Archive for adwords

An interesting development…
Google AdWords have announced a new reporting system that will explain a visitor’s search behavior in the time leading up to a conversion.

This means that we can now track which keywords and PPC ads result in a conversion at any time – up to 30 days prior to the purchase.

Google explain it best in their blog post here: New Reporting in Google AdWords

This is worth a closer look if you’re doing anything in AdWords.
Do you think this will be a useful tool for your business?

Categories : PPC Methods

In case you missed it, Polls for CPA Offers Part 1 can be found here.

Now that you understand “why” its good to run polls for CPA offers, let’s dive into the “how”.

  1. Find a good poll topic.
    Choose a topic you are interested in if possible. All topics can work – politics, celebrities, news, sports, etc. If you are stuck for ideas, check out sites such as : Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Buzz Index – Top 20 Searches, BuzzDash. You are looking for a popular topic, celebrity, news, etc – that is controversial, surprising, upsetting, or newsworthy in some way. Another way PPC Mom likes to find poll ideas is by listening to what her friends are talking about in person, at the coffee shop, on Facebook, etc. Whatever topics people around you are discussing, these can make fabulous poll questions.
  2. Write a kick ass poll question. This is the fun part!! PPC Mom likes to follow the “COP” approach to writing poll questions. All questions must be CONTROVERSIAL, OPPOSITE to popular opinion, and PERSONAL.  You want to piss people off a bit to make them feel like they MUST VOTE in this poll to prove you wrong!! Create a sense of urgency. Make them angry!  :)   If you have a boring question, who is going to vote? No one. An example of a boring question : “Are the Chicago Bears going to make it to the SuperBowl?” BORING! Who cares?! (LOL – jk. I am a Bears fan!) But you get the point. If no one cares about the answer, no one will vote. It’s always wise to focus on  individual people instead of general concepts. Try a question like this instead : “Is Jay Cutler a complete waste of money and space for the Chicago Bears?” – This question has three key components and follows PPC Mom’s “COP” approach to poll questions. It’s a great idea to write 4 or 5 poll questions on the same topic. You can split test them and see which questions get the best results.
  3. Choose 5 CPA offers from the networks. Ask around at the networks and see which email/zip submits are converting well. Choose 5 that sound good to you and grab your affiliate links for those offers.
  4. Create your polls. You can save time if you create 3-5 polls on the same topic using different questions. There are lots of ways to do this, and it’s up to you to decide what’s best for you.  WordPress Easy Polls is great because it is FREE and very easy to use if you understand WordPress. The creator of WPEP is Chris. He’s fantastic and provides excellent support for his products. You can also use a product like Poll Factory which is good, but not free. If you need help or advice about either of these, let me know. I can help.
  5. Launch your poll on the search engines. PPC Mom does not use Google for polls. Yahoo and MSN/Bing have been excellent so far. Google is oversaturated, expensive, and unpredictable. Why would you want to do business with a company that fits that description? So many affiliates seem determined to use them for everything and I cannot understand why. There are many other traffic sources out there and Yahoo and MSN work just fine for polls. If you must use Google, then go ahead. But don’t say I didn’t warn you! ;)

In the next chapter of Polls for CPA Offers Part 3, we are going to cover the finer aspects of poll campaign management! Exciting stuff, eh? ;)

Have a fantastic day!

During my time in PPC I have run across several (9 actually) tools from Google that could really make a difference in your marketing efforts, at least I think. I can’t promise you haven’t seen these before, but there might be something different here you haven’t seen, so check them out.

Trends- Here you get two great tools to work with. The first one is comparing sites, and keywords to see what is more popular. Secondly you get a list of the top 100 searches on google right NOW. Use this post to learn what to do with this information, it is great.
http://www.google.com/trends

Traffic Estimator- https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox with this tool you are suppose to be able to see how much traffic you could get on adwords for certain keywords, I believe it is just like the one you see in adwords, but I am not sure. Also I wouldn’t follow this too closely it can off, by quite a bit.

Ad Preview Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool – this is relatively self explanitory, you put in keywords and you can see your ads, sort of like on the regular search site, but I dont think it affects your impressions this way, not sure though, anyone want to weigh in on this?

Search-Based Keyword Tool- http://google.com/sktool/# This one is relatively new, and I am not 100% sure on how to use it. So I am going to link you to a couple of people who are sure. Search Engine LandGoogle Adwords Blog
Insights- http://www.google.com/insights/search/# I haven’t used this one either but I know that it exists and maybe some of you can come up with a clever way to use it.

Adplanner- https://www.google.com/adplanner/ I found this a few months ago and I love it. It reminds me of quantcast and alexa because you can learn so much about the site you put into it. This also helps when putting together marketing plans.

Keyword Tool- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal I can’t tell you how much I love this tool for keyword research. To come up with related keywords, I use the bottom of the list. To come up with negative keywords I use the top of the list, and to come up with ppc keywords I use the whole list.

Analytics- http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html Find out what people are doing on your website, how long they are visiting, where they are coming from, the whole bit. Just about everyone serious about their site is using this, because it is free too.

Webmaster Tools- https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?hl=en Use this to submit your sitemap to get ranked faster. There is also the google conversion university here.

Well I figured out what my problem was last week. I changed my daily budget on Friday at the end of the day and they couldn’t review that until Monday. Apparently they make you wait for that kind of change.

I didn’t want to wait all weekend (Im a bit impatient) so I started another campaign and started collecting clicks. So, they will let you start new campaigns and change your Maximum cpc without review.

I did increase my cpc for the original campaign once it went back live today. Of course I got a million clicks and little data, even though I only have 20 keywords in the group. Remember this is the content network, on the search network I wouldn’t put more than one keyword in an adgroup.

So, now I have a bunch of clicks, no more sales, have decreased my bids again on this original one cause everyone was clicking on it, and I want a few less clicks. We will see, as with all ppc campaigns there is a lot of tweaking to do.

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