The Importance of Understanding Results
Understanding the “results” of your campaigns is very important as you will be able to make “tweaks” and optimizations to increase your efficiency, sales, ROI, and overall profits. Before we jump into things it is important that we clearly define what we mean when we refer to “results”.
Campaign results are basically any analytical data that you can gather from your campaigns. Landing page hits, affiliate link click-throughs, ad click-throughs, overall traffic, unique visitors, page views, CTR, impressions, sales, and leads are among the most common analytical data that you can gather from your campaigns. These campaign results can be used to further enhance performance and this is what we are going to be helping you out with this week.
The more data that you can gather from your campaigns, the easier it is to benchmark results and analyze, test, and improve upon them. In order to do this you need to understand why collecting is so important.
Here is an example:
Let’s say that you have been advertising Product A for three weeks and you have been getting approximately 30 clicks a day from 100 keywords that are spread throughout your campaign. You have been sending traffic from your ads to a landing page that you setup that targets a specific “niche” within a larger market. Things seem like they are running fine because you have made some sales, but the overall net profits (money you’ve earned after advertising expenses) aren’t as high as they could be.
Upon analyzing some of your data, you realize that only 10% of the traffic that makes it to your website is actually clicking on your affiliate links and visiting the merchant page. In other words, you’re wasting 90% of your ad clicks because your landing page isn’t converting visitors into “potential” customers.
There are several things that you can do to improve upon this and many of them have been discussed in earlier weeks (relevance, landing page optimization, etc). But without understanding this data, you are going to be limiting your campaigns overall return drastically.
This is just one simple example of how understanding campaign results can help you realize the good things that you are doing, and what campaign aspects you can improve on. In this case, the landing page needs to be optimized.
Determining the Effectiveness of your Campaigns
There are many different ways in which you can determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. We are going to focus of the most important techniques in this section.
Analyzing CTR
All of the data that Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing make available to you as paid advertisers is very important. One of the most important points is Click-Through-Ratio (CTR) and is also one of the first pieces of data that you can analyze to help improve your campaign profitability.
CTR is the ratio between how many times your ad has been displayed in the search results (also known as impressions) to the number of times it has been clicked. The higher your CTR, the better your entire campaign is going to run. The reason for this is because as you increase the CTR, the performance is directly related to how well written your ad is. A CTR of 5% or higher means that of every 100 impressions there are five people are clicking on your ad. This is a pretty good CTR. With this being said, a CTR of less than 1% means that you are most likely not being relevant enough, or simply that your ad is not performing well.
Remember, that the higher your CTR is, the lower your bids will be, and the higher your ad will be displayed within the search results. This is because Google and Yahoo like people that write ads that get clicked on more because it makes them more money and they will reward you with better positioning because of this.
We have an entire tutorial written that explains how to improve your CTR through using good copywriting techniques:
Adcopy Writing Tutorial
Adcopy Writing Case Study
Analyzing your Data and improving your CTR
When you have determined that your ad needs some work, there are some techniques you can use to improve the CTR.
Utilizing Your Common Keywords
The root of all good (high CTR) ads is derived from it’s overall relevancy to the keywords.. It is VERY important that you implement the Common keyword technique within all of your adgroups so that you can use the same common keywords in your ad. Ideally you want to be able to include ALL of the keywords within an ad group somewhere within the ad. If you cannot do this, chances are your ad group has been created too “loosely”.
Your Ad Title: Your common keywords should always be written within your ad title, as this is the first part of the ad that people read. If you have an ad title that is highly relevant to the keywords that the user searched for, you will achieve a higher CTR than if didn’t have the common keywords in the title.
For example, if you have an adgroup with the common keywords: “train pug to heel”, you want to try to include these keywords in your ad title.
Train Your Pug To Heel
Learn How to Train Your Pug
To Heel In Just Minutes Here
YourWebsite.com
If you see that your campaigns are suffering from low CTR then this is the first part of “tweaking” that you want to do. The benefits of having a CTR above 2-3% are very substantial and can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic you receive (thus your earnings could increase substantially).
We have an entire tutorial that will teach you all about analyzing your data located below:
Analyzing Campaign Data
How Does Conversion tracking actually work?
Conversion tracking is one of the most important aspects as it allows you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns based on several metrics. Without it, Internet marketers are left “blind” because they will not know which areas of their campaigns need to be improved and which should be left alone. The common misconception is that a “conversion” refers to a sale only, and this is simply not the case. A conversion can be a click on an affiliate link, a sale, a lead, or even a hit on a specific webpage on your site. Conversions give you the ability to track certain actions that occur and they are VERY important.
In the example above, conversions were tracked each time a visitor clicked a merchant link. This is just one of the ways that conversion tracking can be used to improve your campaigns and enhance earnings.
Sales Conversion Tracking
SALE conversion tracking is probably the most beneficial out of all types of conversion tracking because it allows you to determine the EXACT keywords that are converting into sales. Having this data will allow you to tweak your highest converting keywords and ads and improve the ones that are not converting. Sale conversion tracking is the most important data that a PPC marketer can have, but unfortunately it is not available to everyone.
In order for sale conversion tracking to work, the merchant (owner of the product), must place a small piece of code on their order “confirmation” page. NOT all merchants are willing to do this, so it’s always a “blessing” when conversion tracking is offered.
You can also email merchants and ask them to put your conversion code on their order confirmation page. Typically the merchant will only do this for their high volume affiliates, but it is definitely worth a shot. Some affiliate programs have created scripts that allow all affiliates to do this. An example of this is “Who Loves Money” and you can see how this works by visiting the following page:
http://www.wholovesmoney.com/affiliate.php
In order to take advantage of merchants that do offer sale conversion tracking, you will need to supply them with your conversion tracking ID from within your Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing account. Finding your tracking ID is simple and can be found very easily.
Google
Step 1: Log into your Google Adwords account and click on the “Conversion Tracking” link at the top of the page:
Step 2: Click the “Start Tracking Conversions” button at the bottom of the next page
Step 3: Select “Purchase/Sale” from the conversion type list. It doesn’t matter what you select on this page because you only need your Conversion Tracking ID, so you can choose any option you want here.
Step 4: Simply click “Continue”
Step 5: Copy your “google_conversion_id” from within the code that is provided to you
Yahoo
Step 1: Within your YSM account, click on the “Administration” tab.
Step 2: A set of links will appear below the tab, click on the “Analytics” link.
Step 3: The code will then be displayed for your conversion tracking. You will be able to find your conversion tracking ID within the code that reflects the following:
var ysm_accountid = "yourUNIQUEconversionID";
You’ll want to save your Google & Yahoo conversion IDS, or write them down so that you do not have to go through the same process each time you need it! You will also need it if you choose to use My-Linker (discussed next).
If you have sale conversion tracking available to you, determining the effectiveness of your campaign will be much easier and you will easily be able to weed out the poorly converting keywords.
Analyzing your Landing Page with My-Linker
One of the most important “actions” that an affiliate needs a visitor to perform on their page is to click-through to the merchant pages. If your visitors never visit the merchant pages, then you will never make a commission, so it’s very important to keep an eye on this. Many people fail to track this and never really understand the performance of their landing pages. These people are missing out!
To track merchant page click-throughs, we have created a program called My-Linker that will allow you to create unique campaigns where you can insert your Google Conversion Code to track merchant page conversions instead of sales conversions.
You will need to insert the code that is generated by My-Linker in place of your affiliate links, and then you will be able to track which keywords are producing the highest merchant page conversions and which ones are under performing.
If you use my-linker links on your page rather than your direct affiliate links, you can track how well your landing page is performing and collect data on exactly which keywords are prompting your visitors to click on your links. The my-linker links also mask your affiliate links so that your competition cannot see what you are linking to!
To access your My-Linker account you can use the link below:
Access My-Linker Here
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is a technique that allows you to analyze two different “scenarios” and find out which one is performing more optimally. There are many aspects of a campaign that you can split test and we are going to go into detail with these in this section. Split testing is something that you will want to implement in order to fully optimize your campaign by using statistical data, rather than playing the “guessing game”.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Download R.A.I.T Guide Here
Crunching the Numbers
Optimizing your campaigns will enable you to increase the overall profitability and remove a lot of the wasted adspend that you may be incurring. Sales conversion ratios are calculated by determining the average amount of clicks it takes to generate a sale. For instance, if you paid for 100 clicks in your Google Adwords account and received 2 sales, your conversion ration would be 2% or 1 in 50 (written 1:50). Calculating your conversion ratios does not require you to have any kind of tracking installed as you can simply tally up the amount of clicks paid for vs. how many sales.
All products convert at different ratios depending on the industry, the quality of traffic that they receive, and the product itself. In our experience, we’ve determined that the highest converting products available convert at less than 1:30 (for every 30 clicks, you average 1 sale), but it is possible to convert at 1:10 or lower if you have a highly optimized campaign.
There really isn’t any way to know a product conversion rate unless you ask the merchant yourself, and in many cases, they will give you a number that is not entirely true. We (Kyle & Carson) can’t figure out why a merchant would like to “embellish” their conversion stats because it only hurts affiliates as they are the ones that end up losing in the end.
Increasing the overall effectiveness of your campaign will increase your conversion ratios, lower the amount of money you spend on advertising, and ultimately put more money in your pocket.
There are many different ways to analyze data and test various parts of your campaign, and we have really just brushed the surface with this topic.
If you have questions about performing tests, you can ask them in the forum.
A Note about Conversion Tracking from The “Big Three”
Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter all offer conversion tracking. With this being said, we need to tell you that the conversion stats that you get are NOT always 100% accurate within these systems. Sometimes you will get a sale, and even though the merchant offer conversion tracking for the product you are selling, you won’t see a conversion calculated in your advertising account. This works both ways as well. Sometimes you’ll see a conversion tracked in your advertising account, but in fact you did not make a sale. This is just something that we as Internet marketers have to accept as there are many variables that can cause this to happen.
Note: This does not mean that the merchant is stealing sales, because in most cases it is impossible for them to do this. Most of the time conversion tracking is very reliable and will produce accurate results.
Refining Campaigns
Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for even the best Internet marketers. As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are under performing. and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertiser's keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are either under performing. or not making sales at all. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
Bridging Campaigns Between Different Marketing Platforms
Increasing sales and the reach of your campaigns is something that can really take your profits to the “next” level. If you have a campaign in Google Adwords that is performing very well, you should expand that campaign into other PPC engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and MSN Adcenter. This technique will allow you to take a $100 / day campaign to a $200-$400 / day campaign by simply connecting with a wider range of potential customers. Google Adwords, YSM, and MSN Adcenter all have the same structure for setting up advertising campaigns. They have the “campaign” level, “adgroup” level, and “keyword” level, so it’s easy to re-create a campaign in any of these networks.
This technique of bridging your campaigns and expanding them into other platforms is not something that is only done between two PPC engines. If you have an Article that you’ve written that focuses on a certain group of keywords and you are getting consistent sales from it, you can use these keywords to create PPC campaigns. This is something that we HIGHLY recommend that you do.
Many marketers start out by using free techniques such as Article marketing. When you start to earn sales from your articles, this will provide you with very valuable information that you can use to expand into PPC. If your article is listed under a specific keyword in the search engines and is making you sales, you can easily put together a campaign and advertise it.
Bridging campaigns between different marketing platforms is really something that you should take advantage of. NONE of the top marketers (including us) strictly use one method or platform to connect with potential customers. Your reach is a lot larger if you diversify.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Refining Campaigns
Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for even the best Internet marketers. As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are under performing. and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertiser's keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are either under performing. or not making sales at all. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is a technique that allows you to analyze two different “scenarios” and find out which one is performing more optimally. There are many aspects of a campaign that you can split test and we are going to go into detail with these in this section. Split testing is something that you will want to implement in order to fully optimize your campaign by using statistical data, rather than playing the “guessing game”.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Examples of Effective Adcopy
The following examples show different types of ad writing techniques that can be used to create highly effective, high click-through ads. When writing your copy, you should have a few things in mind. Your goal is to get as many people as possible to click through your ads to your landing page, but you want to do this using techniques that reflect the relevance of your page. Adding keywords like "FREE" in your ads is not a good idea because people that type in "free" into their search queries are not usually going to make a purchase.
If you have not heard of a "call to action" phrase, you will need to familiarize yourself with this term. It is exactly how it sounds; you are calling someone out to take an action. Call-to-action phrases will prompt the user to subconsciously click on your ad. If you want someone to do something, there is no harm in asking and you will find out that asking your customers to do something will greatly benefit you as marketer.
Here are some examples of "Call-to-Action" phrases:
Click Here
Join Now
Sign up
Instant Access
Get Access
And as we mentioned earlier, posing a question can increase your CTR drastically. Here are some examples of that:
Do You Hate...?
Does it Work?
Is it a Scam?
How much is...?
Obviously a question could pertain to just about anything, so you will want to be creative and really think about a question that a consumer may be asking themselves when writing this type of ad copy.
The Use of the Word SCAM
"Scam" is definitely one of those terms that create a red flag. Many people have been ripped off online and many people are weary of making purchases online because they are in fear of being scammed. There is a good chance that you have been scammed yourself. By using the term "scam" within your ad copy you are triggering this emotions and triggering the interest of the people searching. The use of the term "scam" has been proven to increase ad CTR drastically in many test that we have performed and many other independent tests performed online. Want a boost in CTR...add "scam" within your ad.
If you have not heard of a "call to action" phrase, you will need to familiarize yourself with this term. It is exactly how it sounds; you are calling someone out to take an action. Call-to-action phrases will prompt the user to subconsciously click on your ad. If you want someone to do something, there is no harm in asking and you will find out that asking your customers to do something will greatly benefit you as marketer.
Here are some examples of "Call-to-Action" phrases:
Click Here
Join Now
Sign up
Instant Access
Get Access
And as we mentioned earlier, posing a question can increase your CTR drastically. Here are some examples of that:
Do You Hate...?
Does it Work?
Is it a Scam?
How much is...?
Obviously a question could pertain to just about anything, so you will want to be creative and really think about a question that a consumer may be asking themselves when writing this type of ad copy.
The Use of the Word SCAM
"Scam" is definitely one of those terms that create a red flag. Many people have been ripped off online and many people are weary of making purchases online because they are in fear of being scammed. There is a good chance that you have been scammed yourself. By using the term "scam" within your ad copy you are triggering this emotions and triggering the interest of the people searching. The use of the term "scam" has been proven to increase ad CTR drastically in many test that we have performed and many other independent tests performed online. Want a boost in CTR...add "scam" within your ad.
Writing Effective Adcopy
What exactly is adcopy? Adcopy is the textual content contained with your ads. This could be within an medium where you are required to write ads include Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or any other Pay Per Click search engine. Adcopy is the first point of contact between you and your potential customers. It's a simple fact that if you are good at writing adcopy then you are light years ahead above other internet marketers who can't write adcopy because if an ad does not get clicked, you might as well not be advertising at all.
Within the following text we are going to share techniques will help you write effective adcopy that not only entices people to click on your ads, but will attract prospective customers instead of people just seeking information.
The first thing you should do when you think about writing ad copy is to think like the consumer. What would captivate someone's interest enough to look at your ad and entice this same person enough to click on your ad to see what your web page has to offer. When some performs a search within Google they are bombarded with ads both down the middle and the right side of the page. You are essentially competing head-to-head with 9 other advertisers, so your job should be to make your ad stand out among the rest. How do you do that? By writing adcopy that is relevant, interesting, and different.
The first thing that you need to focus is on ad relevance. If your ad does not contain the exact keywords that the person has just performed in their search, they are probably not going to click on your ad. This means that when you create your ad groups, you should focus on including all of the keywords within your ad group within your ad copy. If you cannot do this, then chances are your ad group is too large and you need to group it tighter. Google bolds the keywords within in your ad if they are within the search query, so use the keyword as much as you can (ideally within both your ad title and description).
Secondly, you need to captivate the interest of your customer by using common language to connect with them. When they read your ad they need to agree with what you are saying. Ask them a question. If their answer is yes, then they are more likely to click on your ad, if it's no, then that's ok too because they probably wouldn't have converted into a sale for you anyway. If they are unsure, then they will definitely be interested in what you offer and they will click your ad as well, so a question within your ad will increase your click-through ratio (CTR).
Lastly, your ad should be different than the other advertisers. You may want to do a quick search under the keywords you are promoting to see what other advertisers are using for their ad copy. You do not want to copy them as this will lower the chance that someone will click your ad. You want to create and ad that is unique so that it will "stand out" from the others.
Note: If you're advertising under keywords that aren't highly targeted (which we do not recommend unless you are experienced) you may waste a lot of money on people who are just browsing the net killing time. If you put a price within your ad it will only attract people who are willing to spend money and not simply a freebie seeker or someone that is looking for free information. Again, this should only be implemented if you are promoting within an industry that is looking for free information or you are advertising under broad keywords.
Within the following text we are going to share techniques will help you write effective adcopy that not only entices people to click on your ads, but will attract prospective customers instead of people just seeking information.
The first thing you should do when you think about writing ad copy is to think like the consumer. What would captivate someone's interest enough to look at your ad and entice this same person enough to click on your ad to see what your web page has to offer. When some performs a search within Google they are bombarded with ads both down the middle and the right side of the page. You are essentially competing head-to-head with 9 other advertisers, so your job should be to make your ad stand out among the rest. How do you do that? By writing adcopy that is relevant, interesting, and different.
The first thing that you need to focus is on ad relevance. If your ad does not contain the exact keywords that the person has just performed in their search, they are probably not going to click on your ad. This means that when you create your ad groups, you should focus on including all of the keywords within your ad group within your ad copy. If you cannot do this, then chances are your ad group is too large and you need to group it tighter. Google bolds the keywords within in your ad if they are within the search query, so use the keyword as much as you can (ideally within both your ad title and description).
Secondly, you need to captivate the interest of your customer by using common language to connect with them. When they read your ad they need to agree with what you are saying. Ask them a question. If their answer is yes, then they are more likely to click on your ad, if it's no, then that's ok too because they probably wouldn't have converted into a sale for you anyway. If they are unsure, then they will definitely be interested in what you offer and they will click your ad as well, so a question within your ad will increase your click-through ratio (CTR).
Lastly, your ad should be different than the other advertisers. You may want to do a quick search under the keywords you are promoting to see what other advertisers are using for their ad copy. You do not want to copy them as this will lower the chance that someone will click your ad. You want to create and ad that is unique so that it will "stand out" from the others.
Note: If you're advertising under keywords that aren't highly targeted (which we do not recommend unless you are experienced) you may waste a lot of money on people who are just browsing the net killing time. If you put a price within your ad it will only attract people who are willing to spend money and not simply a freebie seeker or someone that is looking for free information. Again, this should only be implemented if you are promoting within an industry that is looking for free information or you are advertising under broad keywords.
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