In this post, I will show you how to keep your campaign CTR high and keep your campaign costs to a minimum. The techniques I am showing today is based on hard-and-fast rules. Just like good stock market investors, rules give you consistent outcome and keep the emotion side of the game out of the picture. This is really important because it is easy to get too “attached” to your campaign and let your emotions cloud your judgment and decisions.

Setup Your Baseline

Use these values as a starting point for all your campaigns.

1. Ensure you have 1000-2000 broad keywords. It is important to have a large set of broad keywords as you literally are throwing shit against the wall to see which keywords stick. Because Adwords allows 2000 adgroups per campaign, I would place each keyword into its own adgroup.
2. Set your starting bid at $0.18-0.20 (USD). This is the magic number that is enough to get some impressions flowing. If you cannot get impressions, then your market is either too competitive or there is no interest in your keywords (i.e. your niche is not popular).
3. Set your daily budget to $15. This will allow your campaign to stop at $15 for you to inspect your campaign’s success. If by $15, you still have not generated revenue in your campaign, then it is time to abandon the campaign entirely. You can increase this budget as you feel more confident about the campaign.

Monitor Your Campaign

If you thought getting your campaign live on the network was all the hard work, you haven’t seen anything yet. When you first launch your campaign, you need to carefully monitor and babysit your campaign. The goal is to optimize your CTR and lower your bid costs.

1. Start lowering bids after 1000 impressions. Once you know that your campaign can generate traffic, it is time to make your first bid change. Lower your bids by $0.01-0.02 each time and do not exceed more than 3 bid changes per day. Stop lowering bids once you’ve reached around $0.06-0.10.
2. Optimize your CTR by pruning. The purpose of pruning is to discard keywords that are bringing down your overall CTR for the campaign. I believe that Google looks at the overall CTR for “all time”. So you best babysit your campaign at the start to not let your CTR run too low. My advice is to check your campaign and prune every hour using the following rules:
   1. Delete adgroups lower than 0.15% CTR.
   2. Delete adgroups with 500 impressions and 0 clicks.

Note: You campaign should be able to reach 100,000 impressions per day easily. If you are having trouble, it is possible that your niche is too narrow or specialized. Once you start pruning your adgroups, your impressions should drop below 10,000 but your CTR should stay in the 1-5% range. To put this into perspective, this gives you 100-500 clicks to your poll page. That’s pretty reasonable.

Take-Away Points

To lower your bids on Adwords, you need to ensure that your CTR is very high (i.e. >1%). In order to achieve this, you need to prune and drop poor performing adgroups. If you wait too long to do this, you have doomed your campaign by letting the impressions run away with low CTRs. Therefore, do not launch your campaigns and go to bed. Sit there and monitor your campaign every hour to stay ahead of the CTR race.

Ad copywriting is extremely important for making your ad standout and grabbing the attention of web surfers. On most websites (where your ads are most likely to be displayed), making your ads standout in a sea of crowded garbage and over stimulization is not easy. This chore is made harder by ad blindness, where the surfer has blocked out certain areas of a webpage due to clutter and ad saturation.

Ad Copywriting Guidelines

There are obviously many examples of ad copywriting out there. The easiest way to see examples is to review the top 10 ads that appear on Google when you search for the keyword. Those ads are there because somebody (or some ad agency) has meticulously crafted those ads, split tested them, and pushed the ones that convert to the top. But for polls, ads don’t appear on Google’s search engine result pages (SERP). They appear within the content of a website. Therefore, it is not as easy to find samples of ads, but not impossible.

Since we are talking about ad copywriting for polls here, keep in mind, the goal here is to get the punters to vote on your poll and then enter their information on the next page “for a chance at a prize.” Here are some basic rules to follow for poll ads that have been suggested:

1. Try mentioning the prize in the ad. The punter may vote on the poll because they are interested on the prize and is guaranteed to click all the way through to the offer page. Or they may not even click on your ad because they are not interested in the prize, thus saving you the cost of one click.
2. Try fitting in a call-to-action (CTA) into the ad text so that users know what they need to do when they click on your ad. Same principle as above applies so that punters who are interested will click, and those who aren’t won’t and save you some click costs.
3. Enter the keywords into the headline. Sometimes I enter just the keyword by itself and sometimes I enhance it with a few more words. See my examples below.
4. Try putting “Yes or No” in the headline. You can try putting your poll buttons in the headline or a variation of that to see if it makes a difference.
5. Try stating “1-Minute Poll” in the body of the ad. You can also combine this with the “Yes or No” in the body to basically reveal what your poll is about. For example, “1-Minute Poll: YES or NO”.
6. Try adding ellipses (…) to your ad body. Adding ellipses to the very last line of your ad body seems to trigger a bit of curiosity for the punters and will make them click through to find out more about the ad. This can be a good thing or a bad thing.
7. Do you know the “secret”? It has been said that incorporating the word “secret” in your ad has the same effect as ellipses and will trigger the curiosity in the cat. Try and see if this works for you.

Ad Format

This is just a guideline for the look and feel of your ad. Use the above copywriting guidelines to determine what goes on each line. Because these are just guidelines, it is not necessary to follow strictly as my examples below show.

1. Keep the headline short. 1 or 2 words maximum.
2. Tell them it is a poll on the first line.
3. Ask them the question on the second line.
4. Capitalize the words in your url.

Ad Copywriting Examples

Halo Wars: Yes or No?
1-Minute Poll-Win A Great Prize
Is Halo Wars Overrated?
PollSite.com/Halo

Halo Wars vs. Killzone 2
60-Second Poll
Which game will reign supreme?
PollSite.com/Halo

Barack Obama Is A Liar
Is He Lying To You Too?
3 Second Poll – YES or NO
PollSite.com/Obama

Is Payton Manning Gay?
They Are Saying He Is
Vote YES Right Now
PollSite.com/Payton

Are You Ready for A Black President?
We Need To Know….
30 Second Poll – YES or NO
PollSite.com/Black-President

Will Smith House Arrest
Does Will Deserve House Arrest?
Vote for a Free Ipod Touch
PollSite.com/WSmith

Ah, the question about max bid is always asked by beginners starting PPC. In most cases, setting a value and forgetting doesn’t work because you are not maximizing your CPC. It is also important to have good tracking on your campaigns so that you know where to tweak and optimize your bids.

So let’s get started.
Is it better to bid a maximum of $0.10 at the start, or is it better to bid higher (e.g. $0.30) and then gradually lower it over time?

Starting Low
If the keywords you are bidding on are very competitive, then starting at $0.10 will get you nowhere. Now what if you slowly bump up by $0.05 increments until you get impressions? I have heard of people trying this technique and still never getting impressions. You may have ruined your campaign forever.

Starting High
The alternative is to start high (e.g. $0.30) to lock in your traffic, and then gradually lower your bids to a sustainable level. Yes, it is very difficult to make money bidding over $0.20 on a typical e-mail or ZIP submit campaign, but if you know that you are getting good conversion rates, then you can rest assured that lowering your CPC will eventually keep you afloat. In this stage, you will lose some money to research what adgroups are getting traffic and are converting. If you are not getting decent traffic from certain adgroups, you can prune them to improve your CTR with Google. This is a small sacrifice to learn what works and what doesn’t.

The general rule of thumb for me is to bid $0.25 right off the bat. If impressions and conversions are decent, gradually reduce by $0.02 per day. At around $0.15-$0.19, you should slowly lower it by $0.01 per day until you hit your maximum ROI. Don’t expect all adgroups to give you the same ROI. Certain adgroups can only go as low as $0.14 and earn you 25% ROI. While other adgroups can go lower to $0.10 and give you 100% ROI.

The general theme on bidding is to divide and conquer until you have found a happy medium.

Caveat
Aha, there’s always the damn fucking caveat at the footer of all documents.

1. If you have a good history with Google, you can actually start your bids off right where you want it to. Initially, you may have to start at $0.25, but with good standing with Google, you can start at a lower bid price.
2. Even bidding $0.50, if you have a new Adwords account, it may take 5-7 business days to get impressions. So please be patient and don’t setup 30 campaigns in frustration. When it kicks in, you’re going to lost a lot of money quick.

When it comes to promoting e-mail and zip submit offers, you need to know when to keep an offer and when to toss an offer. I am sure that every affiliate marketer has their own strategy that works for them. Each strategy’s validity will also depend on many factors including promotion technique and target demographics. Today, I will show you two methods that are commonly used.

Method 1 – One offer at a time.
In this method, you would push only one offer in your campaign and use certain hard rules to keep or toss the offer. This method minimizes financial loss and will give you some ideas on whether the offer is working for your campaign. Its disadvantage is that it takes a bit more time to find the best offer and you are more prone to scrubbing by the advertiser.

The hard rules for swapping out an offer for another are as follows:

• Toss if after 30 clicks, there are zero leads.
• Toss if after 50 clicks, there are fewer than 2 leads.
• Toss if you have lost $15. This last rule is a catch-all accounting for your starting bid price and irregardless of click/lead ratio.
• Toss if after 10 offers tried, you still don’t get a lead.

Once you’ve found an offer that is giving you a positive ROI, you can either stay there, or you can continue testing other offers until you’ve tested all your offers and had a chance to evaluate which one was the best performing.

Method 2 – Rotate-rotate-rotate.
Anybody who’s read topics on PPC surely have heard about rotating multiple offers. Rotating will give you a feel (possibly early on) about which offers are converting well. You might even find the good converting ones in your first 30 clicks to your landing page. But in most cases, you will go through about 100-300 clicks before you know which one is a winner. This is more expensive obviously, but you may have some early indicators on which offers are converting. Another benefit is you minimize potential scrubbing and spread your eggs around in case an offer disappears.

In this approach, if you are receiving lower than 10% click/lead conversion, it is probably time to toss the entire campaign due to lack of interest. It may also be that your ad copywriting has mislead the visitor or that the landing page itself is flawed. Now remember that this 10% conversion rate is not written in stone because it is highly dependent on the CPA as well (i.e. payout $$$). But you really want to be in the 25% or higher range to be truly effective.

What? How can it be a bust, yet successful at the same time?

When I started my first few PPC campaigns with Google, I could not get any impressions for the life of me. I think it was because it took about 5 business days for my new Adwords account to get approved with Google. There were definitely some frustrating times waiting for this to occur. So in the mean time, I was taking all my keywords and advertising to Microsoft’s adCenter for my polls. The results were less than stellar. On adCenter, I received no greater than 2000 impressions and zero clicks. Obviously I needed to get my impressions into the 6-digit range to be truly have an impact. And then Google pulls through.

When Google finally approved my account and my campaign, I was on a mad dash with the only account I had active there. Within 12 hours, my stats were as follows:

• Impressions: 270,524
• Clicks: 93
• CTR: 0.03%
• Total Cost: $18.96
• Total Revenue: $1.70
• Total Loss/Gain: $(-17.26)

So while I was happy that I finally got impressions with Google, in no less than 12 hours, I had quicky burnt through $18.96 of my hard earned money. The campaign has since been paused while I fix some issues with my landing page and tracking software. These were the mistakes I made during setup that must be resolved before resuming my campaigns again:

1. Offer was not mentioned on the landing page.
2. Topic was not emotionally catchy enough.
3. My tracking sucked big time.
   1. Could not tell which clicks were sent to the offer page.
   2. Could not tell which offer was being presented at the time.

My biggest beef about my setup was my tracking software. I really couldn’t tell from the overview page which clicks made it through to the offer page versus which ones bounced right away. And the only way for me to see if I received a lead was to log into each affiliate network to check my stats for the day. I really fucked up setting up Tracking202 and the software itself was not designed to support this kind of campaigning to boot. I have now found a workaround in Tracking202 that will show me clicks, click through, and leads.

adCenter Labs

As every advertiser knows, your campaign is only as good as your offer and your offer is only as good as the demographics of your visitors. Every advertiser needs to ensure that the offer they present on their site is most suitable for the demographics of the site visitors. The last thing you want to do is throw up a cosmetics offer on a site predominantly visited my men.

So how do you conduct demographics research for your target keywords? Our good friends at Microsoft provides a great tool called Demographics Prediction that allows you to review the gender and age statistics of the keyword you are targeting. Then you can log into your affiliate network’s system and find the offers that pertain to that demographics. The tool is free to use (no Microsoft account needed either), but I find the results to be somewhat questionable at times. I wouldn’t rely solely on this tool blindly for keyword research. Use your judgment too.

Jessica Simpson Demographics

After launching 3 campaigns on the content networks (Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter), I learned that sub-300 keywords per campaign will get you little to no traffic at all. On my Adwords campaign, I have provided just shy of 400 keywords and received ZERO impressions over the last 5 days. On adCenter, my smallest campaign contains 72 keywords and is receiving about 100 impressions per day.

A bit of asking around and doing some investigation, I learned that 2000-3000 keywords is what I should be aiming for. Also, there is no need to be diligent and prune irrelevant keywords on the content network. With the polls that I am running, you want curious people generally interested in the topic to hop onto your landing page and submit their vote.

My next goal is to launch 3 more campaigns with 2000+ keywords in each campaign to generate more impressions. The one good thing about getting low impressions in my first 3 campaigns was that I did not have to pay for clicks, because I received none.  So I consider this a free lesson in PPC advertising. You don’t get very many things for free in this industry.

One last thing I’d like to add is that if you have a new Google Adwords account, it may take several business days for staff to perform a manual review of your account and campaign. If you want to start quicker, setup an account and setup a quick campaign for a pre-existing website (does not have to be yours). This will get your account approved so that when it is time to setup a real ad, your account will be ready and your ad will be online within a few hours instead of days. Total cost of this effort doesn’t need to be more than $5.

Lesson Learned

1. Ensure at least 2000+ keywords on the content network.
2. Don’t worry too much about keyword quality.
3. Setup and get your Google Adwords account approved early.

Google Adwords

Today I launched my first Adwords campaign on Google’s content network. I am driving traffic to an Obama related site, but without using the word “Obama” in any of my keywords. I targetted the topics in the news that are related to Obama. This indirect reference allowed me to set my CPC very low due to longer tail keywords. I am hoping for a 30% conversion rate at my current CPC amount so I am not expecting to make a profit. If I hit my 30% conversion rate, I will profit about $5 for every 100 clicks to my landing page.

The goal of this campaign is to learn about setting up a proper campaign and verifying that links are sending users to the appropriate offer pages and that Tracking202 is doing its job of tracking CTRs and effecitve keywords.

What I learned

• Google’s Adwords page was a pain in the ass. The wizard setup mode was nice for setting up the ads. But I quickly abandoned this in favor of the offline editor.
• Google’s Offline Adwords Editor software was a pain in the ass, but an awesome tool. It is incredibly powerful for offline adwords management, but has a somewhat steep learning curve.
• Setting up my campaigns for proper tracking is a pain in the ass. There were many Tracking202 links to manage each offer on my rotation.
• It’s a pain in the ass to do everything properly. As I launch more campaigns, the process will get easier and I will find more efficient ways to launch them.

Summary of Campaign

• 340 Obama-related keywords.
• CPC set at $0.25USD.
• $10.00USD max daily budget.
• Rotating 5 offers from 3 affiliate networks.
• Offer lead range $1.10 – $1.40.

I am publishing plugin that I wrote to rotate HTML code within a Wordpress post, page, or sidebar.  You will need the PHP-EXEC plugin installed in order for this plugin to work. Download the plugin and try it for yourself. Post back here in the comments if you have some questions.

Purpose

Use this plugin to rotate ads or sections of HTML code. I found it effective for rotating my affiliate offers.

Download

WP-HTML-Rotator

Usage

• Create a wp-content/htmlrotate/ folder.
• Modify the html.txt sample file provided and upload it into the htmlrotate. You can name this file anything you want as long as it ends in *.txt extension.
• Use the following code in your Wordpress: <?php echo gethtml(‘html’); ?>

Disclaimer

1. I am not offering any support for using this plugin.
2. Please use at your own risk. I will not be responsible for any damages that this plugin may cause to your Wordpress site.
3. This plugin has been tested in Wordpress 2.7+ only though I see no issues with it working on earlier versions of Wordpress.
4. You have permission to modify this plugin to your heart’s content.

My biggest accomplishment for January was making $16.00 profit without spending any of my own money. In the process, I had to setup my website, my tracking software, and pick an affiliate offer to promote. All this was scary to me at first, but now I feel more confident with this. All-in-all, I think I have accomplished a lot for 2-weeks of work in January. What else did I accomplish?

Affiliate Networks

I was approved into the following affiliate networks with little to no effort. I didn’t have a website when I applied and I made it very clear during the interview that I will be using PPC campaigns with custom landing pages to promote the offer. They didn’t hesitate to approve me.

• Neverblue
• MAXBounty
• Advaliant
• Azoogle
• Amped Media
• COPEAC

Note: I was disapproved from Convert2Media. Too bad for them.

PPC Networks

I, begrudgingly,  signed up for the big-3 PPC networks. I wanted to get any delays in the sign-up process out of the way.

• Adwords. This one was free and didn’t cost me a single cent.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing. Had to prepay for $30, but I also found a $100 coupon which I hope works.
• Microsoft adCenter. Had to prepay for $5 of ads. Couldn’t find any coupons.

Other Accomplishments

• Tried and negligibly succeeded in Facebook advertising. $16 profit. heh!
• Dusted off the cobwebs from my older websites and started optimizing it for organic traffic through SEO optimization. Always have Google Analytics running on your sites to see what’s generating traffic.
• Setup Prosper202 system on my server for tracking purposes and truly understood how it all works.
• Continued to maintain this blog providing useful information to those who needed some guidance.
• Becoming the mentor for 5 students. I am no expert, but for the most part, I am 2-3 steps ahead of them.
• Took the plunge and subscribed to PPC Coach. So far, I am mildly impressed with what I see, though the community there is friendlier. Lots of intelligent people willing to help though.
• Setup a fully loaded content site ready for my next plan of attack on PPC.
• Built a Wordpress plugin for rotating segments of HTML code. I named this plugin: WP-HTML-Rotator and can be found on this site.