Starting a PPC Campaign

June 26, 2008 @ 11:54 am · Filed under Advertising, Affiliate Programs, PPC

I have dabbled in using PPC advertising to drive traffic to my sites, but now I am getting ready to do it for real. This will be for the main site that makes money for us. 75% of that revenue comes from a single affiliate program. About another 20% comes from AdSense, and the remaining 5% comes from other affiliate programs.

I have been doing some reading about PPC and here is the plan I have come up with.

Set Up Tracking
I currently use Google Analytics for my stats. I am adding goals to keep track of affiliate clicks, AdSense click and email list sign ups. I am also adding code to modify the URLs of the affiliate links when the user has come from a PPC ad so I can see which sales are actually from the PPC campaign.

Keyword Research
I’ll start by creating a keyword list for a single product. (All the product are similar, so it should easy to extend the list to other product.)

Here are some sources for keyword research I have come across. I’ve played with most of these before, but this will be the first time I will use them seriously.

I plan to go mostly for mid to long tail keywords to begin with. Once I have a list I will group them into related keywords. Each group of keywords will be used for a different campaign.

Create Landing Pages
For each group of keywords I want to come up with at least 2 initial landing pages for with significant differences on them to do A/B testing.

Setting up Campaign
I’ll set up the campaigns in AdWords. I’ll need to come up with ad variations for each campaign to test out the effectiveness of the ads.

Monitoring and Tweaking
Now its time to monitor everything. Which campaigns are getting the best ROI? Which specific ads do best? Which landing pages get the best conversions? Based on the results, I’ll start tweaking things.

Repeat
Finally, I can start the whole process over again for each different product.

3 Comments

  1. Ty Hurd Said,

    July 14, 2008 @ 1:02 pm

    Interesting post – I have a way to game Google and other PPC places that can save you a TON in spending. I did a full post on it here: http://www.tysblog.com/2008/07/06/how-to-get-105-or-more-in-google-adsense-ppc-for-only-5-again-and-again-and-again/

    Good luck with your PPC – it can really be hit or miss till you tweak your campaigns just right.

  2. Ian Said,

    October 28, 2008 @ 8:49 pm

    Thanks for the great info. Ive not heard of Goolge suggest, one for the toolbox i think :)

    Ian :)

  3. Toivo Lainevool Said,

    October 28, 2008 @ 9:07 pm

    Ian, I’m glad I could make a good suggestion. I still haven’t gotten my PPC campaign going, I’m still tweaking things on my sites and creating landing pages. Like everything it is taking longer than I thought.

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