Being lazy doesn’t pay in the pay per click industry. If you look at the most successful pay per click marketers, you are going to see folks who are constantly testing and tracking everything to figure out how they can earn more with their each and every campaign. I know a lot of folks watch commercials on TV that talk about setting and forgetting things. Well, PPC marketing is not one of those things.

Testing and tracking go hand in hand. You can’t test without tracking, and tracking without testing doesn’t really do you much. By testing different keys and concepts on your landing pages, you can find out what works better, which helps taking a step forward. A lot of folks don’t believe in testing individual keywords. They think of it as “overdoing” and a waste of time. No reasonable marketer would tell you not to test every keyword. Not all keywords are created equal, which means you should try to use ones that give you the best chance of making money.

I personally use WP Affiliate to test my keywords as far as tracking is concerned. I do use Google Analytics and have tied it into my Adwords accounts to figure out how conversions are happening. But I use WP Affiliate on my WordPress sites to reconcile the differences between Adwords numbers and my internal numbers. Tracking individual keywords with WP Affiliate it easy, and there are 10s of other solutions you can use for your keyword tracking. But you should never fly blind in pay per click marketing world. You should test everything, and then track them all.

So you have taken time to build a website, and you have designed an advertising campaign to promote your site. You do your keyword research, and you input your keywords, and then it hits you. Your bids are not high enough to be on the first page of Google.

So in my case, you can decide whether the max CPC of $.5 is worth going for. But what if that number was $15? Believe me, it’s possible. I have seen some obscene numbers to show up on the first page. Now, a lot of folks believe that you can make a living by staying on the second page, but that simply does not work for me. Unless you are in the top 6 listing of Google, you are not going get enough traffic to make a decent living off your site. Whether you are an affiliate marketer or just a lead generator, you should aim for positions 1 to 6.

Lots of folks do go for the first position regardless of the money involved. I personally believe going for the first position is just dumb. You are going to pay a whole lot of money to get that spot, but you actually get better conversion rates on the third or fourth position. The number 1 position is much different from others as you will have to pay a premium to get it. And since you get lots of unqualified clicks, your budget is going to dry up sooner than you think. Positions 4 to 6 provide you with enough traffic to stay afloat and at the same time are not too hard on your budget. What I do with my own campaigns is that I multiply the minimum bid by 1.5 and use that as I Max CPC. Then I watch my campaigns to see where I end up and if the results are not satisfactory as far as the traffic goes, I multiply the new number by 1.5 and repeat the same process.

There is no magic Max CPC that you can use in your campaigns, but you should bid high enough to be in the top 6 positions. The best way to achieve that is by actually doing it. Don’t worry about losing money in the start. If you continue to optimize your pages to get more conversions, you are going to make enough money to cover your costs (that’s obviously dependant on your business model).

So how high do you bid for on search marketing networks?

One of the biggest mistakes that newbie marketers make with adwords, and other paid search services is targeting everything under the sun in one adgroup. Let’s say I want to promote a coupon site. If you use a keyword tool, such as WordTracker, you can get thousands of keywords that are related and not related to coupons.

By putting everything under the sun in one adgroup and using the same ads and landing pages for all these keywords, you are not only going to hurt your pocket (as your quality score will drop for unrelated keywords), you are not going to realize a high enough CTR and conversions from your campaigns. That’s why you should limit what you put in each of your adgroup.

The best way you can optimize adgroups is by targeting only one keyword in each group. But here is the thing. Most pay per click services limit the number of adgroups and campaigns you can have, which means you may not be able to use the one-keyword-per-adgroup concept for your adwords campaigns. I personally use the concept of “mini-themes” for my adgroups. But you should avoid putting bargain keywords in a coupon adgroup. You should also have different landing pages for different keywords. Research has shown that if you customize landing pages for specific keywords, you are going to see better conversion results.

There is no magic number that you can use here, but you should always follow this rule: never put completely different keyword phrases in one adgroup (by that I mean keyword phrases that are mutually exclusive). It’s very simple but you’d be amazed how many folks don’t do it.

You may have heard this idea before, but a few good marketers believe that you shouldn’t trust EPC and your short-term profit when it comes to advertising online on Google and other search engines. The concept of customer Life-Time-Value (cLTV) does make sense on the paper. After all, taking into account the total income that you get from a customer during the life of relationship should matter.

But most PPC marketers focus on short-term profits than long-term. Here is why:

• LTV is hard to calculate: you may be able to forecast a LTV value for each of your customers, but there are a lot of uncertainties involved in the process. Unless you have been in the business for a long-time, you are not going to have enough data to conclude who is more profitable than whom.
• cLTV is dangerous: I am an optimistic person, always trying to see the positive in every situation. But LTV is a dangerous metric to play with. You can get ahead of yourself and expect “X” amount of profit from a customer just to have the conditions change drastically against your business. In other words, it’s easy to overshoot by going with LTV. A lot of companies have gone bankrupt because of solely relying on this metric. Now, what LTV is good for if you are out of business?
• cLTV can lead to expensive decisions: let’s say a company such as Capital One can spend $50 per click for the word “credit card.” They simply know that every conversion is going to cost them $500 on average but since their average cLTV is $1000, they are making a profit. But a small business can go in the red by using the same analogy. You need to have a strong cash flow to be able to play the cLTV game.

My goal with my campaigns has always been to get the customers for the lowest CPA possible. That’s why I am not a strong believer in cLTV. Why would you want to throw cash at a problem that can be solved in other ways? cLTV may work if you hit a wall with your advertising campaigns, but for most of us, it provides no significant value.

Earning Per Clicks (100s of them) is the industry standard used by most affiliate and pay per click marketers to find out how attractive a product/affiliate program is. The concept if really simple. If you are promoting a product that gives you $100 per sale, and your conversion rate is 1%, your EPC is $1. In other words, for every 100 clicks, you are going to make on average $1. Now, this is an average value and you could go 200 clicks without making money. Regardless, many marketers design their sites around this metric (to increase their EPC). But is that the right metric to use?

Many experts argue that EPC is not really that relevant as far as determining the success of a campaign is concerned. At the end of the day, you may be earning $100 per click but spending $110, which means your campaing won’t be profitable. That’s why expert marketers now use EEPC to determine the profitability of each PPC campaign. EPPC = (EPC – (CPC)*100 – HCC)/100. In essence, you are subsctracting the cost that you are paying on average per 100 click and the header cost for those hundred clicks to get down to effective earning per click. There are many other ways to look at this but at the end of the day, you should always look at profit and not revenue. If you are breaking even before taking into account the header costs, then you are actually losing money.

EPC is an industry term that really gives no clear indication about how successful your campaign will be. It just shows how much you can expect to earn on average per hundred clicks. But if you can’t get those clicks for a price significantly lower than your EPC, then you are just wasting money away.

If you have been to a search engine conference such as Search Engine Strategies you have probably met people who swear by pay per click marketing – folks who claim PPC is the only channel they use to make thousands of dollars every month. I personally have no problem with people who claim they are having extreme success with pay per click marketing. There is no doubt a few people make a very good living with PPC alone, but putting all the eggs in the PPC basket can easily put your business in danger of going extinct.

Pay per click marketing is a powerful tool for Internet marketers but it should not be the only tool. It is a great tool to test new offers or do some branding for your business. But at the end of the day you should pay attention to other channels such as media, SEO, and social media. After all, who doesn’t like making more money, and if you can do that with SEO and other marketing techniques, you should do just that.

In addition, the market is so volatile and cut-throat these days that there is no guarantee you are going to be making huge profits tomorrow just because you are doing it today. With Google slaps coming down on us from left and right and the competition getting more intense, it is just the matter of time before the blue oceans in the PPC market turn red. At the end of the day, if the barriers to entry for competitors are not that high, you can expect them to jump in and take a piece of your pie.

At the end of the game, pay per click marketing is only a part of the whole Internet marketing game. By using other channels such as SEO and display media, not only you can keep your presence up in your market, but you can hedge your risks and be more prepared for tough times ahead.

Are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

This is really a silly question. Any reasonable person would know that landing pages are very important. Think about it. You are in the air, and are about to land, would you rather land on a piece of heaven or on a rocky mountain? Your visitors actually care about how you present information on your landing page. So here are a few myths about landing pages:

• Simple, bad looking landing pages work just fine: That’s simply not true. A terrible looking landing page may work great for you, but it’s not written on a stone. You have to get there after vigorous testing.
• Web 2.0 landing pages work great: Again not true. Online marketing is not about winning the beautiful pageant. It’s about providing the right product to the right audience at the right time.
• Usability is overrated: Not true. People love pages that are easy to use and well-presented. If you have a site that causes major confusion for your visitors, they will just live. Remember, you have about 30 seconds to get people’s attention, so if working with your site is harder than solving a math Olympiad question, then there is a good chance your visitors will leave immediately.

Landing pages should be clean and informative. Call to action is a must but overdoing it could back fire. You should never ever settle on a landing page without a/b and multivariate testing. When it comes to online marketing, you should leave your guesses at the door and test until you know for sure what works best.

Call to action is really underrated among newbie marketers. I know a lot of new marketers who feel shy about asking prospects to follow their instructions. But really when it comes down to it, you need to push your prospects hard for them to do what you need them to do. You can drive millions of eyeballs to your landing pages using Google Adwords or YSM, but if you are not specific enough about what you want them to do after reading your landing page, then there is a good chance you will not convert as high as you could have with proper call to action.

Let’s say you want to market a credit card to your audience. You start talking about the card, the benefits, and the features that make it unique. You pretty much explain to your audience why they should not go to work today without applying for that card. But if you forget to actually provide them with proper instructions, there is a good chance that you lose their sale. It’s very similar to having a shop with excellent items for sale, if you forget to unlock the door for your customers, then you are going to lose their business.

So when it comes down to it, you need to put call to action links (preferably Graphical Buttons), and ask your visitors to perform the action (whether it is signing up for your newsletter or just getting the product). It’s really a simple concept, but it’s amazing how many marketers miss it.