I have spoken with many affiliates who have used PPC to promote their web sites with miserable results. The landscape of today’s PPC arena has changed dramatically from that of the past few years. Here are a few tips to help you get started in search marketing:

Start Conservatively

When I started using PPC I set a budget of $10 a day. Start small, develop the results you desire then increase your spend incrementally. Granted, a small amount of clicks will not always generate enough traffic to be able to judge the effectiveness of the campaign, but you can generally get an idea of how you should proceed after your first 500 clicks or so. I have tried many campaigns as an affiliate that simply did not work. Whether it is a conversion issue on the merchant’s end or a case where the commissions are simply not enough to cover the necessary terms in a crowded vertical market, some work and some don’t. Which leads to my next point.

Tighten Up

Try to find a niche that is not over-exploited or too crowded. Generally speaking, the tighter the niche is the better results you will have on a PPC campaign. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. The product or service you are promoting must be popular enough to have adequate search traffic in order to monetize your campaigns. For instance, an effort to promote computer monitors will generally be less successful than an effort to promote LCD computer monitors. Better yet, an effort to promote 21″ computer monitors will be even more successful because you are targeting a more specific consumer. Again, tighten up but don’t back yourself into a corner with targeting so tight that you lose your search volume. There is a fine balance between the two.

Don’t Be Too Concerned With Position

If you can pay 12 cents a click in the #6 position and the top position will cost you 90 cents a click, you need to run both positions and find the “sweet spot” where your ROI is the highest. It will not always be the top position.

Many things determine ad position in today’s PPC landscape other than cost per click, which leads into the next sub-topic.

CTR CTR CTR

In search marketing, nothing happens until someone clicks on your ad. Generally speaking, a CTR (click-through-ratio) of 2% is considered good in a PPC campaign. Google, MSN and now Yahoo consider the CTR of a given keyword when determining the position of your ad. If you have a CTR of 8% and a bid of 31 cents, your ad will likely be displayed above the ad of a competitor with a CTR of 1% and a bid of 51 cents. CTR is very important as it is a determining factor in how your campaign performs overall and has a large impact on the price you ultimately pay for that click.

To increase the CTR of your campaign try to write ad text that is relevant to the item or service you are promoting and try to avoid any statement that does not give the consumer a reason to click your ad and buy the product. You have a very limited space to say as much as you can. Make every character count. Try several text ads for a given ad group. Let them run for a few days or weeks then evaluate the CTR of each ad. Keep the top performers and either eliminate or edit the lower performing ads. Statements in your ad like “Free Shipping”, “On Sale” or “Coupon Available” will be much more likely to entice the customer than a statement such as “Huge Selection” in most cases. If you are targeting a consumer who is searching for a Samsung SyncMaster 204T, for instance, the fact that the merchant you are representing has a huge selection is really not important. The customer wants that monitor and probably does not care about a huge selection of other monitors they are not interested in.

The Landing Page

Where you send the customer after they click is just as important, if not more, than anything else in the PPC equation. I see so many merchants advertising a specific product and sending the customer to their home page on the click. This makes absolutely no sense to me, but as an affiliate marketer this is an opportunity to outperform someone who has deeper pockets than you do.

If you are sending the traffic directly to the merchant, landing page quality should be considered during merchant selection. If a merchant does not have clearly-written and easy-to-understand individual product pages to send your traffic to, then you will probably not be successful with this merchant in a direct PPC campaign.

When creating your own landing pages, make sure you consider the ad you plan to write to promote the page. Use words on your page that you will use in your PPC ad. Make sure the page reads properly and don’t get carried away by creating a spammy page that looks like it obviously exists to tout a given keyword, but make a page that looks good, is uncluttered by irrelevant information and displays the product in such a way as to entice a click. For example, if you have in your ad that a coupon is provided, make sure the coupon code is on the landing page. Announce the coupon on the page and offer the details of the offer on your page somewhere very near the image of the product or the link to purchase the product.

Negative Keywords

Some consulting clients and friends whom I have worked with over the years have a hard time grasping the concept of negative keywords. If you are using phrase or exact match keywords, negative keywords are not that important. But if you are using broad match keywords, negative keywords are often more important than the targeted keywords themselves.

For instance, if you are targetting men’s polo sweaters, you will want negative keywords like:

• defective
• return
• photo
• picture
• image
• customer service
• mend
• fix
• repair

You do not want your ad to show to a customer who is looking for a way to return their Polo sweater nor do you want to show your ad to someone who is looking for a way to repair their lawn edger.

Generally speaking, try to show your ad to those who are searching for your keywords without including those with any motivation other than making a purchase. I know this only seems like common sense but this is an area where many affiliates and merchants alike drop the ball and spend money that they did not have to spend.

More to come on advertising your site later.

Happy Marketing!