I had an email the other day from a friend who has a new website that is only few months old. He is selling a good set of products that are priced well and on a well designed website, which still needs SEO. Not to mention that there is a hell of a lot of room in the market for his products, as I found out after a little investigation.
However because he was entering the Xmas period and any organic SEO would be too slow, he decided to go the way on PPC. I said good idea just make sure you target your keywords properly. Big mistake on my part as I should have asked him what his understanding of PPC's and targeting the right keywords and keyword phrases, so your ROI remains high.
He had also decided to use a combination of Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (Formally Overture) and Miva (Formally Findwhat). Anyway I hadn't heard from him for sometime, until 6 weeks before Xmas. He had spent quite a few thousand dollars on PPC's and had only made about 8 sales, losing a large amount of money. So needless to say he was very disappointed and was asking for help.
Certain pieces
Now discounting Click Fraud, I asked to have a look at the list of keywords he was using across all the services. I also had a look at keywords and keywords phrases that I thought were relevant to the products that he was selling. I checked also across all the 3 PPC services. After about 2 hours work I had nailed it.
His business was "New Zealand Maori Arts, Paintings and Carvings", not his real business, but I am using this so not to expose his mistake to everyone reading this. Also the example is still the same! "Maori Art, Paintings and Carvings" is actually a great love of mine.
Here is a small list of his chosen Keywords and Keyword phrases:
Number of reports:
Art, Carvings, Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, Paintings, Tribal Art etc....
When I asked why he said because they all had good search counts on them, was his answer! This was mistake number 1! Mistake number 2 was a lot of these keywords phrases had very large click amounts on them around the $5-$9 per click mark! Mistake number 3 was he was choosing too generalized keywords and keywords phrases.
So it was time to make a change. Here are the basics:
Set a Gross limit on each PPC service for example say $100. You can then work out your ROI from here. If it doesn't work out then, either change the PPC service or your Keywords
Set a daily limit on each PPC service for example say $20 a day. ROI, plus you can monitor which keyword phrase, is making you the most money.
Choose your Keywords and Keyword Phrases effectively. Art, Carvings, Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, Paintings, Tribal Art were too generalized. Art for example could mean any type of art from Van Gogh to Kids Art, so you are going to get a lot of wasted clicks which cost money. He should have looked at more specifics such as, New Zealand Maori Art, Maori Art, New Zealand Carving, New Zealand Indigenous Art, and Maori Carvings. All are highly specific to what he is selling. There maybe less clicks, but more sales or inquires.
Check the bid values, you may find that one phrase may have $2 a click at one PPC service and only 10 cents at another.
Track you conversions from all chosen keywords and keywords phrases from all services. You can either do this yourself, by setting up separate urls for keywords or using tracking software or scripts, to monitor which keyword or keyword phrase is pulling in the most sales.
The most important and the biggest mistake is how you choose your keywords. People are still falling into the trap that relevant keywords to their products or services that have high searches are going to bring heaps of buyers. In most cases the answer is no, as they are looking at a generalized.
Another good example of this was a "Shoe Salesman in Toronto, who only wanted to sell his designer shoes in Toronto, so he bid on the keyword Shoes, the bids were about $8 a click. The keyword Shoes had hundreds of thousands of searches a month, but they were US wide, wonder how much that cost him, before he worked it out".
The end result was that he spent less than $780 on his PPC campaign up to Xmas and made 7 times as much sales and a lot of inquires. His average sale was around $143, making $8000 in sales. A big improvement, just from making a few basic changes!
There are a few exceptions to the rules, but that another topic that I will write about.
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