid links)

With respect to an advertising campaign, specifically Pay Per Click based, e.g. on Google:

You also need to understand some terms, in fact you need to understand how they work and what’s likely to be best for your chosen strategy:

1. Keyword Phrase – e.g. above it’s “organic health food” – Google will match a search on any specific keyword phrase to people or companies who have paid for an advertising campaign (PPC Campaign) based on that phrase or a list of phrases including that one. The ads circled in red above are paid links. The ones down the right being AdSense Ads. The other search results are ordered by the Search Engine Optimisation strategy specific to whatever search engine is used, in this case Google – if anyone has paid to be shown for that keyword phrase, they will be ranked higher according to how much they have paid… though other factors concerned with page ranking affect the position too.

2. SERP position and Page Ranking etc. Google and other search engines decide the position of a result listing based on various information including:

• perceived relevance of the page (which takes into account the number of related keywords, but may penalise repetitive use etc.)
• weighting of the site overall
• number of links from other sites and pages to that page
• weighting of those other pages, other factors – including what host the site is on (e.g. if it’s a host known to have hosted spammers etc.)

This is just a quick idea of how the search page position is worked out – it’s more complicated than that, a big subject in itself – Search Engine Optimization (or optimisation: UK spelling)

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) – this is the name for the online advertising method where a business pays whenever someone clicks on an ad. Typically this is a small paid ad on a SERP, but could also be on your own webpage (e.g. by using Google AdSense). The user is then to the advertiser’s website.

4.. Cost Per Thousand (CPM) – instead of paying per click you pay per impression, i.e. so many dollars for a thousand impressions (impression = each time your ad shows on a page).

5.. Cost Per Click (CPC) – the other side of PPC

6. Click Through Rate (CTR) – clicks per impressions, i.e. the ratio of how many times your add is clicked on versus how many times it gets shows – basically how effective is your ad – usually shown as a percentage.

7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – what it costs to get a paying customer, i.e. the average cost of your advertising, on average per customer.

8. Conversion Rate – ratio of how many people click on your ad versus how many actually take the desired final action, usually meaning they buy the product. Obviously if your CR is 1% and it costs you more to get 100 people to your sales page than the profit of a single sale, then you are loosing money!

That’s a very basic guide, research it in detail, until you are happy that you know what it all means, and what you need before starting a PPC (or other) campaign! You should be able to find out most of it for free, e.g. starting with a Google search. You might also want to buy and read a book on the subject.

Before starting a PPC campaign, make sure you know your aim and your budget, and stick to the budget, unless you make a considered reassessment to increase it based on results. E.g.

• You need to get people to your sales page, you’ve got ads ready, you’ve signed up to Google AdWords, AdSense, etc.
• You have set up a budget of, say $50, spread over a month – about $2 per day…
• Say you get reasonable results, making a small profit ($100) and the statistics show that 2 of your 5 ads are twice as successful in converting as the others, with one ad not even getting clicked on.
• So based on these results you drop the 3 poor performing ads, and increase your budget to $5 per day for the remaining 2 ads
• Expected result would be roughly twice the traffic (because you increased the daily budget) and twice the overall conversion rate, therefore 4 times the profit - $400 over the same period.

These figures are just an illustration, but the important points are that:

• You need to have the campaign set up so as you can track the different routes taken (i.e. which ads perform well)
• You need to set your budget – low daily limits* to start with
• You need to keep on top of these statistics
• You need to tune the campaign based on the results
• Drop poor performers, else you can loose money
• Concentrate on good performers, and ramp up once proven – but always check regularly, things can change quickly

*Google lets you set your budget by daily limits, geographical and other targeting – and will spread it over the day for you… so e.g. your ad might only appear every 1,000^th time a particular string of keywords is searched for.

 for more information on AdWords see: http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/