Traditional PPC
PPC, to me it's the holy grail of advertising.
I'm gonna make a lot of people salty with this statement, and many will try to prove me wrong.. but, "I've never met someone that was a multi-millionaire solely from just doing SEO".
Let that sink in for a minute and you will see why I think PPC and paid advertising in general is the best skill you can ever learn. You might find a couple outliers to my statement, but when you compare how many millionaires in our industry were born out of just solely PPC compared to just solely SEO.. well, you'll see where I am coming from.
What is PPC?
Well, it stands for "Pay Per Click" and it's exactly as it sounds, you are paying for visitors to click your ad to come to your site. If you need instant traffic to your site, this is the way to get it.
The Players
The major players in PPC are pretty much Google, Bing/Yahoo ( soon to be split ), and Facebook. Many people do not tie Facebook into traditional PPC, but it's such a large platform that it deserves to be part of the Big 3 that use to be just Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
The only reason Facebook has been traditionally outside of the Big 3 is that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all "search marketing" platforms, meaning that you have to type in a keyword and then get served ads based on the keyword you typed in to search. This means that the advertiser ( you and mean ) bid on keywords within Google/Bing/Yahoo we think are relevant to our product or service to get customers to see our ads.
With Facebook, there are no keywords you type in to get ads. The ads are just there! This is because with Facebook you are pretty much bidding on demographics and doing "interruption marketing". Meaning, you are having to interrupt what the visitor is doing with your ad to get them to notice you. Instead of bidding on the keyword "RN to BSN degrees" ( As you would for Google ), you would be bidding on females who are 25-40 that live in the Chicago area with interests in Nursing and job titles of RN and showing them your RN to BSN degree ads.
There are a lot of 3rd tier or Premium PPC players that are alternatives to Google, Bing, and Facebook. I am going off memory here, so forgive me if any of these companies have changed or gone out of business...
7search
Bidvertiser
Adblade
Pulse360
BuySellAds
eZanga
Adknowledge
InfoLinks
SiteScout
Adbrite
Outbrain
mMedia
Miva
Twitter
Pinterest ( although basically Facebook )
There are actually a lot more than the list above, but these are ones I have used to some extent myself and tend to be the higher-end or larger players.
However, if I were to give you some advice.. it would be to stick with Google, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook. Work with the 80/20 principle here, especially if you are new.
Just running on Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook alone will pretty much help you reach almost ANY demographic ANYWHERE on the Internet. The ease of use and the fact you know those companies will be here tomorrow should pretty much sway you to just use the Big 3 full time. I mean seriously, who ISN'T using Google or Facebook?
Breaking into international markets tends to lend itself to a few different platforms ( Asian, Russian, and a few others ), but the large play for most of us will still be with Google, Bing, and Facebook.
So what's it take to get started ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?
Almost nothing. You do need to have a credit card handy and a website. You can find vouchers that will give you free money up front like $50 with Bing and $100 for Adwords, but you still need a valid credit card to sign up and get an account. You will also need a website in order to make your ad.
Ok, I'm in. Now what ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?
So essentially there are a few parts to getting started. I am going to assume you have money on a debit/credit card and a website. I am also going to give you a very high level of the steps involved because covering every option is way beyond the scope of this post.
For Google and Bing/Yahoo, you are going to create a campaign and Adgroup where you setup where you want to target and who you want to target.
Let's assume you're a plumber in Chicago and you want to advertise your business in the local area.
You don't want to advertise nationally, so you narrow down the geographic reach to just the Chicago area, maybe you even narrow down to a section of Chicago since you really can't service the West Side as it's too far for you. Once you have that selected, you are going to move on to things like the time of day your ads run.
Advanced Pro Tip: A lot of people just select the geographic area they want to target, like the zip codes of South Side Chicago. However, try the reverse. Select all of Chicagp first and then exclude the zip codes and areas you DON'T want. You might think in your head that this is the same thing and reinventing the wheel, but trust me.. it's not and you may end up with more traffic in the same qualified area.
Maybe you don't work Tuesdays and you really can't take calls after midnight. If that's the case, you don't really want your ads running those times do you? Of course not, so you make your selections to only show your ads during the times you can work and take leads.
You are also going to decide on your daily budget and also how much you want to pay per person that clicks your ad. This is an important step because if you put in too low of a budget or too low of a per click price, you are more than likely going to miss a lot of potential customers. You also need to account into your budgets for "tire kicker" type customers, competitors clicking your ads, and the fact that not every person that clicks will turn into a lead.
What should my budget and bid be ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ?
If I were to give you some generalized advice here, it would be that you want to bid high enough that your ad will be #1 in the SERPs and that you will be able to have enough budget to have that ad run all day long during the times you selected. This is because in order to be successful, you have to have a mindset of "buying data", not immediately converting ad spend into revenue.
If you are not bidding high enough per click ( as in the #1 position ) you might realize that many people are clicking, but not calling you or filling out the form. You very well might realize that no one is clicking. If you didn't bid high enough, you don't really know if the problem is you, Google, or the fact your ad is at position #7 and no one can see it. Maybe the customers are finding who they want to do business with ( your competitors ) at positions #1-6 already and then "just checking you out" at position #7, but in reality they have already made up their mind mentally who they want to spend money with.
If your budget is too low though, you might have the same problems and not realize that maybe people who call plumbers tend to call at night when there is an emergency at home. All day at work they might not know there is an issue and since your budget is so low and it ran out at 1pm, your potential customers don't see your ad when they need you at 7pm.
There are a whole host of other issues and reasons too broad for this post, but please bid into position #1 and have enough budget to run all day long non-stop when starting out. Anything less than that, well you just won't have the right data to make statistically relevant decisions on.
Don't worry though, you won't be bidding into #1 for very long. You are doing this to buy data and to jump start your CTR, which is a major factor in lowering your per bid costs. Once you have enough data, you are going to be making changes in your budget and bidding position.
On to keywords and ads... ( Google and Bing/Yahoo )
Next step is making ads.
I start with no less than 3 ads and I make all my ads completely different. This is because I am looking for 1 base ad out of 3 different ones to choose as a winner and then make small improvement on that one winner later.
For my ads, I like to look at what my competitors are doing and then make my ad stand out.
So if I were to look at some Chicago plumber ads for the term "Chicago Plumber" on Google, I might see how everyone talking about how great their service is, but none of them focus on speed of service or price.
Now knowing this, I am going to make one of my ads all about how I can get to your door within 20 minutes or less and I charge only $99 a visit. Ad 1, done! If any of you know of the "Jimmy Johns" franchise, you know how well speed plays a part in their advertising.
My second ad, I am going to step into my ideal customers head and write an ad just for them. My ideal customer might be Bob. Bob owns a house and is married and just found out he has a water heater leak. His wife can't wash dishes or do their laundry and none of the kids can take a bath. Bob is 37 and in middle management and is too busy ( and scared ) to fool with the problem himself.
Knowing this, I might write my ad talking how I can fix their leak without the wife getting upset the first time, and do it correctly with proper post-service cleanup. Ad #2 is now done.
My 3rd ad, I like to do something crazy and wild. Since we are dealing with a local Chicago Plumber, I might make an ad that throws in the word Chicago in the display URL or even a CTA in the display URL. I might also stretch it out a bit and put in the headline that I am the "#1 Plumber In The Loop" ( if you are from Chicago, you know this term ).
I might also tell you in the description lines that if you call in the next 2 min, I'll give you $30 off.
Thing is, I can say a lot of things in my ad, but the call in the next 2 minutes and get $30 off is a hard CTA with an urgency. Truth is, the plumber prob gives everyone $30 off because he jacked his rate up $30 to cover it.
Advanced Pro Tip: Don't be lazy or scared with ads. Some of the best ads I ever wrote, I would put in the day of the week in the ad. No I didn't have to change them daily either, but you could put in that "the sale ends Tuesday" and just run that all the time. Depending on the day of the week, Tuesday is either 2 days away or 7 days. Even at 7 days, thats enough urgency to get people to act.
Get creative here.
For keywords, what would someone that needs a plumber in Chicago type into Google or Bing?
How about words like:
plumber
southside plumber
how to fix a leaky sink ( this one is a bit harder to convert, but can work )
plumbers in 40218
sink repair near me
water heater doesn't work
24-hour plumbing
AngiesList plumbers
Roto Router ( a competitors name )
All you need to do is step into your customers head to find out.
OR, you could grab a subscription to tools like SERPWoo.com and SpyFu and find out easily what your plumber competitors are already bidding on and steal all their hard work for yourself.
Once you are done, you are pretty much ready to start advertising.
Granted, this was a very high overview of Google and Bing PPC and was intended to get people familiar with it.
On to some advanced stuff....
I gotta keep this a high overview too. There is just sooo much I could talk about, but we don't have the space for it here and I can't give away too much of my own secret sauce ( yeah, I know some of my own competitors are here on BuSo.. )
I thought I would tell you where I see a lot of noob and even intermediate level PPC guys mess up. Maybe I can also point out where agencies rip you off and what you need to be doing to ensure success.
A lot of people might try to argue against this point, but if you are not in your Adwords/Bing account daily making changes, you just are not doing it right.
It doesn't have to be you personally. I can't see any reason why even with a small account, that someone would skip out on pulling their Search Query Report, adding negatives, and adding in new keywords/adgroups DAILY. You can even judge by the intention of the terms matched in these reports if you have the right ads and keywords to begin with and if you maybe need to make changes. If you are only doing this weekly, you are wasting ad spend every day it's not done.
People like to be lazy and not properly name their campaigns and Adgroups. If I go into an account and have to use excel or Adwords editor and I have a bunch of "Adgroup 1" or Campaign #52 names, I just want to scream at you. You just added on 2 more hours of billed time if I have to look up what this campaign or Adgroup really is. If this is you, kill yourself now. Don't ever do this, there is no reason to.
Agencies seem to skim over geographic optimizations. Sure, they might exclude a whole country or even a state, but I don't see very many that take the time to exclude out specific towns. This can make all the difference sometimes. Get down to specific zip codes and towns and see how that data is doing.
I had a campaign that the VP's wanted to shut down because the state of California was doing badly. I looked into it and in reality, everywhere in California was profitable for us but 1 city, Los Angeles. I even dug in deeper and see that LA was actually profitable if we just excluded 2 sub-areas within LA. This research and tiny change turned the whole campaign profitable for the state of California.
A lot of people make decisions way too early or they let Google do it for them. Learn what's statistically relevant before making a decision. Also, map out how this choice will affect other parts of the campaign in the future.
For example, I saw an account where someone decided to block mobile traffic out completely by giving it a bid of -100%. The reasoning was that it was not converting well for them. I questioned if they actually had enough mobile traffic to determine this, but what really happened was they just didn't have a mobile-optimized site for their mobile visitors ( they didn't know this by the way ). So instead of fixing the site ( because they didn't know ) to be mobile friendly, they just decided that all mobile traffic sucked and to not run it at all.
The site was fixed within a week when the issue was discovered, but it took them 6 months to realize it. Once fixed, no one went back and turned on mobile because they just always assumed "mobile sucked" and didn't need to turn it back on. They essentially lost months of great leads and traffic because they thought mobile traffic just sucked off of 2 days of initial data and the fact they didn't know why their mobile traffic sucked ( because of their poor site ). Their ignorance ( on many levels ) ingrained in their head that mobile was terrible even after they fixed their site. Someone ( me ) had to go back in and turn it on and show them the light after the fact.
Don't let Google determine which of your ads gets shown. Also, opt for rotation because the algo they use for picking winning ads selects an ad way too early in the optimization cycle. You need to be watching the ads yourself and picking a winner.
Agencies will literally bid on your Brand name in PPC, bring in lot of sales/leads, and then bill you for that. That's recockulous. You built the brand, you put dollars into it, so why let an agency bid on it for pennies and bring in leads for you and pay them a cut of it? I have seen this millions of times and it just makes me sick. Leads that come in for your brand term should not be paid out to an agency, but yet I have seen this be upwards of 80% of an agencies billings within PPC.
No one seems to optimize their bid/position on ROI. For example, everyone wants to be #1 or maybe #5 because they think it's cheaper. LISTEN, if you aren't pulling data and then doing pivot tables in excel to find out what you should be bidding based on ROI, then
At some point in the campaigns life, you should have enough data that you can pull a report and see based on ROI what each position does for you. When you pull this report, you are looking at all the impressions, clicks, and conversions you got for positions 1-8 over say, 90 days time.
What you are going to find is that maybe positions #1-3 are over your CPA or CPS goal. Maybe positions 6-8 just don't bring in any traffic. #5 had traffic, but not enough to do anything with and it is also over CPA/CPS goal.
#4 though, it might not be a ton of traffic compared to #1-3, but I'll take those 5 sales a day since the CPA/CPS is way under my goal and very very profitable.
Once you see this and figure it out, you start realizing that all you need to do is set up a few Adwords rules to automate your keyword bids into the 4th position average every day to keep that sweet, sweet profit.
Most people don't realize that when they see they are position 3 in Adwords or Bing, that's an average position. Most of day you might be #1 and most of the day you might be #5. Don't freak out about it.
A/B testing is a waste of time if you are doing it as 50/50. You can't really do much for ads in Google about this, but for your LPs, please don't do 50/50 A/B test. What if your new experiment is a flop and you lose 50% of your leads now? Do A/A/B where your control now has more exposure and your variation/experiment can still be tested with less waste. Some scripts for optimization of landing pages can let you decide the % if you don't want 50/50 ( and instead decide to do the smarter 70/30 )
[b]If this is too much to absorb and take in, I do personally take on projects as a consultant. It has to be the right project and the right fit. Don't worry, I will even hold your hand while I do it. No, I will not do it for free or for equity only.[/b]
The main thing is, you need to be in the account daily and you need to be making daily optimizations. That includes your ads, budgets, keyword bids, keywords, demographic options, your landing page, and much more.
A few more tips:
Yes, click to call ads work wonders and are cheap for a lot of industries
Yes, you need extensions like call, sitelinks, reviews, and call outs.
I didn't cover Display, but Display and remarketing work awesome if used correctly. Most people and agencies suck at it and don't know how to set up proper remarketing or Display ads. If you are banging it out on Search and doing well, do yourself a favor and test out and expand into Display. However, only do this in Google. Bing's Display network is full of fraud.
A lot of people spend money on Google, barely break even, and then give up. I love these campaigns though because it means you only need a few tweaks to get to profit. Also, Google normally charges you less at the end of the month than what you think due to fraud clicks so keep that little nugget in mind. It's not a lot of money, but if you are high volume it can mean the difference in raising profit in your campaigns.
Worried about competitors clicking your ad? Can you find out their IP ( by setting up some kind of email to them and getting them click on a page and recording that ) or the specific city they are in? If so, grab that data and EXCLUDE it from their view.
Whew, so what about Facebook?
Glad you asked.
The process for Facebook isn't much different. The largest difference is that people on Facebook are not searching for your "it". They wanna see what their favorite celebrity had for dinner last night or what drama their ex is getting into tonight.
With that information, there are no keywords you are going to be bidding on. You are also going to put a lot more effort into your ad, especially the image, to "interrupt" what the user is currently doing to get their eyeballs on your message.
Facebook is more centered about demographics. You are going to be setting up campaigns based on geography, interests, education level, gender, age, and a whole slew of other options.
The most important thing to remember is that unlike Google and Bing/Yahoo, people are not looking for you or your product. Your ad image needs to grab attention and your ad text needs to bring home the bacon to get them to click.
With that said, Facebook can be some of the most profitable traffic that you can run in the right niches. Even 6 years ago, people were making 7 and 8 figures Net profit off Facebook traffic alone. They still do today...
On to some advanced Facebook stuff....
Too many people pick 1 or 2 targeting options. Maybe they pick age and gender, maybe an interest. You should be hyper-targeting people using all the options possible. To find out more about hyper-targeting in general, read the next post below in the Retargeting section/post.
When testing ages, do it in groups of 5 years. You shouldn't be making ads where you target men and women both in the same ad. You also shouldn't be selecting ages where it's 21-60. Build in groups of 5 years for age. One ad can be males 18-23 and another can be males 24-29. Same with women too. If you don't do this, you will never be really able to tell who is converting poorly or well for you.
Don't pick all the ad placement options when making an ad. Make one version of the ad for Desktop Right Side, and one for Mobile Newsfeed, and one for Desktop Newsfeed, etc. Reason is the same as above for conversions. There are reports you can pull, but I like to see my ads split up to ensure I am getting the correct data looking at the dashboard instead of pulling a report each time I want to check in on it.
If you know you have a solid ad and message, go for CPM bidding. Facebook knows they will make gar. money here and give you all the traffic they can.
I almost always bid CPC to start and I always bid at least 20% more than the highest range price they suggest. This is because the pricing changes during the day as budgets get activated due to day-parting or decline due to spending up all the funds. If you bid more than 20% the highest suggested range, you will cover yourself for when the price floor increases later in the day or week.
Power Editor within Facebook can give you more advertising options than what's available within the general user interface for ads. You need to learn to use this.
Custom audiences are probably the most underused bidding option in Facebook and prob. the most underused in all of PPC. Learn to use it ( see below for remarketing ).
A trick I learned is that if you make 1 ad and it goes live, it might do poorly. You can copy that ad exactly 10 more times, and 9 of them will also do poorly. However, the remaining ad might do exceptionally well and be profitable for you. I can't get into detail why this is, but if you have poor performing ads, it might not be your ad or message or demo targeting, it could just be Facebook being Facebook. I have losing campaigns that I went back and did nothing else but copy the ad exactly 100 times and pulled out big time winners from it by just doing this 1 weird trick.
Most ( but not all ) ad reps are worthless at Facebook. Think the front line customer service at Walmart. That's pretty much most of the front line reps at Facebook. If you have a rep that seems to take days to get back to you or just doesn't seem to "get it", ask for another and don't be shy about it. Their managers above them are who you want to deal with. Also, they almost NEVER NEVER give out their phone number to you. If you happen to get one, consider yourself lucky. Mostly, it's email only for communication. I think this policy is changing somewhat though.
People love checking Facebook while at work. Target your demo specifically for when they are at work. For most people this means 9am-5pm in their time zone. If your demo is ER nurses though, it very well might be at like 11pm on a Saturday night at the hospital. Know when your specific demo is online at Facebook.
If your ad gets disapproved, sometimes you can resubmit it later and have it get approved. Facebook does have an automated bot that checks ads, but there are manual approvals still as well. Depending on where your ad fell and if there is a shift change can mean the difference in a denial and an approval sometimes. There is a slim chance of this, most of the approvals are bot checked, but it's worth a try sometimes.
Did you know there are hidden demographic targeting options in Facebook? Even though I said most FB reps are useless, if you do have one you should ask them about these hidden options. I had unlocked some nice education and purchase options in my accounts that are not accessible in regular accounts. Yes, you have education and purchase behavior in yours too, but you don't have the ones I have.
Retargeting
Man, I love me some retargeting. You will find out why if you pay attention to the posts AFTER this one.
Retargeting is probably the most underused tool in PPC today. Sure, tons of people use it, but they use it in a very very cookie cutter way. I'll explain this cookie cutter method in this post, but you will see just how "out of the box" you can get in the posts afterward.
So what is Retargeting/Remarketing?
Basically, it's an ad network tagging you as part of a predefined group and then me purchasing that group for whatever reason I want. That's a 50,000-foot view of it.
More specifically, I can drop a cookie on you once you visit a site I own and then the ad networks I work with can later find that cookie when you browse sites they are partners with and show you another one of my ads. If you have ever been to Amazon.com and looked for a kitchen blender and not purchased, but then surfed the web an hour later, landed on CNN.com, and oddly seen an ad from Amazon about the SAME kitchen blender.. well, that's remarketing.
BTW, remarketing and retargeting are the same thing in case you got confused with my wording.
Knowing this, your creative juices should already be flowing enough to see this is a great way to win back customers that didn't purchase from you and help you reach out to them with another ad about what they were interested in. You already know this person looked at and possibly wanted something from you, but maybe today wasn't the right time to pull the trigger for them.
With remarketing, you can hit em up again with the SAME AD later today, tomorrow, or even next week ( on payday ) and get them back into your site before they forget about you.
That's pretty much the cookie-cutter approach to remarketing. This is what 99% of digital marketing agencies and in-house marketing specialist do for their clients and for themselves. Trust me on this, I've been an employee for several agencies, been in-house for multiple companies, and even consulted some pretty big brands and I have seen all the noob level stuff they have done and try to pass off as "cutting edge" when it comes to remarketing.
Pretty F*cking boring and ( at best ) mediocre.
Who offers remarketing services?
These days, pretty much everyone. Some of the most well-known are:
Facebook
Google
Adroll
Perfect Audience
It wasn't always this way. Remarketing was a huge feature once available only within media buys on certain exchanges. This is how I learned about it and learned how to use it before it was widely adopted.
Are there any cons?
Not so much con's against remarketing, but mostly against people not knowing what they are doing and not thinking things out with remarketing.
For example. I constantly get ads for a certain course I purchased months ago online.
I bought the course already, so quit showing me ads about how great it is and how I can lock in my lifetime price of just $197 if I buy today. I'm already a customer!
Even if I wasn't a customer. The fact you have been showing me these ads for 3 months straight, every single day, multiple times a day, tells me that someone isn't monitoring frequency cap/rate and LTV. You probably have spent more advertising to me than you would ever make if I did convert 3 months after my initial visit.
Listen, you have to be smart about this.
Turn off remarketing when your prospect does their intended action.
Know when most of your customers convert and stop serving them ads if they haven't converted after that time frame.
I'm not a baker, I don't want cookie-cutter remarketing!
So what are some awesome ways to use remarketing? I'll list some ideas out below:
How about thanking your customer after purchasing? Once they purchase, you put them into a "paid" group and start remarketing them with 1-2 ads tops thanking them. Do this only 1 time though for your customer. Having paid customers in a group serves many more purposes ( if your smart ) than just thanking them....
If you offer a membership or service and your customer has signed up, but not performed an important action ( like logging in the last 30 days ), put them into a special group and remarket them to ask them if they need help logging back in and that you miss them! This is a complex step so what you would do is default them into group 1 to begin with, and set the remarketing to start in 30 days. If they log in before the 30 days hits, they trigger another pixel that moves them to group 2 that doesn't have those ads. Some networks offer advanced ways to combine and exclude custom groups to get the right mix of actions you need to achieve this.
Offer your "thank you" page customers, or paid customers, another similar service you are an affiliate of weeks later. Tell them how you found an incredible "thing" they just can't live without.
Promote your upsells and cross-sells via remarketing.
Work for an auto dealership? How about reminding your customers every 90 days it's time for an oil change at your service shop?
Work for a company that takes payments online every 30 days? How about reminding your delinquent customers it's time to pay their bill.
Remarketing an item to customer who put an item into their cart and then abandoned the cart
Remarketing people who did a custom site search on your site for an item and didn't put that item in their cart. Your ads could say "Were you still looking for X"?
Hyper-target your remarketing. Instead of hitting up everyone and anyone that comes to your site and browses around, target only those people who are truly interested in you, your products, and can actually afford them. Facebook is the only platform I know that does this, but when you make your ads you can select your remarketing pool ( let's say everyone that looked at product X or page Y ) and then refine your ad to only people who have interest in your industry ( because interest targeting is allowed on Facebook ) and who are in the demographics that are most likely to convert for you ( maybe its women over 35 who make over $100,000 a year ). Using all 3 of these on the same ad makes a very laser focused ad to a set group of people that should convert highly if you set it up right.
So here is an example for Hyper-Targeting. I'm trying to pull in leads for a university and I have remarketing set up on my landing pages. My remarketing code might be on all of my pages for this university which would include all the degrees, financial aid, and more.
I wanna target only people interested in a RN to BSN degree so I start working with that remarketing pool of people that hit my RN to BSN landing page. I go into Facebook and create my new ad only targeting people that are in my audience of people that hit my RN to BSN lander, but didn't hit my thank you page (which would mean it was people that already converted into a lead).
This is where most methods of remarketing stop.
But I am going to further hyper-target and refine my ad to where it ALSO only focuses on those same people that have an interest in things like Nursing, RN, ER Nurse, Critcal Care Nursing, and many other nurse related topics. This ensures that out of all the people in my remarketing pool that hit my nursing page, I am going to be showing ads to those people who are currently interested in this topic, not just people that might have a passing interest in maybe being a nurse and kicking the thought around.
Now for the 3rd refinement to my ad. I am also going to tell Facebook that now I want to hit up only the demographics from the other refinements where the person is a female and at least 25 years of age. This just happens to be the demographic that happens to actually enroll in a RN to BSN degree at the university that I consult with.
Now, I am pretty much guaranteed that my ad is only going to be seen by people who want a BSN degree ( because they did hit my page ), who either are currently a RN nurse or have a strong interest in it ( because of their interests within FB ), are the right age for online adult distance learning ( people under 25 typically are not ), and are the gender that most likely converts into students when I pull them in ( yeah, it might be sexist, but its pretty much all females ).
In doing this, I weed out all the males, anyone 12-24 years of age that isn't a right fit for whatever reason ( like the high school junior just browsing options for the career counselor at their school ), and people who aren't a current Nurse or don't have a strong interest in it ( maybe it's just someone considering it who's currently stuck in a dead end job ). I probably cut at least 40% of my remarketing pool down, but at least I won't be spending money on people that aren't the perfect fit for being a potential student.
My CTRs are pretty amazing using this technique with the right ads. It isn't enough to just remarket everyone that hits your page because you have a lot of tire kickers, competitors, and people that might just hit your page for no reason ( like a bot ).
Most times, you probably already paid for this person ( via a campaign on Google or Bing ). Knowing this, be picky about how you spend your money with remarketing and pay for only those clicks you know are the most qualified. Also, show them a different message this time around as there is a reason they didn't become a lead/sale the first time around.
I can hear many of you telling me that remarketing isn't free, so why would you spend more money for several of the things above?
It's because you can and no one else is doing it. You should be running a proper business that makes enough coin that you can do what no one else is doing so that your customers remember your brand over others.
If I bought something from you and then an hour later I see an ad on Facebook from you thanking me, I'm gonna be pretty blown away and wow'd. I'll probably end up a loyal customer to your brand because you went the extra mile. The extra $1 you spent on me will probably Net you a lot more coin than that over my lifetime with you.
Pay-Per-View
Often times PPV is overlooked for the dazzle and the glam that is PPC within the Big 3 ( Adwords, Facebook, Bing/Yahoo ).
Sooo, what actually is Pay-Per-View?
No, it's not that channel you rent secretly on TV while staying in a hotel during Affiliate Summit.
Typically, PPV is pop up traffic where someone lands on a URL and then gets a pop-up ad within a few seconds. I know, I know.. you are probably thinking those annoying pop ups like when you get Rick Rolled or you hit a spammy biz-op page.
This is sorta like that, but the pop up doesn't come from the URL you visited, it comes from software you agreed to ahead of time to serve you advertisements.
So think about a free anti-virus download app or ebook that you install on your computer and half way through the install they ask you to install a new browser or app to keep the download free. Once you agree to this, the software silently watches over your browser and records what URL you are visiting and serves up a pop-up ad when it has a good advertiser match for that URL.
Now, why on earth would you want to purchase traffic like this?
I'll give you an example of a past campaign I ran and let's see if you can figure it out in your head.
Long ago, I had a hot offer in the colon rebill niche. I knew a few other hot colon offers on the market, so I went to my competitors and pretended to be a potential customer and signed up for bottles of their products.
I got to the very last page before I needed to input my credit card and I recorded the URL of JUST that page. Lets say that the URLs were similar to trybromalite.net/purchase.php?affid=4006
I then went to several PPV networks and bid .005 cents on those URLs I recorded. Yes, that's half a cent ( in USD ).
See, I knew that millions of people had this "Adware" software on their computers and I also knew at some point they would stumble onto one of my competitors offers because my competitors were buying ads all over Facebook, Adwords, on LARGE media buys, on Plenty of Fish, etc.
I figured I would let my competitors do the heavy work of advertising and convincing the customer of buying a colon product and that I could simply bid on their credit card sign up URL when those customers whipped out their credit cards. All I needed to do was pop up my ad at the last second convincing them purchase my colon product instead for less.
Sometimes my ad would have audio playing that would scream out "Stop, hold on a second for a special 1-time offer!". Then my page would pop up and just happen to look exactly like my competitors page with my credit card form and "reduced price special".
Paying .005 for that exact moment in time was like shooting fish in a barrel.
I was probably the only person doing this back in the day. I even went as far to ask my TrafficVance rep ( the VP of the company ) if anyone else was targeting sign up or thank you pages and she said she didn't know of anyone else doing it. The fact that I was paying the cheapest price possible and no one ever bid with me or above me on those URLs also confirmed no one else was doing this at that time as me.
Why do people install this adware?
They typically get something in exchange for free like software. Generally, its some kid in the household wanting an app or game and they install the Adware on the computer. Later on, little Jimmy's mom and dad use the computer and get the pop ups.
It's just bidding on URLs?
Nah, that's just one of the options.
You can actually bid on keywords so when a user lands on page and that page contains the keyword, your ad can pop up if they hover over that keyword.
You can bid on full URLs, parts of URLs, or even just letters. I had campaigns where I would bid on bits and pieces of URL sections like:
/thank-you.php
.com/motors
ww.doe.m
I can't tell you why I bid on those EXACT strings as it would give away too much campaign juice, but I will tell you that if you get creative, you can find lots of ways to pop up your ad to the right users.
Think of footprints in common CMS's or e-commerce systems....
OK, so what are the cons?
If you get on a popular ( high volume ) URL or keyword, you can blow $5,000 in a few minutes.
Don't try targeting amazon.com, cnn.com or a string that might match those like zon.com or www.
Competition is also very very fierce. Being first or second in the bidding pool is critical for a lot of advertisers. A fraction of a penny is all it takes to grab the #1 spot when it's time to get your ad popped and people fight over this so much that it has lead to specific bidding tools being made just to go into your accounts, monitor the high bid, and adjust it by .005 higher if you are not the highest bidder already.
This drives bids up like mad and unless you have one of these tools and can f5 every few seconds, you are out of luck. If you do have one of these tools, you might find yourself paying well over $1 a pop-up.
Spy tools have also came along and jacked up your spend.
Yes, they are very very hard to make ( unless you have the right info ) but I actually developed one of the first spy tools on the market for PPV and kept it to myself for years. Every time there was a pop up on my tool, someone just got charged money for me to spy on what they were doing.
Renting
Renting might be a bad name for this, but these strategies don't really fit under the other sections...
Have you ever thought about just making private deals with people instead of going to an established network?
Renting email lists
Many site owners collect emails and would be more than happy to strike a deal with you to send your message to their list.
I've done deals where I have offered % of sales, paid for email signups, paid per open, and even paid flat rates with simply approaching someone in the same or similar industry and striking a deal with them to send out an email for me to their list.
Not only can you pay them to briefly mention you in their normal emails, but you can also pay for them to send out an email entirely about you... or sponsor a series of emails.
Maybe you even work out a deal where you promote their product and they promote you.
In the end, I love this method because I bypass ranking, approvals, and other BS and get straight to getting good emails and people seeing my message.
Need to know where to find people that will strike email deals with you?
Probably the best place is to reach out to those in similar industries as you that serve the same demo as you.
Another great resources is actually your favorite CPA network. Yeah, you probably don't know this, but every CPA network worth their salt has an internal mailing department/operation. Reach out to your network and strike a deal with them to send out your email message to their list.
Renting Forums
Many times you can hit the forums your traffic frequents and purchase temporary sticky threads. These look a lot like normal threads, but they are all about you and your offer and are "pinned" to the top of the forum so everyone see's them. They never move down until you stop paying and are a great way to get eyeballs on your message.
Another idea is to find top posters on those forums and offer to purchase their signature space. Many times you can rent out the signature area for cheap and get many eyeballs seeing your banner over and over again because you banner will be seen on all their new posts AND their old posts.
Lastly, you can even decide to purchase a new "theme" or skin for the forum. Typically this is done by hiring a designer who is experienced in creating forum skins. The designer will create a new color scheme for the forum ( that goes with your product or company color scheme ) and also rebrand the forum with your advertising. You give the new skin to the forum owner and agree to pay them to use the skin for 30-120 days.
Renting Demos
So this is a method I haven't seen anyone talking about and yes, I will claim I am the first person to try this and talk about it publically. I came up with this idea back in 2007, so if someone did this before me, well... I don't know you.
I wanted a way to reach a certain demo without paying for ads via Adwords. I figured I could just Google the term I wanted traffic from, reach out to site owners that ranked well, and pay them for placing my ads directly on their sites.
The thought was, why pay Adwords to show my ads on the display network when I didn't even know if these sites had legit traffic? What if I just typed in the keywords I wanted traffic for and looked at who ranked top 10 and contact each of those sites and see if I could work out a CPM or CPM deal with them directly. By doing this, I knew I was paying for traffic on sites I knew were ranking for the terms I wanted traffic from and the traffic would be legit search engine traffic, the best kind of traffic of all.
BUT, THATS NOT MY METHOD.
Yeah, it's not.
That's where a lot of you thought I was going. But why in the hell should I waste time making ads? What if I found an awesome site to partner with, but they don't want to clutter up their page with ads? What if who I am dealing with is a direct competitor and there is no way in hell they are going to put up my ad.
Well, here is where I pretty much dominated my competition and stole a lot of their organic search engine customers while never once ranking my site in Google against them.
I approached the sites and offered to pay them based on CPM to place my PIXEL on their site.
Yeah, a pixel.
No ads cluttering up their site, no competitor telling me no, and no split testing to find a CTA.
I simply told them I would pay them $2 per 1,000 impressions that my pixel triggered from their site. My pixel was just a piece of Javascript that sat on their page just like any ol Google Analytics pixel would.
Uh?
This wasn't just any pixel, it was a remarketing pixel.
I was building up a highly targetted audience of the best visitors ever for less than $2 per 1,000 unique impressions. What would you pay for someone that just typed in "buy weight loss pills" from Google and now you have them in a remarketing list that you can hit over and over and over again for life?
The great thing is, I could do this over and over with new sites every time an algo update or manual penalty hit a SERP. I didn't give any thought to buying blackhat links, who were my competitors, doing SEO audits, or trying to hit top 3 on the first page. I let other people do the work and cry out the tears and sweat. I came in on their coat-tails and enjoyed the ride with them like a parasitic leech.
The best advertisers were my competitors that I got lots of juicy traffic from. They only knew me as "John Greene" that wanted to make a CPM deal with them which did not clutter up their site with ads. They probably thought I was some dumb noob that they were gonna make a few hundred dollars off of... if they only knew!
Every time one of my "advertisers" got hit with a penalty, I just found the new guys ranking on page one and made the same deal over and over.
Of course, not everyone did the deal and some of them were very big brands that weren't going to do a deal like this anyways. Point is, you gotta get out there and try and see who plays ball with you.
Affiliate Program Owner
So you want to be with the big boys now and offer your product out to affiliates?
Congrats on leveling up in life Mario.
While many people do not consider having their own affiliate program a part of PPC or Paid Advertising, it actually is. All that is happening is you are getting clicks ( from affiliates ) and then paying out for an event ( like CPA, CPS, revshare, etc ). It's really no different than if you ran ads on Google or Facebook, except you probably won't pay on a CPM or CPC basis.
A lot of people skip having an affiliate program. They think it's too hard and involves a lot of work.
However, there are 3rd parties who can make the transition easy for you... as long as you pay them.
Who can help me set up an affiliate program?
Several companies I know off the bat are:
Linkshare
Commission Junction / CJ
ClickBank
ShareASale
JVZoo
You can skip having a 3rd party help you and ( if you have WordPress ) set up an affiliate program with plugins like:
Post Affiliate Pro
iDev Affiliate
Even standalone scripts like Amember can help you set up an affiliate program of your own.
Going at it alone.
I've personally done it by myself and also went through 3rd parties.
The awesome thing about setting up your own is that anything you dream up, can be done!
Typically, you are going to have to set up tracking for each of your affiliates and figure out a login system and other essentials if you do not use a pre-scripted plugin like Post Affiliate Pro.
However, this is where I drop a bomb on you. One that pretty much spearheaded a company I worked for into the stratosphere and took them from doing $6MM in yearly revenues to over $30MM.
I'm never happy with a situation or deal unless I get tremendous upside from it.
In planning out the affiliate program for a company I was employed with, I decided to go it alone and build one that suited us perfectly. This was the mid-2000's and there really wasn't any plugins and 3rd party help except a few newcomers.
I decided that since I was building my own affiliate system, I could change all the rules and bend them to my will.
Instead of giving each affiliate a URL with a variable that would just 301 or 302 redirect into another URL ( Example, mydomain.com/index.php?affid=318 which would redirect into mydomain.com/index.php ), I simply let them link to whatever page on my site they wanted.
I had thousands of products, which meant thousands of pages.
My affiliates could link to any product page they wanted with nothing else needed for me to track their sales. If they wanted to link to me and make a sale for a certain product, they didn't need to know a special URL with their affiliate ID and the product page ID, they just linked to me like any site would normally link to me. So if a product on my site had a URL of mydomain.com/med/emg/defib.php, all the affiliate needed to do was just link to mydomain.com/med/emg/defib.php and get a sale.
Ugh?
See, when you bend ideas to your will and imagination.. you no longer have to play by everyone else's rules and standards.
Once an affiliate signed up to the program I developed, all they needed to do was submit the sites they would be promoting us on. This is similar to what eBay does now days for many of their affiliates where they want to know the sites you promote their product on.
If you registered your site/domain with me as an affiliate, all I needed to do is then track the referring domain via PHP when a customer visited my site. If that referrer matched what I had in my affiliate logs, then I know to credit any potential sale from this visitor to you. All I needed to do then is drop a cookie on them and let them browse my site and credit you with the sale.
Oh I get it. - No, actually you don't
So why did I go through the trouble of reinventing the wheel for affiliate tracking?
Because I just got an upside in the whole deal.
Now, I don't just get sales... I get SEO value from you linking to possibly hundred of pages on my site in the most natural and non-spammy ways that are free of any possible 301/302 redirect penalties and future proofing most of my SEO linking strategy. You are linking directly to my site and nothing looks odd about it within the link itself.
I killed 2 birds with 1 stone.
See, most 3rd parties are going to make you use their link from their domain to track your affiliates sales, which means now that link is going from the affiliate's sites, to the 3rd party's domain, to finally your site. Several redirects and another domain having to pass any juice ( if they had even set it up that way ) and also not being very future proof SEO friendly.
In my design, every affiliate was an SEO partner and I helped create a mountain of links that were deep within my site and built up over time by other people.
The beauty in this was that I paid almost nothing to most of them for this work.
In the affiliate world, only 10% of the affiliates will produce 90% of the income. So for every 100 people I had promoting my goods, only 10 of them actually brought in sales that amounted to a monthly payout.
The other 90 affiliates tried. They sent in maybe 1 sale or 2, but these would happen spread out over months at a time. However, all 90 of them still had to link to me from their sites to even register those sales. Many of them never sent in a sale, but I still had my site linked on their sites.
This is how you create an upside for yourself and how you generate sales AND SEO value at the same time. This is why you should always trust your gut and do whatever it is you wanna do.
See, I don't build affiliate programs to earn money ( which is always nice, I'll take it ), I build them to get free links and to boost my site to the top of Google and then take 100% of those organic sales I now get from the ranking. Most people build affiliate programs to end up relying on 10% of their affiliates that they have to share 50% of the profits with. And those affiliate can leave your program anytime they want and leave you with nothing afterward.
Always look for an upside and take it every chance you get.
Media Buys
Man, anyone can do a media buy. But so many of you pass this up thinking you have to lay out tons of money in order to do one.
Sometimes you want to advertise on a site but they don't have a self-serve ad system in place. This is where a media buy would come into play and the way you setup the media buy is with an Insertion Order ( also called an I/O ).
Back in the day, Plenty Of Fish didn't have an ad system where you could sign up and start buying clicks. You had to do a media buy with them.
Some of the largest exchanges didn't have self-serve ad platforms and you had to do a media buy with them as well. Companies like Synacor, Turn, Zedo, Burst Media, and many many others. You would have missed out on a ton of traffic that Google and Facebook couldn't even reach and sometimes still don't reach today.
Wanna promote an offer to Jewish people and you want to hit the sites they frequent the most? You're gonna have to do a media buy with a company that owns a large portfolio of Jewish-themed sites.
OK, so tell me about this Insertion Order deal.
In a nutshell, it's just a contract outlining who does what and when.
It will spell out when payment is due, how it is due, what the network offers you and under what conditions all the terms are bound to. It's actually pretty simple once you do a few on your own.
Probably the most important things you want in your I/O are the following:
Even Spend - This tells the ad network you want your budget spend to be evenly spent over the duration of the contract.
Let's pretend you signed a $100k I/O with a network and the length of time on the contract is 30 days.
Let's also pretend that you get started and spend $10k on the first day and you see it's not working out. You inform the network and they agree to cancel the IO, but they need a 96-hour notice to do so. You agree ( because you are bound to the I/O anyways ) and in 96 hours they spend the rest of the $90k on the I/O balance.
If you had an Even Spend agreement in place, your first day's balance would have only been $3,333 dollars ( $100k / 30 days ) and not $10k. Also, the next 96 hours would have only spent $13,333. You wouldn't have lost $100k, but at most maybe $16.6k total
Big difference.
24 Hour Out - You can't reasonably expect to give notice you want to cancel the I/O and have the reps at the ad network immediately jump at your whim and do it. A lot of networks have wild notice clauses that are designed to make them money, but also allow them time to actually stop the ads too.
If you would have had a 24 Hour Out clause in the above situation, you might have lowered your $16.6k loss to only $6,666.
Above The Fold - You don't really want to pay for ads that are not being seen below the fold do you?
There are lots of other things too, like day-parting, demographic targeting, if you are doing RON ( run of network ) or selected pages/sites in their network, frequency capping, and much more.
However, this is a crash course and trying to touch on everything is a bit out of scope for this post. The important thing to remember is that with any contract, pretty much everything is negotiable.
But don't let the little things like day-parting keep you from not doing a media buy just because I didn't cover it here. If you follow the 3 points above and get a 24 hour out clause, an even spend clause, and make sure your ads are above the fold, you minimize a lot of the failure and hesitation people have with media buys without having to have a million dollar budget to test the waters.
Give me an example.
Ok. A lot of networks don't want to deal with small buyers. If you only have $6k to test the waters with, the ad networks that do media buys might turn you down. I am not saying all of them will, but here is how you can use an I/O to your advantage.
Simply tell them you want to do a $1MM dollar I/O over 365 days.
If you put into place an Even Spend and 24 Hour Out clause, you can test the network for 1 day and only spend $2800. You give them notice and they have 24 hours to cancel on their end. At worse, it takes them all day to do it and your only out a total of $5600. If you also had in place to be above the fold, then you just got a lot of great data to decide what you are going to do next on this media buy ( keep going with a 2nd one, or find another network ).
That's a very simple overview. Some networks will run a credit check/check your Dun & Bradstreet number to ensure you have the funds and reputation for paying you say you do, but a lot of them don't. However, if you actually try to pull off a 7 figure media buy.. they will more than likely check if you can actually pay.
So what's the least amount of money I can spend?
Well, that depends on who you are working with. If you are working with a small site without much of a presence, it could be as little as $500 maybe.
Larger exchanges and sites really aren't going to want to deal with you if you only have $500 and if you offer up a $1MM I/O spread out over 5 years, they will probably just ignore you.
There is no right answer to this question because you could do a media buy with anyone over anything. At that level, it is just all dependent on the deal you strike and testing out the waters.
Aside: Deal making is an art you really need to master. If you are new to deal marketing, I suggest you read this book ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345479173/?tag...nparser-20 ) this is not an affiliate link. After you read it, find a few others that are more recent in Amazon and learn how to make REAL deals, not just accept street deals from people.
Some places do have minimums in place and won't budge on their I/O's.
At the end of the day it is going to come down to pulling up your big boi britches and testing out the waters to see who will take what. There is no point in discussing this point unless you are out there asking questions and trying to strike deals, then pivoting on the ones that didn't work out and trying again.
Some things you need to know.
There are a lot of terms that get thrown around in dealing with I/O's. Below are some of the more common ones:
RON - Run of Network. Basically bottom of the barrel, but you can still be profitable with it. You are gonna be put on any and all places they can fit your ad. This is good for branding and the CPM is always way cheaper for this option. However, it's not the best if you are looking for performance.
Rate Card - Street prices for their CPM/CPC. Never pay this amount.
Flight Date - The duration of the I/O. If you set up that your ad run for 3 months, that's a 12 week Flight or Flight Date.
ATF - Above the Fold. Your ads aren't buried at the bottom of the page where no one see's them but you still get charged CPM for them.
Frequency Cap - how many times a visitor see's your ad. Say I visit a site and see your ad right now, then I see it 4 more times later today on the same site. That's a frequency rate of 4 in a 24 hour period. Time periods differ per network, but I try to aim for no more than 3 in a 24 hour period. That's just my personal choice though.. buy data and comb through the data to find your own sweet spot for your own campaigns.
Ad server - You don't want to bill off the ad network's numbers if you can help it. Set up your own ad server ( ask the network for names of ad servers they are comfortable with using ) and then have them bill off those numbers. This is to protect you from getting ripped off and to validate the numbers being produced and billed for.
Unit - Generic name for a piece of advertising. A unit could be a 30-second commercial, a half page ad, a full ad, horizontal banner ad, etc.
Being exclusive - This can happen, really. I know a few networks that just killed it for me back in the day and they did so well that I actually struck a deal to buy up all their ad inventory. This allowed me a "moat" that pretty much promised me profits as long as I could pay the bill and keep product shipping out the door.
Just imagine if you found an awesome media buy and then bought up all the inventory to where no one else could come in and take it over from you. Now imagine doing the same thing with your product or affiliate offer ( if you are an affiliate ) and being the only person who can sell this product and also being the only person advertising on a network of sites. It's guaranteed profit.
No more having to battle with people coming in and buying up the advertising and raising the costs up. No more copy-cat competitors buying the same ad space as you and trying to sell the same product cheaper.
You just leveled up my friend and the competition is now made irrelevant.
Wrapping Up
Not much to say here. I hope you got through all of the posts and got some good overviews and golden nuggets from them.
Most of the gems I shared aren't talked about in those "Guru" ebooks, $10k coaching events, private paid forums, or even in those exclusive Skype groups. How do I know? I've probably paid for every Udemy course, ebook, private forum, training event, and begged my way into those same Skype groups only to be disappointed by the BS that goes on within them.
The fact is, the real gems are only known by the "doer's" of the world. The doer's are the ones that come up with, find, and exploit all these methods. It's not the "readers" of the world or the "teachers" of the world. Only the "doer's"
You can't find a sunken ship full of gold coins off the coast of Spain if you aren't the one out there looking for it, diving for it, and exploring the coastline for it DAILY. The doers of the world hold all the secrets.
Those that are doer's, are hardly ever teachers. The very small select that do end up teaching, never give away their true secrets for $197 or even $10k because the real golden gems can make multiple millions of dollars and just why would you share that with potential competitors?
Most of the things being pushed for $97 monthly, $197 one time, or at a $10k coaching event are hardly ever put together by the real "doer's". Sure those "gurus" are doers in the fact they're "doing" an event, but most of them aren't the grunt work "doer's" and most of them aren't giving you the gold nuggets either that could pit you against them in a few months time. Sadly, a lot of them are just pushing out content they got somewhere else themselves, like a book or seminar they attended and repackaged to now sell to you.
The best thing you can do to learn more about paid advertising is to participate daily in losing money and finding out why you lost that money in the first place. The next day, learn from your mistakes and correct course.
