Are You Ready for Google AdWords Traffic or Should You Stick With Free Traffic?
Every online marketer knows that in order to become successful, you’ll have to have a high amount of traffic driven to your website. Traffic volume means more income potential, but when you’re just starting out, adwords ad campaigns may not be a viable option for your marketing budget.
So when you are trying to drive more traffic to your site, you’re faced with whether to try to get free traffic or use paid traffic programs such as pay per click (PPC) marketing like Yahoo search marketing and Google AdWords. (Or you can go for both).
Free traffic routes deliver the best ROI (return on your investment) because there’s no out of pocket cost. But the traffic you bring in may not be as targeted as a PPC campaign and quite frankly, may take you longer to get started.
Some forms of free traffic-generating methods include articles marketing, social networking and forum marketing on niche-related message boards using a link-driven signature file. You can also toss in more creative ideas like eBay and Squidoo.
The problem with free traffic is that it’s a work-heavy advertising technique. In order to gain high amounts of traffic, a marketer needs to continually advertise their site to get their link exposed to prospective customers.
If time is in short supply, free marketing isn’t an option that will benefit you. So then what?
It’s time to turn to paid marketing.
Paid traffic avenues cost you money to gain traffic, but if executed properly, the ROI will be much higher and the maintenance much lower. If you’re using article directories, you may have to wait 10 days for approval, but an AdWords campaign can be live in minutes.
While costs are considerably higher, so is the potential for profits - higher the risk, higher the reward right?
If you don’t know how to conduct a savvy PPC campaign, you stand to lose a LOT of money, trust me… I’ve “been there, done that”.
There are barriers in place to prevent anything bad from happening, such as daily limits to your spending. Unfortunately, many marketers put limits far beyond what they can actually afford, not knowing Google will find a way to tap into your coffers.
Let this be a lesson to you, I like to advise my AdWords clients to start with $100 (my default budget, which may vary of course depending on your market). Treat it as their “AdWords testing money” to get their feet wet with AdWords.
The best way to use paid and free traffic is to implement a strategy that combines both methods. You might run a pay per click campaign and at the same create a lens on Squidoo and HubPages – both for the same keywords. Now you are covering your basis.
And assuming the keywords you tried ranking and advertising for, a few days later, you might find your lens ranked #1 in the Google SERPs.
Do you need to continue the PPC campaign? That’s what testing and tracking of conversions will tell you. You might find that the PPC ad linking visitors directly to your sales page has a higher conversion than those who click through to the lens and then have to take an additional step to get to your sales page.
Savvy marketers understand the need to constantly track and tweak their marketing efforts. Implement new strategies. See what works best for your niche audience. Then wash, rinse, and repeat your success!
Lawrence Talent
“AdWords Tutorial” From Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss
Okay, so I got them on the call and they essentially gave me a mini “AdWords tutorial” if you will… basically they schooled me a bit on what went haywire with my campaign. What I learned was quite an eye opener.
After hearing that despite opening up a new account, Google STILL didn’t like me (and I say that loosely of course) and slapped me right from the getgo… They suspected that my domain was trashed. Basically Google keeps a “history” of domains on their PPC network. And if your domain has a HORRIBLE track record and ends up in their dog house, that’s the end of that.
It doesn’t matter (as I discovered) if you open a new account with brand new credit card, they’ll still not give you (with that domain) the time of the day.
With that said, to remedy my situation, I bought another domain and merely had it aliased to the original domain. And wouldn’t you know it… problem solved. That’s right, with that change, i got out of Google’s dog house and the same exact keywords that were originally getting poor quality scores are now OK and Great 
So next time you get in Google’s dog house and can’t seem to get out, you know what to do.
Lawrence Talent
The “Secret” Google Slap??
So you are probably familiar with the Google slap and how that’s affected all advertisers across the board. It happened a few years ago and since then, things “recalibrated” - the spammers got ditched, and the honest to good (albeit intelligent) marketer survived. And if you are anywhere in the middle? Well, flip a coin.
I noticed that a few weeks ago, there was ANOTHER Google Slap, this time against those promoting affiliate links (such as through Clickbank). I know because I tried running a PPC campaign that directly drove traffic to a Clickbank link.
“No no” said Google.
Bam, $10.00 minimum bids. I think Google’s on to me, some Google advertisers are able to get away with it while others (such as myself) are not. No worries. The simple solution is to buy a domain at ~$9 a pop and have that do a “URL frame” to the Clickbank affiliate link. Problem solved.
The only question is… I wonder how long it’ll take before Google Slaps THAT also. Only time will tell.
Writing PPC Ads
Headline
To start off, you always want to use the keyword you are bidding on in your headline. Since Google will Bold font the keyword, your ad will stand out more and will appear more relevant to the reader.
A short cut you can take in creating your headlines is to take the top 10 competitor’s ads and copy their headlines. This might seem unintuitive because you may be thinking that you want to stand out from the crowd. Well, through my own testing of various types of ads I’ve noticed that readers will sometimes associate the language of your ad to credibility.
So if your ad is kind of gimmicky, that may attract a few clicks from the curious but is likely to result in low quality traffic. This doesn’t mean you can’t test out a few gimmicky headlines, but baseline your testing first with something more professional. Then split test some more original ads (this holds true even in “adwords overture“).
Another reason why you may want to copy competitor headlines is because it’s very likely that they have tested their ads already. You want to benefit as much as possible from any testing they have already done in that market.
Lesson #1:Ensure your keywords are in your headline . Rip off of your top competitor’s headlines |
Descriptions
After the headline, you have 2 description lines available, each with 35 allowable characters. There’s a real art in being able to write a clear and concise message within these 2 lines.
The first thing you need to understand is the difference between benefits and features. A benefit describes the results available for the reader if they click on your ad. A feature would be similar to specifications, characteristics or details about the product or service. For a more in depth description check out Feature vs. Benefit.
For example, features of a desktop computer system are: 2 Gigs of memory, processor speed (3 Giga-hertz), Windows operating system, 250 Gig hardrive, etc. Benefits associated with such a computer system would be: increase in productivity, get work done in half the time, saving time, easy to use, the convenience of having everything stored on your big hardrive, etc.
Once you are clear as to what a benefit and a feature is, you are ready to write your description.
There are a few formulas people use which will help give you a starting point.
Formula #1 – Only Benefits
Your description should only talk about the benefits of what you’re offering. The advantage of this is that it create desire in the reader’s mind. And since you are leaving out the features, it creates a little bit of mystery and the reader will want to figure out how getting the said benefits is possible.
The disadvantage is you might get less qualified visitors to your site, since some people may just be curious.
Example:
Looking for {KeyWord}?
Learn How To Get Your Leads to Pay
For Your Ads, Even If They Don’t Buy
www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com
Formula #2 – Benefits on 1st Line, Features/Offer 2nd Line
This type of ad sets up the expectation of what they will be receiving with a beneficial result in store for them. Usually, you want to start with a stated benefit, then state how they will receive this benefit.
The advantage to this is this type of ad will create higher quality clicks, but may result in a lower CTR.
Looking for {KeyWord}?
Get Your Leads to Pay for Your Ads.
Free Report Shows You How.
www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com
Lesson #2:Some pointers for writing your description are:
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Display URL
Lesson #3:
Test the display URL with “www” and without (i.e. www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com or AttractionMarketingFormula.com ) |
Destination URL
Not much to discuss here, other than make sure your display URL’s domain is the same as your destination URL’s domain. Discrepancies will result in a Google Slap.
For tracking and testing purposes, you can use ‘insert’ functions to carry important data over to your website.
For example, you can use the {keyword} function at the end of your URL to pass the searched for keyword to your website, where your PHP or Javascript page will be able to grab and store that keyword for tracking.
i.e. http://www.attractionmarketingformula.com?google={keyword}
When the user arrives at your site after clicking on your ad and for the sake of this example was searching for “google adwords”, then the destination URL will read:
http://www.attractionmarketingformula.com?google=google20%adwords
You then have the ability to call the “google” variable using PHP or Javascript and store it however you want.
Lesson #4:There are other insert functions, which are available to you. See the ‘help’ section under Google AdWords for more details. You can use these functions to help you in tracking your campaign. |
There should be plenty of information here to get you started on your first few ads for your campaign. Next time we’ll cover a critical piece of the Google AdWords puzzle that will separate you from AdWords mediocrity - “split testing”.
To Your AdWords Domination,
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| Lawrence Talent |