Microsoft Word - Adwords Site Targeting

6593 users shared this document! click

http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 1
The New Google Adwords An Illustrated Guide to Placement Targeting For Big Profits Advanced DAY JOB KILLER BLUEPRINT by Chris X & Alex Goad
http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 2 Contents Observations and a health warning ................................................................................ 3
Section summary ..................................................................................................................... 5
Campaign creation in brief ................................................................................................... 6
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 11
Where to advertise? .............................................................................................................. 12
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 15
The split personality of Google PPC ................................................................................ 16
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 17
Quality Score up = cost per click down! ....................................................................... 18 Use the right keywords in your ads ............................................................................ 19
Cut out the puff................................................................................................................... 19
The landing page MUST be relevant ........................................................................... 19 Section summary ................................................................................................................... 21
The importance of tracking and testing ........................................................................ 22 Tracking ................................................................................................................................. 22
Testing .................................................................................................................................... 23
Ad templates ........................................................................................................................ 24 Section summary ................................................................................................................... 25
Looking beyond the search pages ................................................................................... 26
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 28
Cheap means nothing unless.. ...................................................................................... 29
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 31
Adopting a scattergun approach ................................................................................... 32
Section summary ................................................................................................................... 35
Targeting your Content Network ads ............................................................................. 36 Site targeting at a basic level ........................................................................................ 36
Taking targeting to the next level ............................................................................... 36 Section summary ................................................................................................................... 39
Grabbing the ads that you want ...................................................................................... 40 Step 1 Finding your first target page ..................................................................... 40
Step 2 Wash, rinse and repeat ................................................................................. 50
Step 3 Create a new ad based on a very similar key phrase ....................... 51
Step 4 Go Global ............................................................................................................ 51
Step 5 Observe and test .............................................................................................. 52
Step 6 The ultimate objective ................................................................................... 52 Section summary ................................................................................................................... 53 http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 3 Observations and a health warning If you are an avid user and supporter of the Google Pay-Per-Click advertising
program, AdWords , in the way that I am, then you probably do exactly what I do every time you see a new AdWords guide explode onto the market. You
grab it with both hands, because you are experienced and smart enough to
know that you can never stop learning. If the latest guide truly is packed with revolutionary new ideas, then you can
surely learn something, and tomorrow youll be a slightly more efficient
AdWords user than you were yesterday. I am not referring here to the many how to make money using AdWords
guides that are obviously aimed at newbies or internet marketing beginners. I am a long past those and I imagine that you are too, but sometimes
something comes along that looks serious, a guide or manual that looks like
it might have something new to say to even the most experienced AdWords
user. Guess what? 99.5% of the time, they have nothing new to say at all. I hope
that after reading this book you do not feel the same. By the time you finish
reading, I hope that you will appreciate that it is different, and that it
genuinely has got something new to say. This is because I try to approach
making money using AdWords from a slightly different perspective from
most other users that I know, and these differences will become apparent on
the digital pages of this book. For this reason, this is not intended to be a complete newbies guide,
because some of the concepts I discuss and the methods that I propose
using are somewhat advanced. You therefore need to know something about
AdWords before trying some of the ideas that I am going to put forward for
your consideration. That is not to say that if you are a newbie to the world of PPC advertising,
you should not read it. You should, because you are likely to learn more
about AdWords in this book than you will in a dozen newbie starter guides
combined! It is just that, if you mess-up with some of the things that I advocate, then
you could end up spending a lot of money on advertising that is not going to
make you one brass penny, and you might find that you are powerless to
stop the cash hemorrhaging from your AdWords account. That probably sounds a little scary but dont be too alarmed! The basic idea is that if you are still a relative AdWords greenhorn, please
read this guide extremely thoroughly until you really are 100% certain that
you know what I am talking about. Then, be sure to start off in a small way http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 4 as small as you can in fact. You need to know what you are doing, and
have a clear understanding of how AdWords works, before actually putting
this plan into action and committing a large amount of resources (i.e.
money) to it. Also, be aware that Google changes the AdWords rules on a regular basis,
and many of the changes that they make are in direct response to previous
AdWords guides that have advocated various ways of gaming the system. I do not for one moment believe that what I suggest is in any way gaming
the system, and I have been using these tactics for some time, but Google
make the rules, not me, so you never can tell. Therefore, always be aware that what works well today may work very
poorly or not at all tomorrow. Finally, there are ideas in this book that do not necessarily tally with
accepted wisdom. That is deliberate, because what I am telling you are the
things that work for me, and if other people do not agree with me, no
matter! The figures that I have generated using my unconventional tactics
speak for themselves because money in the bank always represents the best
form of reality! http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 5 Section summary Some of the tactics for making money using AdWords that are set out in this guide are slightly unconventional. Newbies should make certain that they know what they are doing before putting any of these tactics into practice. Google regularly change the AdWords rules, so keep your eyes open. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 6 Campaign creation in brief The idea behind AdWords (as it is with all of the many PPC advertising
networks out there) is that once you create your advert, Google will get it
onto the internet for you in places where people who might be searching for
your product or service can be found. They do this by using keywords or phrases that you indicate to Google are
related to your advert when you create it. In order to demonstrate exactly how this works, let us run briefly through
the creation of a basic advertising campaign. Say that I am promoting an excellent and very popular new marketing
product, Virtual Smart Agent , as an affiliate. This particular product offers several pre-prepared PPC ads, so lets use one of those for this example: This is the ad creation form, which would produce an advert that looks like
this once published: See the section of the ad creation form indicating two different URLs? The
Display URL is the one that is shown in the ad (as you can see in the
finished ad) whereas the Destination URL is the one to where the visitor is
really going to be taken your webpage, in other words. Until very recently, the display URL could be whatever you liked, so it was
becoming an increasingly common AdWords tactic to use a fictitious URL
that somehow managed to appear like another line of the ad. Sometimes, this would give the appearance that you were somehow
associated with the product itself (as it would, for example, in the example
on the previous page) and it might also feature the keywords that you were
using in your campaign. Google decided that this was cheating the system, and, as of April 2008, you
cannot do this any more. The display URL cannot now be a continuation of http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 7 the ad text, and it should not suggest that you are associated with the
product. Google goes further by saying that both the display and destination URLs
should be your real URL. As far as I can ascertain from my own tests so far (this is a very recent
change at the time of writing), they do not appear to be rigidly enforcing this
rule yet, but it is something for which I guess you will pay through the
Quality Score system (of which, much more later). That is a perfect illustration of Google moving the AdWords goal posts as
they see fit, and shows why you should never take anything about the
AdWords system for granted. However, to return to our example - next, you must choose the keywords
that you want to associate with this advert: This is an extremely important step in the ad creation process, because what
keywords do is tell AdWords that any time a searcher uses any of these
words or terms, you want your ad to be shown to them. You might therefore assume that the more keywords you can add, the better
it will be. That is true to an extent. For instance, if you are selling a product
or service from your site, using keywords that are too broad or generic is not
going to bring visitors to your site who represent genuine potential buyers. You would be wasting a lot of money on clicks that were never going to bring
you any returns. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 8 So, the keyword list that you use should be targeted and focused on only
those terms that are likely to bring real potential customers to your site.
Such a list should ideally be something that you have researched and
generated from your favorite keyword research tool. Next, you decide how much you want to spend a day and what the
maximum price that you want to pay per click is: In this example, we have set the maximum budget at $5.00 per day and the
maximum price that we want to pay per click is $0.20 (Default CPC bid). Incidentally, it is important to note that the Daily Budget is not calculated
on a daily basis. This represents an average over a 30 day period, so it is
quite possible that you can spend far in excess of this sum on any one
particular day. This is something that is so important to understand that I will mention it
again later in this book, but just remember its an average, not a finite
daily limit. However, note that below that box, there is another one for CPC Content
bid. The Content Network of the AdWords program and how to maximize http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 9 your returns from it is the main thrust of this book, so this is something you
will read much more of later. However, note that you cannot fill in a figure
for the CPC Content bid without first inputting something to the box above
it. It is then going to show you the basic summary screen, which looks like this: Click on Ad Group #1, and you may encounter something like this at the
top of the next screen: This is highlighting the fact that there are keywords on the list that you
added earlier that you are not bidding high enough to figure for. If you want
to alter the bids that you are making for these particular phrases or
alternatively delete them, go to the Keyword tab and do whatever is
necessary: However, clicking on the Summary tab to the left brings up this view: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 10 This is where, for us, things start to get interesting. So, with our very quick
overview of how to set up a standard AdWords advertising campaign out of
the way, let us move on. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 11 Section summary Setting up a standard AdWords advertising campaign is a step by step process, although there have been recent changes in what you are
allowed to do with the URLs featured in the ads you create. You are able to create the ad before actually signing into your AdWords account, although you cannot get to most of the really useful
information that AdWords will provide you with until you do so. We will be looking at how to maximize the returns from advertising on sites on the Content Network later in this book. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 12 Where to advertise? As you saw in the screenshot on the previous page, AdWords offers you two
different options of where your adverts might be placed. Google + search network is the first option offered. Choosing this means that your ads will appear on the search engine results
pages when people make searches using either the Google search engine
itself: or by using the sites of one of their search network partners like AOL,
Netscape or Ask.com: Common wisdom has long been that these are the best places for your
adverts to appear, especially when compared with the idea of appearing on
websites that are part of the Content Network. This is the second alternative
offered by AdWords, a network that is made up of millions of private
websites and blogs carrying adverts placed through the AdWords program. Advert placement on the Content Network has long regarded as an inferior
choice to advertising on the Search Network because neither Google nor you
as the advertiser can really exercise any quality control over these sites. At one level at least, this viewpoint does make a good deal of sense.
Generally speaking, there tends to be some randomness about web surfers http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 13 who visit such websites and blogs, which tends to mean that your adverts
are often clicked on in a random, haphazard fashion as well. Commonly, they will be visiting such a site because it is one that they have
visited often and bookmarked, or because they found the site in the natural
search engine results (those on the left hand side of the page) when seeking
information. In other words, one way or another, they came to the content site because
they wanted to find answers to their questions or solutions to their
problems. They are information seekers first and foremost, and they are
only going to click on an ad in a focused manner if they believe that the
information that they are seeking (for free) is going to be found there. Therefore, they essentially have no intention whatsoever of paying for
anything. It follows that the results which are traditionally generated from
ads featured on content network sites and web pages are far inferior to
those from ads featured on search results pages. This is also because someone who clicks through from an ad on a search
page is proactively searching for something using a focused search term that
landed them on that page in the first place. They know that the content on right hand side of the page is ads.
Therefore, by their willingness to click on them from the search page itself,
they are showing their willingness to buy as long as the site that the ad
points to provides what they were looking for. For these reasons most AdWords advertisers have tended to ignore the
content networks, and have focused all of their efforts on advertising on the
search networks pages. Over the years, this strategy has worked extremely well for many AdWords
advertisers (including me). However, over the past year or so, several
factors have combined to make it increasingly difficult to generate
reasonable returns by adopting this search network only strategy: The first factor is that there are hundreds of new AdWords advertisers coming into the market every week, and 95% of them are following
the strategies and techniques that they have read about in the
standard how to win with AdWords guides. Rule #1 in most of these
guides is search networks only, guys!, so that is exactly what they
are doing. This has served to elevate the levels of competition in the market by a
considerable margin, because there are only so many ads that can
feature on the first page of the search engine results. While you can
still make reasonable money from ads on the second page, having
your ad on the first page is far more effective and profitable. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 14 Secondly, it pushes up the cost per click, because more competition naturally means that there are more people bidding for keywords, and
the more people who bid there are, the higher the costs are driven as
a consequence. The fact that many of these people are relatively new to AdWords and
therefore inexperienced tends to mean that they bid too high as well,
because they are always shooting for the #1 spot. This again inflates
the market prices per click. While being #1 is not the be all and end all, it is nevertheless
important that your ad appears in a prominent position on the organic
search results pages. This is because this will give you a far higher
chance of drawing the click from a searcher who is genuinely in the
market for what you are selling. So, one way or another, in the modern AdWords marketplace, you do need
to pay more for each click if you are to give yourself a reasonable chance of
converting the click into a sale. There are still things that you can proactively do that will help to reduce the
number of wasted clicks that you will nevertheless suffer as an integral part
of any AdWords campaign. For example, you should use the negative words
filter that is an integral feature of your AdWords account. This prevents your
ads appearing on search pages where people are using words like free, no-
cost or bargain as part of their search terms. This stops the freebie seekers
clicking on your ads and wasting your money. However, the bottom line is that, no matter what you do, grabbing the most
prominent advertising spots in the search network has become much harder
and far more expensive. Of course, you should always be finessing your ads and testing them
constantly so that your click through rates will keep improving. Nevertheless, because of the increasing costs per click, you might still be
losing money when compared to the position a year ago. The cost of each click has risen by a far higher margin than any improved
click through rates (CTRs) that most marketers have been able to generate,
and that is not a position that is likely to be reversed, certainly not in the
short term. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 15 Section summary The accepted wisdom is that advertising on the search networks is where the money is to be made when using AdWords. While there is some truth in this, it is nevertheless becoming increasingly difficult to make profits from advertising on the natural
organic search engine results pages. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 16 The split personality of Google PPC Google choose to do a few things differently from the way that other PPC
companies operate, and within these differences lie factors that are very
significant for any AdWords advertiser. The first major difference is that Google have their overall PPC business
separated into two different operating divisions. Firstly, there is the business through which advertisers place their ads on the
internet, which is the AdWords program. Secondly, there is the program through which web site and blog publishers
can add these AdWords ads to their sites or blogs, otherwise known as AdSense . Basically, anyone with a web site or blog that is business oriented can apply
for an AdSense account. As long as that site or blog is not in questionable
taste and does not breach any other rules of AdSense acceptability, it is
almost certain that the account will be granted. After that, the site publisher can add AdSense ads to as many of his sites or
blogs as he wants without ever asking the permission of Google to do so
beforehand. This means that quality control is a major issue both for Google
and for its advertisers. Some of the sites the AdSense ads appear on are therefore of the very
highest quality, but others are appallingly bad, and this presents a
predicament for Google. On the one hand, they want to maximize their advertising revenues. To do
this, they need to pull in as many site owners who are willing to feature
AdSense ads on their sites and blogs as they can. On the other hand, they are attempting to offer high quality sites to their
advertisers but they have no way of controlling site quality. Here lies another prime reason why sales from Ads that appear on the
content network have always generated far lower sales levels for
advertisers. The quality of the sites that these ads appear on is highly
variable, and if your ads are appearing on a poor quality site, then your click
through rates are likely to suffer accordingly. That is a factor that is largely beyond the control of Google, which is not
something that applies to the ads that appear on the search engine results
pages. In their own search results (and also that of their partners) there are
very strictly enforced quality control rules in place, and this ensures the kind
of consistency that will drive better results. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 17 Section summary The program that places ads on sites and blogs that are part of the Content Network is AdSense. Neither Google nor the advertisers have control over the quality of these sites, and therefore the results from advertising on them can be
extremely variable. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 18 Quality Score up = cost per click down! Uniquely among PPC program managers, Google apply what they call their
Quality Score (QS) criteria to all AdWords campaigns as a way of rewarding
those who create campaigns that Google likes, and punishing those who
dont. The concept behind the QS is simple. Google want every advertiser to do
everything that they can to ensure that the consumer finds exactly what
they want when they click on an advert. For example, they want to see total
consistency throughout the whole advertising process. Here is how it works. You, as an advertiser, start with a keyword with which you want to send
people to your site. To attain the highest QS, that same keyword must be the one that you
feature in your ads, because the keyword is what makes the potential
customer click on that advert. In turn, the ad should take the visitor to a
page that is completely focused on that keyword, whether it is a landing
page, an information page or a sales page. Get all that right and you will receive a discount off the costs of your ads,
courtesy of the Google Quality Score system. Get it wrong, however, and
you will end up paying through the nose for your advertising campaign
when, in truth, a bit of care and attention was all that was needed to slash
the cost per click. There are several factors that Google consider when calculating the QS of
any particular ad campaign, including the maximum bid that you have
entered when creating the campaign as well as the relevance and quality of
the page that the advert takes the visitor to. Of these factors, however, it is widely believed that the direct relevance of
the page that your ad takes the visitor to the ad they have been shown
represents maybe 50% of how the QS is calculated. In a nutshell, Quality Score is the difference between success and failure.
Get it right and your ad costs tumble, so you can afford to advertise and still
make a profit. Get it wrong and you cant. In fact, I recently read that Google themselves consider the Quality Score
rating system to be a stupid tax! If you do the job right, you will get a good
QS score and thereby reduce your advertising costs significantly, whereas if
you get it wrong.well, you get the picture. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 19 Here are the QS rules that will enable you to avoid being one of the stupid
ones: Use the right keywords in your ads Many marketers put too little emphasis on making sure that exactly the right
keywords appear in their ads. These keyword should be exactly what you are
promoting, not something like it or thereabouts. If your main keywords phrase is advanced orchid growing guide, then that
is the phrase that should feature in the title and the first line of your advert.
Use guide to growing tropical flowers and you are not telling the potential
customer exactly what to expect when they click through and land on your
page, so you have just trashed your Quality Score! Cut out the puff
The AdWords staff does not want to see ads that feature useless, junky
terminology that does not in reality tell the potential customer anything. Using phrases like amazing, fantastic and unbelievable will definitely not
help you, and even words like sale, bargain or (the ultimate kiss-of-death)
free will kill your quality score. It is hype or B/S and, again, it adds nothing
to the visitor experience nor does it tell them anything. Your adverts should be based on the facts and the truth, nothing more.
Unbelievable or fantastic is your totally biased opinion, and what help is
that to anyone other than you? The landing page MUST be relevant This is the real biggie for the AdWords people. If your advert suggests that
you are going to send the visitor to a page where they are going to learn
more about or be able to buy an advanced orchid growing guide, then that
is exactly what should happen. If you have a sales page, it should sell the
visitor something that is related to growing orchids. If the page features
articles, then they must be about orchids, and any ads on your page should
be orchid related too. Even a name capture squeeze page must play by the same rules. It must
offer any new subscriber something related to growing orchids in return for
the sign up, and the page should feature some orchid-growing related
content as well. If you get this wrong, then Google will levy the stupid tax on you and you
could easily end up paying 200% more for your ads than you need to. Alternatively, your ads will get pushed to the bottom of the search results
page, so that you are going to have to increase your bids dramatically to get
back to the top. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 20 Get the Quality Score wrong, and the cost of your advertising campaign will
increase dramatically, make no mistake about it, so focusing on achieving a
good QS is of paramount importance for keeping the cost of your AdWords
campaign to a minimum. Of course, it is not always quite so simple to get your quality score down
(especially for new advertisers), and increased advertising costs make it
much harder to make money from an ad on the search pages, even though
there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the ad itself. This is just one more reason why it is getting increasingly difficult to make
decent returns from ads that are featured on the search networks. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 21 Section summary The Quality Score system will dictate how much you pay for your ads. Get the QS right, and you will minimize your costs per click. Get it wrong, and you will be paying way more than necessary per click,
thereby making it considerably more difficult to make a profit. The keyword to remember for getting a good QS is relevance. Make the ad directly relevant to the root keyword behind it and also to the
page to which the visitor is sent, and you should enjoy a good QS. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 22 The importance of tracking and testing It is a cast-in-stone golden rule that whenever you are running any kind of
PPC campaign, you should always be tracking and testing all of your results. Neither of these operations need be excessively complex or difficult, but
both tracking and testing are vital for the long term health of your business. After all, you must know what you are spending and what you are earning in
order to know whether your efforts are resulting in a profit or not. No matter
what it is that you are doing, if it is not making a profit, you had better stop
soon if you expect your business to survive. Tracking Tracking your ads is all about seeing how many people are hitting pages
with your ads on, how many are clicking through to generate what number
of sales, and so on. All of the tools that you need to do this are built in to your AdWords account,
so tracking really is a piece of cake: The Conversion Tracking tool highlighted at 1 will actually tell you exactly
how many conversions your ads are generating and how you can change
your ad campaigns to increase your ROI. From the Reports (2) tab, you can create customized reports in a wide
range of categories: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 23 The Analytics tab (3) allows you to link your AdWords account to a free Google Analytics account, so that you can track visitor numbers and demographics from all of your web pages using this free resource. Tracking is therefore something that, in essence, Google does for you. Testing
Testing, however, is far more down to you! At its most basic level, testing is all about knowing which of your ads are
working best, and which are proving to be a waste of money. No matter how
long you have been in the AdWords game, the fact remains that, while your
advertising skills will improve over the years, you will still create some
stunners and some duffers! You therefore need to separate the wheat from the chaff as quickly and
efficiently as possible if you do not want to throw good money down the
drain. Back to back testing of two comparable adverts is the simplest but still one
of the most effective ways of running such a test. Create an advert that you believe to be a killer, but before you start
advertising with it, create an alternative version by changing just one word.
Launch both at the same time. Next, ensure that they are both shown approximately the same amount of
times by going back to the Edit Campaign Settings window of your AdWords
account, scrolling to the bottom of the page to find Advanced Options, and
switch the default Ad serving setting from Optimize to Rotate (otherwise
AdWords will show the more popular ad more often, and that skews your
results): http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 24 When both ads have shown around 100 times each, see how they compare
in sales generation terms. If one is significantly out-performing the other,
drop the non-performer, change another word in the ad that is doing the
business for you, and start again. If, however, neither one nor the other seems to have a significant edge at
this stage, continue with them both until one does. That is, of course, unless they are both performing far worse than they
should, in which case, accept that your original ad was nowhere near as
good as you imagined it to be, drop both versions and start from scratch
again. Ad templates Over time, whichever advertising network you are using, you will have some
ads that do fantastic business for you, those where the conversion rates that
you enjoy are way above the average or the norm. Make sure that you have a template file where you keep such ads, so that
any time you are starting a new campaign, you have a proven ad that
provides a framework around which to build your new ads. In this way, you avoid having to go right back to the very beginning every
time you want to start a new campaign, which should mean that you start
with an ad that is going to make money from the word Go. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 25 Section summary Tracking and testing all of your ads, whether they feature on the search or the content networks, is vitally important. All of the tracking tools that you need for keeping tabs on the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns are built into the program
itself. Test your ads on a back-to-back basis, sticking with those that work, and dropping those that dont. Keep a file with all of your best ads noted, so that you can adapt and use them again for future campaigns. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 26 Looking beyond the search pages Weve established that advertising on the search networks generally
produces the best results in terms of sales generated by AdWords, although
it is getting ever more expensive to advertise in this way. We have also established that, as an alternative to ads on the search
network, you can place them on the content network (websites and blogs)
but that doing so is likely to produce fewer sales. From these two assertions, it follows that paying the same amount for clicks
on ads that are featured on the content network as you pay for those on the
search network is wasting your money. Why, after all, would you pay the
same when you know that you are going to generate fewer sales? This is, in fact, not a major problem, as you can separate the two networks
from one another, as you see from Edit Campaign Settings: Remember that we mentioned Content Bids earlier? Through the screen
shown above, you can make separate bids on the ads to appear on the
content network and bid at significantly lower levels than you would for the
same keywords or phrases on the search network. In fact, while there is no way that you will be able to grab keywords for the
minimum $0.01 when you are advertising on the search network, it is still
possible if you are going to focus on the Content Network: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 27 It is reasonable to assume that there is money to be made by advertising on
the content network, despite what was already said about the quality of the
traffic. For example, take a look at the top example keyword phrase above. A click
on asp chat, would cost a minimum of $0.50 per click on a search network
ad. If you could therefore grab that for $0.01 per click on the content
network, even if it took 49 clicks on your content ad to land one sale, you
would still be ahead! At this level, however, placing adverts on the Contents Network is nothing
more than a numbers game, with no specific plan or strategy behind it. Later we will be looking at a very specific plan that is focused on maximizing
your returns from advertising on the Content Network in a reasonably
scientific manner. However, even at the numbers game level, it may still
work for you, depending upon the market that you are operating in, the
effectiveness of your advert and the product or service that you are selling. Just because there is no great planning or science behind such a numbers
game approach, that does not mean that you can simply set it and forget it.
Even at one cent a click, it could very soon start costing you money if you
are generating no sales whatsoever but are still having your ad shown all
over the place. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 28 Section summary Ads that feature on the content network are not going to make as many sales, so your bid per click should also be considerably lower. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 29 Cheap means nothing unless.. We established that you will pay significantly less for clicks from ads on
content network sites. That traffic is therefore cheap traffic. Cheap,
however, is a comparative term, and the traffic is only cheap if you are
making sales and generating a profit by doing so. It is essential therefore that, before we get down to the nitty-gritty of
generating the maximum number of potential buyers from sites on the
content network, you focus on converting as many of those visitors into
customers as possible when they arrive. There are many factors that will dictate whether someone will buy the
product or service that you are selling once they land on your site. On top of that, your business will have a break-even point, an income-per-
campaign figure below which you are losing money, and above which you
are making a profit. This will be influenced by several of the same factors
that convince a visitor to become a customer, because it is sales that drive
everything in your business. Amongst these factors are: The perceived value of your product or service. Is it good enough, and does it do what it is claimed to do? Can you improve it? Can you add
extra value to it by adding additional bonuses? In other words, can
you increase the overall value of the product package on offer so that
more visitors buy? If you can, this will naturally improve your conversion ratios - the
percentage of visitors who spend money on your site. Is there
anything else you can do to increase these ratios? How much are you earning in monetary terms (as opposed to percentages) per sale? You can obviously afford to spend more on
advertising if you sell a $99 product than if you sell a $29 one, so is
the price point of your product right? Are you adding your visitors to your mailing list? If so, this is adding to the long term value of your business even if it does not create
immediate sales - and that raises the break even point, because it
represents future cash in the bank. Are you generating any immediate additional revenues on the back of the initial sales by making one time offers and so on? That has to be
factored in to the value to your business of each customer. What is your refund rate like? For every 100 sales that you make, how much money do you have to send back to customers? If you do not
know this, then calculating the break even point is impossible. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 30 The bottom line is that, whether the initial cost of buying traffic from PPC
ads is high or low is essentially irrelevant until you compare that cost with
the money it brings in. So, in purely cost terms, ads on content network
sites are cheap in basic cost-per-click terms. However, you still need to do
everything that you can to maximize your conversion rates in order to
generate maximum profits from that traffic. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 31 Section summary Even the cheapest PPC traffic has no value if you are not making more money from it than you are spending on pulling those visitors to your
site. You therefore need to focus on increasing your conversion rates at the same time as you are seeking cheap but effective traffic generation
tactics to use with AdWords. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 32 Adopting a scattergun approach Lets imagine that you have decided that you are going to focus all of your
AdWords efforts on driving dirt cheap clicks from ads that are featured on
sites within the Google content network. You therefore go back to the Edit Campaign Settings screen and uncheck
the Google Search box from the Networks window at the top right hand
corner of the screen. Next, you edit the maximum cost per click that I am
willing to pay for content network clicks right down to $0.01. Now you are ready to go by placing ads on content network sites. How can you make any money from doing this? The first thing that you should be trying to do is to land sales of the product
or service that you were selling previously, but doing so now at $0.01 per
click. At that level, the traffic is cheap enough for you to run a test campaign
for a few days to see what conversion rates you are achieving before you
decide whether this is going to work for you or not. In this case, if you have an advert that you have previously used and tested
on the search network, and you know what conversion rate has been
achieved previously, this should be the ad that you test on the content
network sites as a direct comparison point. This ensures that you have a meaningful way of assessing the conversion
rates that you are seeing from your new content network campaign. This
therefore enables you to see whether your new ad campaign is a waste of
money (if that is the case) that much quicker. This allows you to call a halt
far more swiftly as well. However, it may be that you cannot do so immediately. An advertising
campaign on the content network is not the same as one that you conduct
through the search results pages of Google. A search network campaign can start almost as soon as you submit your
advert, and you can call a halt to it almost as instantly. With an ad campaign
for content network sites, however, your ad must be approved before it can
go live, and that can take a couple of days. Similarly, if you decide that you want to can a campaign, that request can
take a few hours to action. This means that even though you pulled the plug
on a losing campaign, your ad is still being shown for some time afterwards
and you are paying for it every time that happens. If you have a one cent per click ad on a small site, that is no big deal, but if
you have an ad on a site that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, and
you are paying $0.50 a click, then that could knock a big hole in your
budget, and you would be powerless to stop it. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 33 It would be like a great big financial snowball accelerating down the side of a
steep hill, gathering up more of your money the faster it gets. So, be
careful, and certainly at first keep everything strictly small scale, plus, keep
a very close eye to see whether you are getting any results at all. An alternative is to place ads on sites on a CPM basis, that is, you will pay
for ads for every 1000 times that they are shown. This, at least in theory, is
far safer, as you know the exact cost of every 1000 ad appearances before
you start and you can target the sites that you want your ads to appear on
far more easily. However, even this is not perfect, because although the minimum cost per
1000 clicks for CPM advertising is very low, the actually cost that you should
actually expect to pay will be significantly higher, while the click through rate
for ads shown on a CPM basis is generally extremely low. That is, unless you follow my cunning plan.. It is possible to exclude some sites from showing your ad either by
specifically named sites or by particular types of sites. It is also possible to make exclusions by IP address as well: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 34 However, all such exclusions can only be done at campaign level, and that is
a little like throwing the baby away with the bath water. For sure, doing this
will cut out some bad sites, but it probably also means that your ads are
never going to be seen on a lot of high quality sites. You are taking a very large hammer to crack a relatively small nut by cutting
sites from your advertising campaign that might have been good for you. Why would you even consider doing that when you are scrambling for every
bit of business you can get? From this simple overview of the pitfalls of trying to make money from ads
that feature on content network sites, it is apparent that one thing is
missing. However, just popping up ads on Content Network sites in the hope
that they might make some money is nothing less than throw enough at the
wall and some just might stick advertising at its worst! In all my years of
working and making money online, I have never yet seen that approach
make more than a handful of dollars even when it truly was the best of
times! Far more commonly, such an unplanned and ill-disciplined approach, a
marketing strategy that is essentially relying on little more than dumb luck is
almost bound to lose money before it gets off the ground. That should not
be your modus operandi either. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 35 Section summary If you are going to start placing ads on sites of the AdWords Content Network, make sure that you start off at $0.01 per click. This will
enable you to assess your conversion rates without spending too much
money. Test using a proven advert from a previous Search Network advertising campaign if you have one available. Be prepared to pull the plug if the campaign in not making any sales, but be aware that it does not happen instantly. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 36 Targeting your Content Network ads Site targeting at a basic level Once you have a content network advertising campaign up and running, you
should monitor it carefully, especially once you do start to see some sales
coming in. The sites that are generating sales for you are pretty obviously the ones that
you want to work with, and the ones that are doing nothing for you are
equally obviously the ones that you are not interested in. It therefore makes good sense for you to start sending more traffic to the
sites that are helpful for you, and here is how you would do this. First, go back to the Advanced Options window of the Edit Campaign
Screen, and switch the Ad Servings from Rotate back to Optimize. This
should get Google to track which ad sites are pulling the business in for you,
and to send a higher proportion of your traffic there. Second, start excluding the non-performing sites. This will naturally funnel
more of the business to the sites that have made sales for you so far. If, for example, Google was initially displaying your ads once a week spread
across 100 sites, then if you can cut that site number down to 50, each will
display your ads twice as often. By excluding half the sites from your roster,
you have filtered out those that were non-performing and replaced them
with those that are. Over a period of time, you should therefore be able to focus all your content
network ad campaigns on only those sites that are performing for you. So,
through a process of trial and error, the cost per sale of each campaign that
you are running should gradually decrease. It is effective, but it is not going to happen overnight. Taking targeting to the next level I mentioned earlier that there are hundreds of new advertisers every week
joining the AdWords program, and that, as a consequence, there are many
new adverts being created and published as well. In fact, many regular users of the net would suggest that online advertising
is getting pretty close to saturation point. One consequence of this deluge of advertising on the search engine results
pages is that the people who land on these pages are actually seeing the ads
less and less. There is a growing tide of ad blindness. Research indicates that the vast majority of searchers look at the left hand
side of the search results page (at the natural, organic searches, in other
words) and they will search from the top to the very bottom of these results http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 37 before considering looking at the ads. Indeed, some research indicates that
many people even look at the second page of natural results before finally
looking at the ads shown on the page as a complete, when-all-else-fails, last
resort. This ad blindness is another reason that advertising on the search network
is rapidly becoming less effective. It also presents you with an opportunity,
one that few of your competitors are even aware of. Many of these sites that appear high up in the organic search results feature
ads that are presented on that site by Google through the AdSense program.
The idea behind AdSense is that when the site owner pastes a small snippet
of Google supplied code onto their sites, the program serves up ads that are
super-relevant to the site in question. That is the theory anyway. In reality, the ads that appear are often way off
target. For example, a few days ago I ran a search for hotels in Paris and,
being as ad-blind as the next man, checked out the organic search result
that was in the #1 spot. The site was good, and featured AdSense ads in a skyscraper block, so I
took a look. The #1 ad that AdSense had served up on this site was for
Paris Hilton info from a leading music site. Both the Paris and Hilton bits of the name in question could be relevant to
the subject matter of this site, but the sum total is most definitely not. However, this kind of thing happens all the time, with adverts appearing on
content network sites that are almost entirely irrelevant to the original
search. Note that I am not concerned that the ad was not actually particularly
relevant to the site in question the focus is on the fact that it was not
related to my original search term. My concern is still finding a reasonable
hotel in Paris. Here is another consideration. Remember the scattergun approach to
advertising on Content Network sites that I highlighted earlier? If such an
approach does net any sales for you, and you manage to get more than one
sale from any individual site, I bet that the two or three sales that you
manage to generate from the same site will almost certainly come from the
same page! Why? Because it is individual site pages that are targeted, not whole sites! Imagine, for example, that you have a site of 100 pages, each of which
features hotels in cities around the world, and each page carries AdSense. If
I was advertising and selling a guide to hotels in Paris on your site, the
page that details Paris hotels will be the one that generates the most sales
for me, rather than pages that list hotels in Sydney, Bombay or Moscow. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 38 See what I mean? On your hotel site, advertising on 99 out of the 100 pages
would be an almost complete waste of time as far as I am concerned. It is the individual page of your site that I want my ad to feature on,
because it is that page that is drawing visitors to whom I want my ad
showing. You see the strategy concept beginning to take shape here. Imagine that, going a stage further, I found 10 or 20 or 50 sites, all of which
featured AdSense advertising and all of which had one or two pages that
were totally and completely focused on hotels in Paris. If I could get my AdWords ad that featured the words Hotels in Paris in the
ad title line onto each of those pages, that would be a superb way of
skyrocketing my CTR, thereby reducing the cost per sale dramatically at the
same time. It can be done! http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 39 Section summary You can target sites where you ads are to appear by gradually dropping those that do not perform from your list, thus focusing your
efforts on the ones that are making sales for you. However, many of the pages on those sites are likely to be irrelevant and the ads that often appear on them (alongside yours?) are also
unrelated to the main page topic. Your targeting would therefore benefit from being more accurately and tightly focused. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 40 Grabbing the ads that you want While targeting where your ads will appear by site is going to improve your
CTR and therefore your sales, it is going to be far more effective if you can
appear in exactly the right ad blocks on the most relevant pages. So, the first job is to find AdSense ads on pages that appear high up the
natural organic rankings that you can begin to add your advertisement to. Before doing so, however, there is something that you need to be aware of,
especially if the search term upon which your advertising campaign is
focused is too mainstream or popular. We have already established that you are now trying to get your ads on
specific pages inside websites. You do not want to target whole websites
because, as I have already indicated, when you do that, the vast majority of
your ads will be shown on pages that are not relevant. However, if you are using a relatively common or popular search term, you
will find that the top organic results are likely to be for the appropriate pages
of general reference sites like Wikipedia or Ask.com. If not, it is even more likely that the first few organic results are for the
home pages of sites that are especially focused on that particular topic or
subject matter. In this case, even though the (home) page that appears in
the organic results carries exactly the kind of Google ad blocks that you
would like your ad to appear in, you should ignore it, because if you use the
URL, then Google is going to show your ads on a site-wide basis. This means that for every ad that appears on a relevant page, there will be
ten or twenty entirely irrelevant ad displays that have little or no chance of
drawing the click. This will waste your money, as you will understand later. Having confirmed that, let us take a step by step journey through how you
go about finding the pages that you want your site to appear on, and then,
how you ensure that it does so. Step 1 Finding your first target page In this example, we have written a guide to auto insurance basics, so we
start our search by typing this term into Google: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 41 The URL of the first organic search result certainly looks good (it is evidently
not the site home page, in other words) so let us take a closer look. Before doing so, however, there are a few things that you should be
prepared to look for. Even if the page does feature AdWords ads, you still
need to judge whether it is a page that will generate click throughs for you. How do the ads look? Do they stand out and are they in a position on the
page where the site owner really wants people to click on the ads, or are
they there as an afterthought? As a general guideline, if the ads appear
across the very top of the page, or run down the left hand side from the top
in a long, rectangular skyscraper, that is a pretty sure sign that this is a
webmaster who is taking his advertising seriously. How well does the ad blend in with the page around it, or does it stand out?
From your point of view, the latter is far better, otherwise the ad block may
actually be unseen by the site viewers. Also, as an interesting aside, note that in this case, the page title is actually
carinsurance/basics,html and actually has nothing to do with auto
insurance. This re-emphasizes the earlier point about focusing on the search term and
not the page URL, as it is the search term tells you what people are looking
for, and that is what brought us here as well. Bear these considerations in mind when we look at the #1 organic result for
auto insurance basics: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 42 Excellent! There are ads on the page, they are in an ideal top left position
(okay, the Index is above them, but you cannot have everything!) and they
clearly stand out from the rest of the page. Added to that, it is a nice looking
page, and the content information is good and highly relevant to your
product. As it says, it is pretty much Perfect! This is definitely a page that we want
our auto insurance basics advert to appear on. Of course, you will not always be so lucky as to find such an ideal site in the
#1 organic search position. If the page that appears in the #1 spot does not feature ads, there is little
that you can do about it, so move on. Depending on the popularity of the search term that you are using, it could
be that organic results that are featured as far down as the fifth or sixth
page are drawing reasonable numbers of visitors, so do not use the results
position as your page selection criterion. Rather, focus on the relevance of
the ads that are already shown on the pages to the search term that you
have chosen when creating your advert. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 43 If the ads that are already appearing indicate that the people who hit this
site will find your ad to be a satisfactory solution to their problem, then add
the page URL to your list. If not, dont. If it is a page that you would like your ad to appear on, open up a text file
on your machine, then copy and paste the exact page URL in. You could of course just paste it straight into the appropriate AdWords
space, but I prefer to use a text file before doing so, as this means I have a
personal copy of the list on my machine. In order to make sure that everything is set up correctly, you need to start a
new advertising campaign, so the first thing to do is to ensure that it is a
Placement targeted campaign: Give the campaign a name, chose your language and target the whole world
by location (click change targeting, select the Bundles tag at the top of the
drop down page, and then All Countries and locations). http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 44 Unless they have created any new countries recently, you should have 233
locations shown, as indicated above. Create your ad, remembering how important it is to use the keywords in the
ad to help keep your Quality Score good: Hit Continue and if the next page offers you the option to create more ads,
skip it. This should bring you to a page that looks like this: There are (currently) four options of the types of pages that you can target
your ads to appear on. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 45 Select List URLs, because you are going to add the pages that you want
your ad to appear on into the page box yourself. In a perfect world, all you would need to do now is paste the URL of the
page that you found earlier into the box, and that would be that. However, it is not quite that simple, because Google want you to target
whole sites, rather than individual pages (perhaps because they want you to
spend your advertising budget more quickly?). So, when you paste in the individual page URL, nothing happens! The module is looking for a site-wide (home page) URL, so, purely as a
temporary measure, you are going to have to give it one in order to be able
to move through the process. However, you MUST follow this process through to the final conclusion,
otherwise your page targeting is not going to work. You have two choices of how you can do this. Option one is to cut down the
URL that you have already pasted into the box to its root domain name or
option two is to hit Get Available Placements. Purely as an indicator of what will happen, well use option two: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 46 The top result happens to be the same root domain name anyway, so lets
add that to the list by clicking Add: Continue again to the next screen that will offer you a choice of the how
you want to pay for the ads that are going to be displayed. Choose CPM, as
you are going to pay for every thousand displays, rather than per click: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 47 and again, click Continue: Select the maximum figure that you want to spend every day, and the cost
per thousand clicks. I always start off both of these as low as possible, bearing in mind the
potential for the cost to run away with itself when using the CPM approach
that I mentioned earlier. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 48 It is, however, unlikely that you will mange to land 1000 ad impressions for
$0.25, but that is a bridge to cross later! This brings you to what should be the final screen of the set up process: So, hit Save Campaign and that is, in theory, the set-up finished. Except it is not, of course, because as it stands Google are going to show
your ad on every page of the insure.com site. Given that this is an extensive
and popular site, this would burn through your 1000 views like wild-fire,
most likely with almost no clicks. It is therefore CRITICAL that you go back to tweak the new campaign that
you just created. After you have clicked on Save Campaign this is the screen that you should
see: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 49 Click on the highlighted campaign title. By default, the next screen will
display the Summary as controlled by the tags to the top right: You need to change the view to Placements by hitting the appropriate tag
(1) and then click on Edit Placements and Bids (2): Now you need to change the site URL from the root domain name (as shown
above) to that of the individual page that you want your ads to feature on
(without the http://, note): http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 50 And then hit Save changes. Now, the Placements screen should be showing the URL of the individual
page, rather than the root domain name as it was earlier, like this: And that is it, the first page of the laser targeted advertising campaign for
the search term auto insurance basics has been added to your account. Step 2 Wash, rinse and repeat Go back to the original Google search that you carried out for the term auto
insurance basics and open up the page that is shown as the second organic
search result. How does it look? Does it fit your criteria? If so, then go through the same process once again, and add the page URL
to this campaign. If not, move on to check the net result, and so on. Try to find five pages for each term if at all possible. This will enable you to use another feature that I skipped over a little on the
previous run through. At the present moment, we have input a figure of $0.25 as the sum that we
want to pay for 1000 ad impressions. I know from my own experience that
this is not going to be enough (think in the region of $2, and you will be
closer), but how much is actually going to be enough? If you go back to the Edit Placements screen, you will see something like
this: http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 51 This will show you the likelihood of your ad appearing on the pages that you
have chosen for any given sum that you are bidding for your CPM ads, as
long as there are 5 URLs entered. Given that this can be very useful for finessing the CPM figure down to a
point where you have a balance that is perfect (for you) between your cash
outlay and ad exposure, you should aim to take advantage of this tool if at
all possible. So, aim for five pages per ad group. Step 3 Create a new ad based on a very similar key phrase Is there any other phrase that you can think of that might indicate that a
searcher is looking for your product? If so, create a new ad campaign based
on that term. For example, anyone who is looking for a guide to car insurance basics is
looking for exactly the same thing as your original searcher, except they are
using a slightly different format of the English language to do so, so they
would be a key target in our example. Do remember that, as your key term is now car insurance basics, that is
the key phrase that you should use in the new ad in order to keep the QS
high and the cost of the ads down. Step 4 Go Global As a search engine, Google is regionalized by countries, and the results that
are shown in one country are not necessarily going to be exactly the same
as in another. For example, you would find an awful lot more results when using Google UK
to search for car insurance basics than you would in the USA, where auto
is the far more commonly used term. So, take a look at Google in other countries to see what additional variations
you can come up with. The easiest way of doing this is by using a proxy server, where you reroute
your web searches through a server in another country, By doing this, you
call up the version of Google that is local to the country or region that the
server you are using is based in. There is an excellent free plug-in for the Firefox browser that allows you to
do this quickly and easily, available from ProxySel . Download and install this to your browser and follow the directions on the home page about how to
use it. Do so to check out Google in other major computer-using countries and
regions like UK, Europe, Australia, Canada etc., to see what regional
variations you can find. http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 52 Step 5 Observe and test Once your page-targeted Content Network campaign goes live, which should
take between 24 and 48 hours, you should be looking for your ad being
shown and hopefully some click throughs. With the kind of targeting program that you have instigated, you should
expect to see the most effective ads on the most targeted page returning
click through rates of anywhere between 15% and 20%, although some of
my best campaigns land CTRs well in excess of 20%. If, on the other hand you see some of the ads getting large numbers of
impressions and very low click through rates, then you should pause them
and re-examine the ads in question. Analyze what is going on as far as possible, in order to understand why you
are getting such poor results. Although there are no hard and fast rules here, any ad that had been
displayed over 200 times and was enjoying a CTR of less than 10% is
definitely one that I would pause and re-evaluate, and anything less than
5% is in serious trouble! You should adopt these guidelines as a starting point for your own testing
and evaluation purposes. Step 6 The ultimate objective Run your page targeted ads for some time, and keep continually adjusting
and modifying what you are doing. Ultimately, by placing your ads only on high quality pages that are featured
high up in the organic search results for your exact search term, it should be
possible to pull your cost per click through down to less than $0.01. Until you do so, you should not be satisfied! http://www.djkassassin.com All Rights Reserved 2008 53 Section summary Search for individual pages of web sites that are totally focused on your own search term. Work through the AdWords set up routine, and
then go back to finesse it so that you can focus on individual site
pages only. Build small groups of site pages for each keyword search term five pages per term is excellent. Once your campaign is running, keep a close eye on your results and be prepared to pause any ads that do not seem to be pulling the
results you want. The ultimate goal is to bring the cost per individual click down to less than $0.01, which can (and should) be done!

Comments