One of the most important aspects when starting a new promotion with pay per click (via AdWords, Yahoo!, MSN, and others) is determining how much you should bid when setting your maximum cost per click (CPC).  This is a topic that is often wondered about and rarely discussed – because there is no definitive answer.  However, we can narrow down the options and back into the numbers to arrive at a starting bid when getting your new PPC campaign up and running.

What Google says about setting a maximum CPC

The guidance that we get from Google is vague at best.  Here is what they have to say about setting your maximum CPC:

The bid you set is entirely up to you. Your maximum CPC bid should be the amount you’re comfortable spending per click, taking into account your sales objectives and the amount of exposure or site traffic you’re looking for. The more you bid, the better the chances that your ad will appear frequently. – Google AdWords Help

What you need to determine your starting max CPC

One of the best ways to determine how much to set your bids at when starting a new pay per click (PPC) is to back into the numbers using goals and benchmarks.  To do this, you will want to examine several different things:

• Conversion rate – The standard number when trying estimating conversions for a product that you have no history with is 1%.  However, you will want to be conservative with your numbers, so let’s assume a 0.75% (three quarters of a percent) conversion rate.  It may be higher, and if it is, you will be all that much better off.
• Profit per sale – You need to know how much money you will make (in profit) when you make a sale.  If you don’t know exactly how much – use a rough figure using your best judgment.  If you have several products, taking an average is often the best way to approach this.

Calculating your starting maximum CPC

Now that you have identified a conversion rate to use and your profit per sale, you can calculate your beginning maximum cost per click. I highly recommend using Scott Bourch’s free max CPC calculator that allows you to input your profit and conversion rate that then calculates how many visitors per conversion and your max CPC.  In our example, it gives us the following results:

We’re not quite finished

As you can see, with a 0.75% conversion on a $20 item we can afford $0.08 just to break even.  However, since you are trying this campaign for the first time, we want to increase the bid.  Our goal is to get clicks and get some sales to see where our conversion rate will end up settling.

We will use the numbers above as a benchmark and reference to give us a good idea of where we need to be, and will adjust accordingly over the life of the campaign.  To set our bid, I recommend choosing a high number that you are comfortable with and then slowly decreasing your bids.  In the example here, I would probably start with a multiple of 5 or 6 times our estimated bid to begin with ($0.40 – $0.50).  Everyone is different and has different views on whether to begin – however, I have used this method very successfully across several campaigns to get them started.

Tweaking and testing

Whatever you end up going with for your initial bid, your goal is to increase conversions.  It does not matter whether you pay $0.10 per click or $10.00 per click as long as your conversion rate can justify the cost.

Related posts:

1. 14 Tips & Strategies to Increase Your AdWords Click-Through Rate (CTR)
2. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs
3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Tools

When starting out in the pay-per-click (PPC) world you will more than likely be directed to the big three PPC search engines – Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter (Bing), and Yahoo! Search Marketing.  The reason that these three are used most often is because of the quality of the traffic and the volume that they are able to deliver.  However, there are many alternatives to the “Big 3″ that can help you drive more traffic and make more money.

We have rounded up some of the largest PPC search engine companies along with what it costs to get started (the inital deposit) and their minimum bid requirements.  Please note, that the success  you will see with each varies greatly and you want to track and monitor them so that you are seeing a return on what you are spending.

Related posts:

1. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs
2. SEO Blogs
3. Understanding Broad, Phrase, & Exact Keyword Match Types

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, blogger, or business owner, one of the keys to growing your income is by capitalizing on the successes that you have.  If you find something that is working for you, try to make it better and build off of that success.  The idea is very similar to business models built around scalability that allow you to expand rapidly to gain more visitors, revenue, or business.

There’s no success too small

When attempting to capitalize on your successes, there is nothing that is too small.  If there is even a glint of hope or promise shown in something that you are doing – you can build upon that to reap larger rewards.

Imagine you ran a promotion that gained you only 5 new RSS subscribers, newsletter signups, or customers.  While you might think that this might be too low of a number to spend your time trying to improve – it is exactly these instances that can propel you towards success.

There is one product in particular that I was promoting on one of my sites, that was making a few sales a month.  After forcing myself to sit down and put some effort into scaling that success, I now sell 1-5 products every single day with a commission payout of about $20.  This isn’t a boat load of money, but it now adds up to an extra $500 – $1,000 per month in passive income.

Even a glimmer of hope can be successful

Sometimes even the tiniest glimmer of something that shows hope is worth trying out.  The top affiliate marketers will tell you that with many campaigns, you will lose money in the beginning promoting an offer.  However, after tweaking and testing you can turn that offer into a cash-making machine that almost feels like you’re printing money.

You simply need to capitalize on any successes you have – no matter how big or small.

Related posts:

1. Using Contextual Links to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Income
2. Cross-Selling Your Content With Related Posts & Pages
3. Success is Cumulative: Take Things One Step at a Time

Advertising your site with pay per click (PPC) marketing can be an extremely financially-rewarding method of generating more income.  Whether you’re new to PPC or you’re a seasoned expert, one of the easiest ways to realize more profits is to reduce the amount of money that you are spending on PPC.  Reducing your PPC spending sounds easy but it takes continuous tweaking and testing to keep your costs low in order to benefit from the reduced spending.  Many often take the quick and easy route of simply lowering their daily budget or maximum cost per click (CPC).  While lowering your spending will result in a decrease in costs, you are also sacrificing your exposure and volume.  For example: Instead of spending $10 per day to make $11 you are now spending $5 to make $5.50 and simply spreading your money over a longer time frame for the same results.

How can you reduce PPC costs?

There are many ways you can effectively reduce or lower your pay per click costs.  Some of these methods will work for you, and some won’t – but if you continually tweak and test your PPC campaigns you can really lower your spending and put more money in your pocket:

1. Try Different Match Types

   Test the various match types in your campaign.  In AdWords, try your keywords on broad, phrase, and exact match.  In Yahoo!, try standard and advanced options for match types.  Just trying each keyword as each match type can help lower your spending.

2. Use Negative Keywords

   You could potentially be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on keywords that aren’t generating revenue.  Try implementing negative keywords to refine your search terms to only those that produce a positive return on your spending.

3. Increase Your Click-Through Rate

   AdWords rewards higher click-through rates with higher positions on the page and a lower cost per click.

4. Lower Your Bids

   One of the fastest and easiest ways to lower your costs is to lower your bids.  While this seems simple and straightforward, you need to approach this method cautiously, gently lower your bids, and track your results.  If you lower your bids too much you will see much lower volume for keywords that are potentially high converting for you.

5. Try Dayparting

   Different industries have different times of the day or week that convert better than others.  Try showing ads during the times that you have the most conversions to capitalize on buyer habits.

6. Increase Your Quality Score

   In AdWords (not other PPC search engines) your quality score can have a huge impact on what you are paying per click.  By getting your quality score as high as possible you can tremendously reduce your costs.

7. Keep a Tight Focus

   One of the best ways to reduce your PPC costs long-term is to keep a tight focus on your entire account.  From keywords to ads to landing pages, group similar content together to create the most relevant and targeted campaigns.

Test & Tweak

The tips above will help you get started lowering your costs for your pay per click campaigns, but it’s up to you to test and tweak each one to create a campaign that delivers the best results.  While these methods are somewhat broad in their coverage, I have used each of these ways many times to make a profitable campaign generate more revenue – or take an unprofitable campaign to profitability.

Related posts:

1. Negative Keywords: Target & Convert
2. Understanding Broad, Phrase, & Exact Keyword Match Types
3. Setting Your Cost Per Click (CPC) When Starting a New PPC Campaign

Negative keywords are an excellent way to curb your spending and drive better-targeted traffic to your site.  While broad, phrase, and exact match types allow you to target certain search terms – negative keywords allow you to refine your results so you aren’t receiving unnecessary or unqualified visitors.

Negative keywords are included in your campaign by adding a minus sign in front of the keywords you would like to filter out, and you can use them at the ad group or campaign level.

Advertiser Education: Negative Keywords

Google has put together an excellent overview of what negative keywords are, and how they can help you.

Why should you use negative keywords?

There are several reasons to use negative keywords, not only in your AdWords campaign – but all of your PPC campaigns:

• Reduce your spending – When you use negative keywords you are refining your search terms so that you are only bidding on those keywords that are relevant and help you meet your goals
• Higher quality visitors – Negative keywords can bring you higher quality visitors who are searching for what you offer because you are filtering out the non-relevant and non-converting keywords.

Related posts:

1. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs
2. Understanding Broad, Phrase, & Exact Keyword Match Types
3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Tools

Something that many people are unaware of when setting up their AdWords account is the ability to set different “match types” for each keyword.

According to Google, keyword match types allow you to:

“…determine which Google searches can trigger your ads to appear. These options can help you control who sees your ads.”

Many times when setting up or running an account we simply enter the keywords, write the ads, and spend some money driving traffic.  However, you can needlessly be spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on keywords that do not benefit your site, cost you extra money, or may not even be relevant to what your site offers.

Using the 3 keyword match types in AdWords

There are three match types that we are going to cover to help you refine your targeting and be more efficient with your AdWords spending.  In your account, you will want to try each of these three variations for each keyword so you can see which are converting the best and which offer the best return on your investment.  To differentiate each match type in your account, you have three ways to style your keywords:

• your keyword = broad match
• “your keyword” = phrase match
• [your keyword] = exact match

Broad Match

As its name implies, the broad match type gives your keywords the most coverage and allows you to cast the widest net.  Any search that a visitor conducts that uses your keyword will trigger your ads to be displayed.

If you are bidding on the keyword airplanes with broad match, your ads would be displayed for the following terms (as an example) and any search that includes the keyword airplanes:

• blue airplanes
• cheap blue airplanes
• airplanes for free
• yellow airplanes with gears

Phrase Match

A little more targeted than broad match, the phrase match option will only display your ads if a particular phrase or word you have specified is searched.

Using red airplanes as our keyword, you ads would be displayed for the following terms (as an example) and any search that includes the particular phrase red airplanes.  With this match type option, you keyword must be in quotation marks (i.e. “your keyword”):

• cheap red airplanes
• red airplanes for sale
• cheap red airplanes for sale
• find red airplanes

Exact Match

The most targeted and specific match type for your keywords is exact match.  Your ads will only display when someone searches for the exact term you are bidding on.

Exact match keywords are enclosed in brackets and would appear in your account like this: [your keyword].  If you are bidding on the term red airplanes and it is set to exact match, your ads will only be displayed when someone searches exactly for red airplanes.

• red airplanes

Match types overview

I recommend trying all three options to see which performs the best for you.  Many people suggest to only use phrase and exact match but I have found with several campaigns that broad match performed better than the others, which is why you should test it on your own to see which works.

Related posts:

1. Negative Keywords: Target & Convert
2. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs
3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Tools

Quite often, even the slightest changes to your PPC ads can have a dramatic effect on your click-through rate (CTR) and overall performance of your campaigns.  Testing your display URL is one of the easiest ways to increase your click through rate because you will use the same headline and description in your ads and you will only have to test the way your website address is displayed.  Your display URL is the website address that people searching will see displayed in your ad.

The amazing part of your display URL is how much of an impact it can actually have on your ads’ performance.  I have personally seen increases of several percentage points by simply testing various display URLs.

8 PPC Display URL Variations to Test

In this example we’re going to look at the different ways (it’s surprising how many there are) of how you can display your website address in PPC campaigns:

• YourDomain.com
• yourdomain.com
• YourDomain.com/Page
• yourdomain.com/page
• www.YourDomain.com
• www.yourdomain.com
• www.yourdomain.com/Page
• www.YourDomain.com/Page

What you are testing

In the above examples you want to test the difference between capitalization and lowercase letters, adding a www in front of your website address, and adding a page on the end of your domain name.  Typically, I use a page as opposed to a keyword because I believe there are people who will copy and paste your address from your ad (I am one of those people) so the address still works when pasted into a browser’s address bar.

Related posts:

1. 14 Tips & Strategies to Increase Your AdWords Click-Through Rate (CTR)
2. Setting Your Cost Per Click (CPC) When Starting a New PPC Campaign
3. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs

Your click-through rate (CTR) plays a crucial role in determining your success with AdWords.  It is one of the big factors that is calculated when Google decides where your ad’s position on a page will be located and (more importantly) how much you will pay per click.  The impact your click-through rate can have on the performance of your ads cannot be underestimated – sometimes it makes the difference between paying $0.10 and $10.00 for each click.

Naturally, you AdWords CTR should be something that you spend a good amount of time and effort tweaking to achieve the best results.  Not only should you see a lower cost per click, but you should see a significant increase in your traffic and clicks when you improve your click-through rate.

While your click-through rate for AdWords is vitally important to your campaign’s health, you should ultimately focus on your goals – conversions, subscribers, newsletter signups, etc.  Otherwise, you will be driving more traffic to your site that is not doing anything but costing you more money.

Rounded up from some of the best sources on the web (and a few that I have used successfully), here are some of the best strategies and methods for increasing and improving your AdWords click-through rate.  Keep in mind that targeting and standing out from your competitors will give you the best results when trying to increase your CTR.

Create an arrow with your ad

This method was made popular when Shoemoney wrote a post chronicling some ad variations where he created an “arrow” with the ad copy.

The ad copy forming a > is at .40% CTR where the normal is at .19%. So this was actually over a 200% increase in CTR. – Shoemoney

Include keywords in your ad

One of the basic (but often overlooked) strategies is to include the keywords assigned to an ad in the title and description.  When someone does a search for particular keywords – and those keywords are in your ad – they will be shown in bold compared the normal font weight.

Test with the Search Network

Sometimes the search network will perform better than Google’s own network, so try running your ads there as well.  However, sometimes using the search network will bring down your ads’ CTR – so be sure to try both ways.  I have seen some campaigns do very well and others perform terribly.

The search network can have a positive or negative effect on your CTR, there’s really no way to tell how it will impact your overall campaign CTR. Make sure you test it on & off. – Earners Blog

Increase your bid amounts

Try increasing your bid amounts so that your ad will display in a higher position on the page (and thus get clicked on more).  After a few days start to slowly lower your bid, you will eventually hit a lower limit where your CTR will start going down.  Once you hit this position, keep your bids the same.

Continually split test everything

One of the most efficient and useful ways to increase your CTR is by non-stop testing of each variable in your ads:

• The title
• Description
• Display URL

The easiest way to do this is to keep selecting the best-performing ads and getting rid of those that don’t perform up to standards.  If you continue to do this, you will end up with ads that have extremely high click-through rates.

Use a price in the title

A great way to draw attention to your ad is to use a price on the title.  It will make your stand out when people are searching.

Adding the price in the headline is a great way to increase CTR. Be careful with this one though, if you’re not the cheapest, you’re CTR will suffer. – Redfly Marketing

Maximize your descriptions

Descriptions are a very powerful way to increase your CTR.  Many suggest writing the first line of your description by showing the features and benefits, with the second line being a call to action and/or price.

Use keyword insertion

A powerful way to increase your CTR is by using keyword insertion in your ad.  This allows you to really effectively match your ad with what a searcher has typed in.

I try to stay away from keyword insertion on the most part but it’s useful when you’re trying to get a campaign up & running quickly. It’s great for CTR since it’ll substitute the keyword into your ad. – Earners Blog

Test display URL variations

Another basic, yet often overlooked method is to try variations of your display URL in your ads.  You have several options to choose from:

• http://www.YourDomain.com
• http://www.yourdomain.com/Page
• http://YourDomain.com
• http://yourdomain.com/Page
• www.YourDomain.com
• www.yourdomain.com
• YourDomain.com
• yourdomain.com
• YourDomain.com/Page
• yourdomain.com/page
• http://www.YourDomain.com/Page
• http://www.yourdomain.com/page
• http://YourDomain.com/Page
• http://yourdomain.com/page
• www.YourDomain.com/Page
• www.yourdomain.com/Page

It is amazing which display URLs work for different keywords.  This is an easy, effective way to test and find the best results.  As you can see there are several variations that you can test, and often even small things like capitalization to separate words can have a big effect on your CTR.

Use the Trademark Symbol

You can effectively increase your AdWords CTR by including the trademark symbol in your title or description.  This will make your product/page appear official, and the symbol naturally draws attention because of its uniqueness in PPC ads.

Accept Google Checkout

If you have Google Checkout enabled on your site, you can see huge increases in CTR as a result of the large button that is displayed in your ads.

If you don’t believe that using that button from Google Checkout gives you a higher CTR and an advantage over your competition give me a call I’ve got some beach front property in Vegas I’d like to sell you. – Michael Gray: Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Seasonal Headlines

Tailoring your ads to a particular time of year can deliver more targeted buyers.  The ad is more relevant to the people searching because it mentions a particular time, holiday or season.

Doesn’t matter if your product is not seasonal. If you sell blue widgets all year around, a headline like “Easter Widget Sale” will work great. There are so many different holidays, festivals and events that this can be used with. If you’re targeting locally, even better. – Redfly Marketing

Ask a question

Often, posing a question to those searching for an answer can yield excellent click-through rates.  They are trying to find something – and you are there posing the question to assist.

Include a number

Numbers (and any other unique characters) can make a marked impact on your ads.  Many times a page will be filled with ads, and if yours is the only one with numbers – it will stand out from the rest.

Related posts:

1. 8 Display URL Variations That Can Increase Your Click-Through Rate in PPC Campaigns
2. 7 Ways to Lower Your PPC Costs
3. Setting Your Cost Per Click (CPC) When Starting a New PPC Campaign

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing can be a very lucrative and excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your site.  These tools will help you maximize your spend and get the best return on your advertising.

Calculators

• Maximum CPC Calculator

Products

• PPC Bully
• PPC Coach
• The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords – Created by Perry Marshall, this is one of the most comprehensive guides on Google AdWords available. (check it out…)
• Keyword Elite 2.0

Display Ads

• Google Display Ad Builder

Google AdWords

• AdWords Editor
• Traffic Estimator
• Ad Preview Tool

Keyword Research

• Google Trends
• Google Insights for Search

PPC Keyword Tools

• Jumbo Keyword
• Bad Keyword & Number Stripper
• Keyword Typo Generator
• PPC Keyword Wrapper
• Negative Keyword Wrapper Tool
• PPC Generator
• Keyword Lizard

Bid Management

• PPC BidMax
• BidRank
• KeywordMax

Testing

• Taguchi-Based Ad Optimizer

Related posts:

1. SEO Tools
2. Affiliate Marketing Tools
3. Analytics Tools