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October 19, 2015 By adamriemer Leave a Comment

How to Use Google Custom PPC Ads to Make Money

A few weeks ago I was talking with one of my favorite PPC marketers about new trends we were seeing with AdWords.  While everyone’s been busy talking about Custom Audiences for re-marketing and display, he’s been focusing on the other tools like Custom Ads.

Although he couldn’t give a lot of details about the results, we went over what he had been doing and did a brainstorm for new ways to use them specific to his and my own clients.  Although my campaigns haven’t launched yet, I’m in love with the idea that you can target and focus your ads to specific queries and for specific needs without having to create a million ads.

So what is the Adwords Custom Ads tool and how can you use it?  If you want to know how to set it up, Google does an awesome job explaining it on this post.  If you want to know how to implement campaigns for your business, check out the section most relevant for you below.

Side note: Before I give some examples, the basic rundown is that it works by using dynamic inserts.  i.e. you need to be cautious of character counts.  For example, you can use inventory levels, prices, deals/discounts and anything else you want to add to your feed, but if any of the combinations go over the character limit, your ad won’t work.  

google custom ppc ads
By OutStyle from DepositPhotos.com

How to Use Custom PPC Ads

  1. Brick and Mortar (Local Businesses)
  2. Ecommerce Shops
  3. Leads or Service Providers

[Read more…] about How to Use Google Custom PPC Ads to Make Money

Filed Under: PPC

July 30, 2014 By adamriemer 2 Comments

10 Things To Make Landing Pages Convert

landing page optimization
By @Olivier26 / purchased from DepositPhotos.com

Landing pages are the most important thing to have optimized, once you have a source of quality traffic.  If the landing page isn’t made to convert, you are not using your ad spends as well as you can.  Below are 10 of the most important things you need to think about and try to use (if it fits within your business model) with your landing pages to help them turn more visitors into leads and sales.  [Read more…] about 10 Things To Make Landing Pages Convert

Filed Under: Monetizing Your Site, PPC Tagged With: how to convert landing pages, landing page optimization, landing pages

June 23, 2014 By adamriemer 9 Comments

How to Track PPC as an Affiliate Without a PPC Pixel

how to track affiliate PPC campaigns
By @vlue / purchased from DepositPhotos.com

One thing that many PPC Affiliates hate is that you cannot place an Adwords or Bing pixel on a Merchant’s site.  That means that there is no way to report to the search engine which keywords are driving conversions.  The reason that some merchants do not want to place the tracking pixel in their cart is that the search engines want one account per store or shopping cart.  This is where Affiliates need to find another solution.

If an Affiliate cannot use a PPC pixel to track and report conversions back to Adwords or Bing, how can they track conversions and sales through Adwords and Bing?

One option is to have the merchant give you a tracking link that can capture the keyword clicked and provide you with a report based on the keywords, if they have an advanced tracking system or the ability to do this.  Unfortunately you’ll be giving them the keywords that you found that convert into sales by search engine, which also means that they can take and use them for themselves.  So unless you can trust the Merchant not to take your keywords, I don’t recommend this.  Instead here are a couple of other possible solutions that could work if done right.  They aren’t guaranteed to work, but if done right can provide you with more data.    [Read more…] about How to Track PPC as an Affiliate Without a PPC Pixel

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, PPC Tagged With: how do affiliates track ppc, how to track ppc campaigns as an affiliate, ways to track ppc as an affilate

February 12, 2014 By adamriemer 1 Comment

Using Adwords Extentions – Sexy Google Ads are Better Ads

This is a guest post from leading PPC Affiliate and PPC Consultant Don Batsford Jr.

google adwords extensions and how to use them
By @subbotina / purchased from DepositPhotos.com

What are Google Adwords Extentions & why use Adwords PPC Extentions?

In late 2013, Google made it very clear that advertisements featuring ad extensions would be given better Quality Scores. Ad extensions consist of any links or content outside of the traditional title and two lines of description central to Adwords text ads. At 25 characters for the title length and 35 characters for each line of description, any chance to expand ad relevance and size should be looked at as an opportunity. Also, Adwords’ Quality Score is a major piece of the underlying algorithm that determines ad rank and bid.  Higher quality score ads will show above ads bidding the same cost per click and may even pay less.

Google has let us know that extensions make ads look sexy. So it is time to implement any and all that are a good fit for your campaigns. Some examples of Google Adwords Extensions include: [Read more…] about Using Adwords Extentions – Sexy Google Ads are Better Ads

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: don batsford jr, how to use adwords extentions, what are adowrds extentions

October 28, 2013 By adamriemer Leave a Comment

How to Find & Use Negative Keywords for PPC Marketing

If you do PPC and have confusion with how to use Negative keywords or are confused with what negative keywords and the match type are with PPC, this post will help you.  Even if you are an experienced PPC Marketer, this post could help generate some new ideas to find and create negative keyword lists to advance your campaigns, help you drive more relevant and targeted traffic and hopefully more revenue.  If you have any other questions about how to find or use negative match keywords with PPC campaigns, please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer it for you.

What is a negative keyword match type?

A negative match type or a negative keywords match is when you use a specific keyword or phrase to block your ads from showing when it is present during a search query on a search engine.  If you sell red apples but not green apples, you can add the word green into your campaign.  If the search engine is doing it’s job, when someone types in buy green apples, your ad will not show (in theory) because you added the negative keyword match “green”.  However, if someone searches Granny Smith or other types of green apples, but your negative keyword list does not contain the phrase or words “Granny Smith”, it may still show because you did not add negative keyword phrases to your list like “Granny Smith”.

Why add negative keyword lists to your PPC campaigns

There are numerous reasons you want to add strong negative keyword lists into your PPC campaigns.  The first is that negative keyword lists can help to generate more targeted traffic that can convert better on your site.  By having more targeted ads showing on relevant queries, your click through rate can go up.  When your click through rate goes up, your overall PPC cost per click can sometimes go down because your quality score may go up.  By having a higher click through rate, you can also sometimes gain a higher percentage of the search queries for the specific keywords you are going after because the algorithm recognizes that your ads are creating a great user experience for their search engine.  It is very important to have strong negative keyword lists in your PPC campaigns and these are only some of the reasons why.

How do you find negative keywords for PPC?

how to find negative keywords for ppc
how to find negative keywords for PPC campaigns

This one is easy at first, but takes creativity to get good at really targeting your ads and creating a strong negative keywords list.  The first thing you can do is think of things that are not relevant.  You can have colors, you can have other types of the same service or product or you can have completely irrelevant meanings of words.  If you click on the image above, it gives a few examples of what to think about when you are looking to build negative keyword lists for your campaigns or want to know how to find negative keywords for PPC ad groups.  The main keyword in the image is Auctions.

If you are using an auction to sell a specific product or own a large auction site, these are some of the negative match keywords you may want to add to your PPC campaigns.  I’ll go through why and then give an example for diamond rings and then white crew neck tshirts.  The first is if you are bidding on the keyword auctions.  If your auctions are all online auctions, you want to think about what people are searching for that are not relevant for you.  The wrong type of auction can generate a list of negative keywords for your PPC campaigns.  Airport auctions and estate auctions are probably not good for you since they are in person if you only have online auctions.  You also need to think about if it is the wrong type of search.  If your products are new, good negative keywords for your PPC campaigns could be returns, damaged, used, etc…  You should also think about quantities.  If you only sell single products, wholesale, pallets, bulk lots, etc… could make great negative match keywords for your PPC campaigns.  The next thing to think about are targeting down even more specific.  Instead of just using the word airport, include airport codes, cities and their abbreviations, states by name or code or even animal and product types that you don’t carry.  I’ll give two examples of finding negative matches for your PPC campaigns below.

Diamond ring – The first thing to think about is the material and the color of the band.  If you only have titanium and white gold, use negative keyword phrases for your campaigns like yellow, platinum, silver, etc…  These could make great negative keywords for your PPC campaigns.  The next thing to do is to go off of the gem stones, try using rubies, ruby, emerald, topaz, garnet or other stones in case someone is looking for a diamond and sapphire mix.  Another thing to think about when trying to find negative keywords for PPC campaigns is the size of the diamond.  If you only sell 2 karats or larger, use sizes like 1/4, quarter, 1, one, 1/2, one half and if you only carry solitaire, then make sure you add negative keywords to the campaigns where multiple diamonds could show up.

White crew neck tshirts – If you are trying to sell white crew neck tshirts with PPC campaigns, here are some things to help you get started building negative keyword lists to add to your PPC campaigns.  The first is to include all colors except for white.  Next add in specific patterns.  If your shirts are all undershirts, get rid of some of the terms like graphic, fashionable, etc… which could be for people looking for outerwear.  If you don’t sell any form of tank top, then add in short sleeve or use tank and tank top as negative keywords in your PPC campaign for this product.  If you don’t have long sleeve but you do have short, try adding in negative keywords like long, long sleeve, long sleeved and long sleeves.  Because you only have crew neck, V neck, scoop neck and other terms are also not relevant so you’ll want to add them to your negative keyword list as well.  Think about the common styles that are not relevant and take the words that make them different and add them to your negative keyword list in your campaigns.

Finding negative keywords to use in your PPC campaigns is only part of having success with using this match type.  The next thing is knowing how to use negative match keywords for your PPC so you don’t actually lose exposure and potential sales.  This can get tricky however it becomes a lot easier with practice.

How do I use negative match keywords for PPC marketing?

how to use negative keywords in ppc
how to use negative keywords in PPC

Using negative keywords or negative matches within PPC seems easy, but it also gets tricky.  You might sell multiple colors or styles or materials of a product, so including negative keywords in your main campaign may not be a good idea.  Instead you’ll want to create negative keyword lists for your ad groups instead.  Here are a few things to think about if you have not used negative match type before and also a few examples like above with how to do it. The first example I’ll use is jobs, next we’ll go back to a jewelry store with campaigns built around rings and after we’ll go back to tshirts.

Jobs – If you need to build a negative keyword list for a job site or if you are a recruiter inside a company, you need to think about everything you could be hiring for and bring the right person to the right page.  A person going after an executive job will want to know the history of the company, the other executive team members, high level benefits and financial data.  A person looking for seasonal work will want to know how many hours, what the pay range is, etc…  These all use the phrase job or jobs, but are worth different amounts to you and will need different landing pages, ads and have different search volume levels.  We’ll focus on trying to find an executive level person for this example.

The first thing to do is to get rid of people looking for things that use the word job but aren’t related to careers.  There are lots of terms from the porn industry and there are famous people and even head hunters or executive recruitment firms like Steve Jobs from Apple or Robert Hand which is a recruitment firm I found in the Google keyword tool when actually building a similar campaign.  Next you need to think about the career level of the person.  Although the porn and famous people terms may be good for the overall campaigns, by adding Xmas, seasonal, part time, hourly or temp to your campaign level negative keyword lists, you may block it from showing in the ad groups you use to target the groups meant to attract executive level job seekers.   Instead you want to click on the individual ad groups built for the executives and add in the seasonal and part time job terms that wouldn’t be relevant for them.  Now your ad group should only show for someone that might be looking for a CFO job in Texas or a CEO job in NYC.  You’ll also add your executive keywords to the part time and admin ad groups to help make sure they show up for the relevant job seekers.

Jewelry store negative keyword lists – If you are building out a negative match keyword list for a jewelry store that carries emeralds, diamonds and sapphire rings, you’ll want to be extra careful.  I would recommend creating a unique ad group for each stone and each material type.  Once you have these you can add in the other materials to the ad group level negative keywords list (not the campaign level) and then go into the specifics.  You may also want to create individual ad groups for mixed stone rings in case you have people looking for diamond and ruby or emerald with diamond rings.  If you add emerald to the total campaign negative keyword list, your ads in the emerald campaign might now show up which is why you want to only add it to the ad group level campaigns so that the ads will take you potential customers to the landing pages that do not feature anything with non relevant keywords.

Tshirt stores – Think about what we talked about above when creating a negative keyword list for PPC campaigns.  Instead of adding stone types to your negative keyword lists, change them to the colors that are not in the group.  The next thing you’ll want to do is add in fabrics, patterns and shirt types.  If you are only selling white cotton undershirts and you also sell blue tshirts and black graphic tshirts, you’ll need separate campaigns for all of them.  In the white cotton undershirt ad group you’ll want to include terms like wool or polyester, graphic, over, overshirt, blue, red, black, etc…  In the other ad groups you’ll want to include the terms and products that you don’t carry or that exist in other ad groups.  If you have a separate campaign built out for sweaters, you may want to block sweater terms like wool, cashmere, etc… from these ad groups but not the campaign level to help make sure you don’t show up for the wrong searches and then add the regular keywords from these groups to the negative keyword list in the campaigns built out for the other similar products.

PPC is one of the most fun channels you can work with.  There are almost always new campaigns and ad groups you can build.  You can constantly test landing pages, ad positions, ad copy and even new variations and misspellings of keywords.  You also get real time results so you can tweak as necessary.  When you start to use different match types like negative keyword matches, you also get to create negative keyword lists which can be a lot of fun and sometimes challenging because you really have to think about what the user is looking for and what could cause your ad to show up that isn’t relevant to your products or services.  Google now offers a way to generate some negative keywords with their ad planner tool, but by looking at the keywords they recommend you may want to use with their keyword planning tool, you can find a ton of great negative keywords to add to your negative keyword list within your campaigns and ad groups.  If you have any questions about how to use negative match keywords or how to find negative keywords for your PPC campaigns, feel free to leave a comment below.  Thank you again for reading and let me know if there is a topic you would like to see me write about or if there is something you want me to go into more detail on.

Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: how do you find negative keywords, how do you use negative keywords, how do you use negative match, what is a negative keyword, what is a negative keyword match type

April 15, 2013 By adamriemer Leave a Comment

Why Enhanced PPC Could Temporarily Damage Affiliate Marketing & A Solution

I do PPC for very niche sites and programs that I trust, which is very few.  When Google switched from their “legacy” model with campaigns to their enhanced campaigns, they added in a huge issue for Affiliates, you cannot turn off tablets.  This is a giant issue for a few reasons.  I’m going to go over the main ones I can think of and then teach you how to turn off mobile phones as a device with enhanced campaigns so you can help prevent a giant leak if you are a PPC Affiliate.  This is only a temporary issue in my opinion because of the massive amount of growth with tablets and people that shop with them after clicking through a PPC ad.  Because of that I’ll also give you a workaround and solution, but your Affiliates are going to have to trust you enough to pay them if you are going to be able to keep them.

Enhanced PPC does not allow you to opt out of Tablets, just mobile phones.  This is where the biggest issue occurs for PPC Affiliates.

1.  People using a tablet to look and share the products, then using a computer to buy.

In many of the niches I work in, people share products before they buy them.  If you sell wedding or prom dresses or are ordering a style of wedding cake or picking designs, years ago you would pull it up on your computer and send the images to your friends.  Once everyone has seen it, then you go back onto your computer and buy the product.  Unfortunately this has now changed and Google will be causing damage to PPC Affiliates that rely on a cookie life for sales.

If you think about the example above, if you are choosing decorations for a baby shower, you could do a Google search when you are with your friends, click through a PPC ad and then find what they want on your site, click your Affiliate link and check out the merchant.  When they are done planning and have everything, they go home to share it with their partner or their parents and then go online and order.  Chances are people aren’t going to go onto that same tablet or mobile phone and place the order.  Instead they are probably going to go on their computer where your Affiliate cookie isn’t set, and you just paid for a click and the merchant got the sale, but you won’t get credit.

2.  People browsing with tablets don’t shop as much on their tablets and you cannot turn them off with enhanced campaigns.

Tablets still don’t equal even near 50% of online purchases from what I’ve read and seen with different eCommerce stores analytics.  Many stores are lucky if they can get 20% mobile sales.  Even though sales are down compared to computers, tablet usage for searches, Facebook and other places people use Affiliate links is way up.  This is another huge problem.  With the lack of actual sales going through a tablet and the search and click volume going up on tablets, your chances of getting credit for sales with PPC is diminishing fast.  Google will not allow you to turn them off either.  They wrote me an email saying that it is too hard for them to differentiate a computer from a tablet which is why you can only turn off mobile phones.  Here is the email from Google.

email from google about enhanced campaigns
email from Google about enhanced campaigns

3.  You don’t have a pixel to fire for tracking.

Unless the merchant has third party tracking and you can trust them to manually credit you for the sales, you now lose them because you cannot have a pixel for Adwords in their cart.  By adding a second adwords pixel to your shopping cart because an Affiliate wants to see their conversions from tablets and computers, Google can shut off all of your campaigns and you may not get them turned back on.  It will show you are running multiple ads for the same store within the same account which is against their TOS.  If a PPC Affiliate asks you to place a pixel like this that reads and reports back to or from Adwords, do not do it as it could hurt your company even more than any value they could add…unless you don’t do your own PPC.  It could wipe out all Google PPC traffic for you which is never a good thing to have happen.

So what can you do to protect your PPC Affiliates from tablets in PPC and help them feel confident?

Most merchants, my guess is 95% or higher allow theft (because they don’t know better or they are being lied to by an OPM or Network) in their programs with coupon sites, trademark bidders and adware.  It doesn’t matter if they are OPM run, managed in house or by the networks.  Clean programs are almost impossible to find now.  That breaks the trust for a lot of the top PPC Affiliates.  (I’ll do a post on how to attract value adding non trademark bidding PPC Affiliates later on).   Here are a couple of possible options to help make them feel confident and keep them going within your program.

1.  Set up parameters or unique urls for secondary tracking.

By adding on parameters or using unique tracking urls that report into another system and record the Affiliate’s ID, you can now track from the first click with the ID to the sale in your tracking system because you have tagged the user.  (This doesn’t completely work if they change over from devices unless you have a very advanced tracking system).  Then at the end of the month, once a week or each day you can go in and compare sales that were reported into your network and see if any were missing.  Because there are already tracking gaps and issues with the networks and analytics packages, you may see more sales inside the network everyonce in a while, or it could be the network pixel over firing.  This sounds easy but can actually be a bit tricky, especially because one of your non value adding affiliates having the sale that they stole from a legit partner, you don’t have the proper coding in, or multiple affiliates taking credit for one sale (or one stealing from the legit partner).

2.  Make sure you are asking where the person found you.

Although this isn’t the best possible way to do it, many legit and top PPC Affiliates will  build landing pages on unique urls that are easy to remember and that are brandable.  If they provided value, the person may actually remember the url and if you always ask how the person found you and which site referred them to you, you can help to build their trust.  Many top PPC Affiliates will actually call the merchant to place an order just to see if they ask or not.  It can mean the difference between a good merchant and a bad one.  If the order they place doesn’t get credited to their account, they won’t work with you or trust you.  It isn’t a great option with Google enhanced campaigns and tablets for PPC, but it is one more thing you can do to help build and keep the confidence in your program for your PPC Affiliates.

3.  Offer a higher commission, but do not allow bidding on trademarks or trademark/url + coupons.

One possible third option is to offer a higher commission to help make up for the missing sales due to tablet clicks.  You’ll also want to have the Affiliate compare their old clicks and conversions without tablets being enabled to the new amount of clicks and sales so they can get an estimated loss.  Once they have an estimated loss, you can change their commissions to make it possible for them to earn the same amount as they did before.

How to turn off Mobile Phones for Google Enhanced Campaigns.

Log into your account.  Click on Campaigns and select the campaign you want.  Now click on settings and click on devices.  Next to mobile you can add or decrease a percentage.  Set it to -100% and you have now in theory turned off mobile ads.  One program I do PPC for dropped in conversions drastically when my account was changed to enhanced and I found it was because of mobile and tablets.  The clicks on tablets was almost the same as the clicks from computers which cut my sales deep and ended up costing me money instead of making money.  Luckily the campaigns were test ones so it wasn’t a huge loss, but this could have been horrible for some current campaigns that spend a ton.  On another campaign, the conversion rate is a bit lower when Google turned my old campaigns to enhanced, but after tweaking my campaigns and shutting off mobile it started to recover.

When tablets or if tablets get up to the same amount of shopping from PPC and SEO as computers and laptops, this won’t be as much of an issue.  However, with the growth in search from tablets and phone and the leading sales volume coming from computers (from what I’ve seen), PPC Affiliates are taking a hit.  This could also be a reason why SEO and social media Affiliates may have taken a hit with conversion rates as well.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, PPC Tagged With: enhanced campaigns and Affiliate Marketing, Google, how to turn off mobile devices with enhanced campaigns

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