“I have learnt more about internet marketing than I have ever done at the many other internet marketing seminars I have attended. The information was presented in an interesting, exciting and simple fashion, by a presenter that really knows how this all works.”
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is as an internet marketer to see SO many adwords advertisers wasting their time and money on adwords campaigns that are guaranteed to fail. Not only are they are costing their business money, but they are pushing the price of adwords up so it costs more money for everyone.
Can anyone remember the good old days when adwords was used by savvy internet marketers to gain targeted cost effective leads into their business?
Can anyone remember the good old days when advertisers engaged professionals to build and manage their campaigns?
It seems with new age businesses that people are now building and managing their own adwords campaign without any guideance or knowledge. You have to know that by doing this all you are doing is increasing the advertising cost for other businesses and for you.
Ok, so now that I have got that out, let’s look at ways that you can become educated and actually get some results from your campaign without paying too much for traffic. Before I teach anything specific to adwords you have to understand how adwords works. Firstly, what is adwords? Adwords is advertising on google to get visitors to your website, as seen below:
In my next blog post I am going to teach you about the adwords algorithm, but before I do you’ll need to know the following terms:
Click Through Rate (CTR) – This is the amount of times (as a percentage) that someone clicks on your ads. So if your ad was shown 100 times and it was clicked on 1 times that would be a CTR of 1%.
Bid – This is the amount of money you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad
Budget – This is your daily allocated budget, how much you are willing to spend each day on sending traffic to your website.
Relevancy – This is how similar your website text is to the advertisement that you are using to deliver traffic to your website.
I have been spending some time today reviewing trading websites and ads for various participants in the coaching program. It is becoming increasingly obvious that a lot of traders have not read or implemented the following blog posts:
It’s important that you do read these posts and implement these changes to your site to ensure that you are working towards the best positive trading result.
One of the best ways to increase the amount that earn from Adsense is to increase the relevancy of the advertiser on your website. The more relevant the advertiser is to the keyword that you are targeting the more likely you are to get a high paying advertiser.
There is not just one way of increasing this relevancy, there are many techniques that are used, so I have listed a few that I recommend below:
Keyword In Title Tag:
In working out what kind of ads should be shown on your site Adsense looks at the Title tag on your website. To increase the relevancy of your ad you should include just the keyword (first letter capitalised) in your title tag. Not only will this increase the relevancy of your ads but it will also increase the Search Engine Optimisation on your website.
Keyword Density In Content:
The content placed on the page where you are having the adsense feed coming through needs to be relevant to the keyword that you are advertising on. You need to aim for a keyword density of about 5% - 7% within the content to ensure that you stay within Search Engine Optimisation Guidelines and also for maximum relevancy effect.
Keywords In Meta Tags:
The keyword meta tag and description meta tag are important in increasing the relevancy of your advertisements. Firstly let’s talk about the keyword meta tag, in this tag you should include only the keyword that you are advertising on, this keyword must be have the first letter capitalised. Secondly, the keyword description should be 10 – 20 words long and have the keyword that you are trading on at the start or end of the description. The keyword should have the first letter caitalised.
Keyword In URL:
In our experience one of the major influencers on relevancy (if not the most important one) is the inclusion of the keyword (and the keyword only) in the URL. Now this does not mean that the domain name needs to have the keyword in it (this would help), but it does mean the extension from the domain name needs to have the keyword in it.
Use The Competitive Ad Filter:
The competitive ad filter in adsense is designed to allow you to filter out advertisers that you don’t want shown on your website. This filter is designed to allow you to block irrelevant advertisers, but in this case we want to use it to block out Junk Advertisers. Junk Advertisers are advertisers that are bidding to buy the bottom end of the market keywords, they are arbitration website, they are websites like yellow pages and ebay.
The competitive ad filter only allows you to ban 200 specific websites from advertising on your site. To get this list please click here
Keyword In Page Header:
The header for each of your trading pages can be customised to use the keyword that you are trading on. This is valuable as it places your keyword in a h1 tag and will increase your webpage relevancy.
2 Content Pages Relating To Keyword:
By having more pages on your site that relate to the keyword that you are trading on, you increase your site’s relevancy to the keyword. We recommend a minimum of 2 content pages relating to the keyword to get best results.
Now if you have done this and you are still finding that your ads are irrelevant make sure that you check out the Adsense Blog and ensure they are not doing a system wide update.
Before I go a quick advanced tip for those people that have locked trades away, it would be worth the time and monetary investment to move the locked trades onto a new domain name that is relevant to the keyword you are trading on. More about that later.
Instead of complaining about people breaking trading rules, I have decided to be proactive about making the process of trades going live even simpler so, I have created an online checklist for you to follow. The idea is that you will complete and submit this checklist every time that you would like a trade reviewed to go live.
Once you have submitted the checklist it will come through to Matt and I and we will automatically know to go and check your trade. Before I give you the link to the checklist here are some things you need to test:
Tier 2 Pay Per Click Provider Items To Check
It is important in your trading set up to ensure that you check all aspects of your Pay Per Click account for each keyword. Here are the major items to check:
Campaign Max Cost Per Click – When setting Cost Per Click on certain Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks they will ask you to set a Campaign Max Cost Per Click. This cost per click setting needs to be set at the same cost per click setting as the Keyword Max Cost Per Click. If this is not done the Tier 2 network will default to make you pay the amount that is highest.
When checking the Campaign Max Cost Per Click ensure we have approved the amount you are spending, as you may end up spending too much for a click and end up with an unprofitable trade.
Here’s a quick video on how to do this on www.ask.com:
Keyword Max Cost Per Click – As above, the Keyword Max Cost Per Click must be set at the same rate as the Campaign Max Cost Per Click. The highest Cost Per Click price that you set will be the amount that you spend.
Here’s a quick video on how to do this on www.ask.com:
Daily Spend Budget – It is critically important that you set the daily spend budget at the right amount. If you set it too high you could risk losing a significant amount of money. Remember that in the first 30 days of trading you should not be setting a budget that is more than $10 per day, per keyword (unless expressly approved by me). Also remember that time and money limited trades should never exceed $10 and 24hours.
Here’s a quick video on how to do this on www.ask.com:
Destination URL - When setting up your inbound traffic campaign it’s important to ensure that all inbound traffic goes to the correct URL. I know you’re probably laughing saying “How could you possibly get the URL wrong” – sillier things have happened before. Traffic to the wrong URL will result in no return on investment. So ensure that you have the right URL and that you test that URL in your browser to ensure it works.
Keyword Targeting – The specific keyword that you are targeting your advertising to needs to be allocated against your campaign as an “exact match” keyword. This will ensure that the right traffic will go to your Destination URL.
Ads Are Correct – The ad that you have pre-written must be copied into the Tier 2 Provider correctly. If this is not done you could get a lot of untargeted visitors to your site resulting in lower conversion.
Here’s a quick video on how to do these things on ask.com:
The advertisement is one of the major factors in the success of your trade, here are the major items to check:
Headline – The headline is important in making the reader of the advertisement stop and take notice. There are a few things that you need to check here and they are:
No more than 25 characters long (yes some providers will allow more, but we like to write to this guideline so that the same ad can be used across multiple networks)
The keyword that your advertisement is targeting must be contained in the headline
Description Line 1 – This line is important in making the reader re-assured that the headline was a valid statement. It is used to further convince the reader that clicking on your advertisement is in their best interest. Here a few things that you need to check:
No more than 35 characters long (yes some providers will allow more, but we like to write to this guideline, so that the same ad can be used across multiple networks)
The keyword should be repeated in this line or the Description Line 2
Description Line 2 – If a reader gets to reading this line, this is really your last chance to use sales copywriting techniques to convince the reader to visit your site. This is also your major call to action line. Here are a few things that you need to check with this line:
No more than 35 characters long (yes some providers will allow more, but we like to write to this guideline so that the same ad can be used across multiple networks)
They keyword should be repeated in this line or the Description Line 1
Misleading Advertisement – In no way do you ever want your ad to be misleading, so any claims or promises that you make in your advertisement must be available on your landing page.
Landing Page Items To Check
The landing page is the place where you make your money, so this could be the single most important place that you check. Here are a few things to look out for:
Relevant Advertisers – The advertisers being shown on your landing page must be relevant to the keyword that you are targeting. A quick check on your landing page in both Firefox and Internet Explorer will be fine to do. In doing so it would be advisable to ensure that you have cleared your private data. This will ensure you don’t have any caching problems.
Keyword Density - You need to test that your page has a keyword density of 5% - 7%, which will help in increasing relevancy.
That is everything that we would expect you to check when setting up and activating your trade, we have made a checklist for you to do this, just click here to use it
I thought it would be interesting for our traffic traders to know what the three major things are that I see going wrong with trades, and how we go about fixing those three things.
In the process of finding out why a trade may not have been a positive trade we first ensure that the rules I posted earlier were followed. If they have been followed we then look at these next three aspects:
Cost Per Click
Advertising Text
On Page Conversion
Cost Per Click
As you know, when buying and selling traffic the major thing that we are looking for is a significant difference between the buying and selling amount. So, the first thing that could have gone wrong was that we were spending too much to buy our traffic. For example we may have been buying traffic at $0.40 and selling traffic at $0.60. Now while this is technically a profitable trade the risk of this trade being negative is too high, as the difference between buying and selling price is not great enough.
When testing why a trade was not profitable, we are constantly looking at whether we have spent too much for the traffic? So this is the first place you can look at as well when assessing your trade
Advertising Text
When completing the ad set up process with the Pay Per Click provider you are asked to insert advertising text, this text is then shown to the potential visitor. What we find is that often without meaning to people are using misleading advertising text to advertise their trading websites. For example the ad text may say “Free Website Hosting” and when they go to the page they are unable to get “Free Website Hosting”. This will end up in the customer being unsatisfied and less likely to convert into money for you.
When testing why a trade was not profitable this is the second element of a trade that we are assessing.
On Page Conversion
The third and final element to adjust when a trade has been unprofitable is the on page conversion. We are looking at a few factors with the onpage conversion. The first factor is the relevancy of the advertising being shown. The more relevant the advertising the more likely we are to get a high conversion. I’ll write a post later about increasing advertising relevancy.
The second factor that I am looking at is the layout of the page for conversion, specifically the placement of advertising, text and images.
So now you have the three major things that we look at when a trade has been unprofitable. What you need to remember is that as per the rules that I originally set up for trading, you should only ever change one element at a time in each trade.
