“I Wasted Several Thousands on PPC”
October 1, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik
It’s much to often when speaking to someone trying to market through search engine marketing that you hear, “I wasted several thousand on PPC,” which was a thread on digital point forums. So, whoever thinks they can start a site, throw up a quick campaign in Google, and make thousands of dollars, think again.
With Pay-Per-Click marketing becoming a lot more complex than it was several years ago, even 2 years ago (quality score implementation, etc.) a lot of knowledge is required. Building a successful campaign takes a lot of testing and optimization.
If you are just staring and don’t have the money to hire a professional, at least you can do the following things to help minimize the risk of losing a lot of money quick.
Keyword Research: Keyword research will make or break your campaign. Make sure you don’t launch bidding on too many words at first. Have an apporximate of how much you will pay for the position you want that may get you the most traffic. One of the best keyword reserach tools is Googles Keyword Tool.
Competitive Research: This one is key. It is crucial you really do look at your competitors, what their landing page is like, and what they are bidding on. Look at your compeititors in the first positions. They should be doing well if they have the money to bid first position in the search engines.
Set Small Daily Spending Cap: Google allows you to control how much money you want to spend per day. Most of the time, if you’re bidding on high volume searched keywords, it will go over that budget by a bit so make sure you sart out with a small budget if you’re main concern is going over a certain amount. Also, setting a small daily cap will reduce your ad impressions but that may not be a bad thing for CTR reasons.
A/B Split Testing: A big mistake a lot of newbies make is in a rush to get the campaign going, throw one Ad and let it ride. Make sure you are testing different variations of ads to see which one is getting better click through rates and test also which ones are converting better for you.
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Comments (5)
Thank you for suggesting useful points to be cared before we start campaign. I am newbie in this field. Invested $20 in Bidvertiser PPC. But didn’t get enough response yet. I will follow your tips.
[...] Re: Top PPC Tactics There is nothing more important than reading blogs in the industry that talk about PPC and understand exactly how it works for you to be successful. If you have any specific question, Ill be glad to answer for you but posting that you’re new to ppc and want tactics wont get you too many responses (i dont think, maybe im wrong)… first and foremost you want to do the right keyword research which im sure you are using the google keyword tool which is the best by far for me. you can see estimated cpc cost, etc. are you local targeting, nationwide, worldwide? make sure you set the right settings for your campaign or you will lose a lot of money very quickly. I wrote this last month: “I Wasted Several Thousands on PPC” | PalatnikFactor.com [...]
[...] Re: What is your monthly adwords budget? There has got to be a reason why you spent $100, got clicks, and not converted. It could have been a landing page issue, keyword relevance, ad relevance…PPC is a very strategic marketing tactic and has to be done right in order to be successful. Check out this post: I Wasted Several Thousands on PPC [...]
[...] “I Wasted Several Thousands on PPC” [...]
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