If you thought Google was getting annoying with all its new policies, you are going to have to brace yourself for even more guidelines from Google. Google is trying awfully heart to cover itself against liabilities and protect consumers in the process. Whether that has helped small businesses that make money off of Google is another story. While I am not a big fan of a lot of policies that Google has adopted in the past, I actually agree with the latest move by Google to address issues caused by hosted domains (e.g. those on blogspot or WordPress). There are plenty of people who are spamming on Google by using free hosting services or hosted portals such as WordPress. The new URL policy addresses that.

Here is what Google is asking its advertisers to do: display the full URL of your website if you are on a domain that hosts multiple websites. Here are a few nuggets from the announcement:

all ads leading to sites on hosted domains will need to have display URLs that accurately reflect their destinations….

Incorrect:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: adwords.blogspot.com

(more…)

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.

Well, are you? Most people don’t know that they are leaving something on the table or they wouldn’t. I mean either you are not greedy at all or you don’t have the same logic most people do. If you know your advertising campaigns are not as effective as they should be, you  test and optimize. If you feel you don’t have enough exposure in a market, you try new channels, do PR, and so on. When there is a problem, you try to find a solution for it.

When it comes to paid advertising, many folks waste their traffic without knowing it. If you send traffic to a page that does not ask for your visitor’s information or gives them a way to come back to your site for more, you are wasting your traffic. When folks come to your site, either they are ready to make a purchase, or they are just shopping around. Maybe, they are just curious about your product and are non-buyers. It doesn’t matter what their mindset is at that point. You should always have a back up plan (a flow-chart scenario tree if you will). If they end up buying from you, you will get their contact information to sell more to them in the future. If they don’t buy from you, you should provide folks with enough incentive to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed.

You may say, “nobody is going to sign up for my newsletter.” That can’t be further from the truth. If you provide the right incentive, people will sign up. Signing up people is not really that hard but retaining them is. That’s why you want to have a clear plan about what you will communicate with your leads about. Most folks have a set of autoresponder messages at had that will go out every 2 or 3 days. They don’t even have to break a sweat to keep their leads. Others try to do it day by day, which is really inefficient.

Planning is the differnence here. If you plan for the scenarios that I mentioned above, you can make sure you have everything ready to go once you start giving your money away to Google. Even if you are paying $0.01 per clickto Google, you should still try to turn those clicks to leads. The more effective you are in that department, the more money you are going to make through your PPC efforts. It’s no rocket science.

Everyone’s heard of Google content network these days. A set of sites that put Adsense banners and link units throughout the content for monetization purposes. When it comes to advertising on Google, the content network is the great unknown. You really don’t know what you are getting yourself into when you check that content network check-box on your campaign setting page.

Some folks have had great success with the content network. Others have become miserable. I used to work in the financial industry in the past. I know our CPA was way over the top with the content network. In fact, it was so bad it was bringing down the performance in the whole channel. Now we did a lot of things wrong (such as throwing more money at the network), but the content network just didn’t work out for us.

I personally have had mixed results with the content network. Based on my experience, I know that the content network traffic does not convert nearly as well as the Google search traffic. In fact, the placement advertising worked much better for me. Having said that, I feel blogs can use content advertising to attract folks. If you are providing valuable information to your visitors, then the content network could do wonders for you. But if you are plain selling a product, then you may have a harder time converting with the content network.

Should you try content advertising? It really depends. I know a lot of companies go into that direction once they hit a ceiling with Google search network. But you should be extra careful about what you intend to get from the content network. I would go with placement advertising as it lowers the risk, and you can pick and choose sites you want to advertise on easier. Content advertising can be a gold-mine for your niche, and that is why you should never stop testing.

If you have been using Google Adwords for a while, you are certainly familiar with the pain that was minimum bid. Google changed the concept to 1st-page bid but the underlying concept is the same. If your landing page is deemed to be not optimized for your search term, you are going to have to pay more to stay on the first page. After all Ad Rank = Quality Score * mCPC.

Many of us have been slapped by Google in the past. You start a campaign, and you run it for a while for $0.20 per click just to find out after a couple of weeks that Google is asking for a minimum of $5 per click to show you on the first page (not the first position). That’s really painful and if you are running affiliate offers through Adwords, I doubt you can make enough revenue to cover your costs.

Now people pray to God hoping for Google to change its mind and reduce your min bids. Here is the thing. God’s not going to fix your problem. There is actually a simple way to get around it. All you got to do is use Google Adwords keyword tool to figure out what Google sees on your page.

Just select the second option (Website content) and use your own URL to figure out what keywords Google comes up with your site. If the keyword that you are bidding on is on that list, then that could be why you are not getting the excellent quality score that you have always been wanting.

Your listing’s quality score is not just about the keywords that are on your page. You have to truly optimize your landing page to ensure Google that your page is relevant to the phrase you are bidding on, so don’t expect to get “great” quality score by just dropping keywords on your pages. But Google’s free tool does allow you to find out what areas you can improve on. With tools from Google, who needs paid tools!

If you have worked for a big corporation before, you have probably heard this statement before: “we’ll just throw some money at it.” That’s really what most big corporations do with their advertising campaigns. They optimize for a while but then start throwing money at their campaigns. They overspend with their campaigns, consultants, conferences, and training classes. They keep throwing money at the problem until they get satisfactory results.

The big guys can afford to do that. They have money to burn, and how they use it is their decision. But it’s stunning that some small businesses follow the same path. They stretch themselves by spending more than they can afford on advertising. They keep investing in the latest and greatest PPC tools. Take Hitwise for example. Hitwise is a great competitive intelligence tool but it costs a ton. I doubt any early stage small business can afford those guys. But surprisingly, the more I talk to small business owners, the more I hear about them thinking about going with Hitwise to gain competitive edge! Hitwise is a great tool but it can’t run your business for you neither can it do magic. Running a business comes with uncertainties and can be stressful for most folks. But here is the thing. Hitwise may give you confidence for a month or two, but once you start stretching yourself and don’t see the results, you are going to end up in a worst place.

I personally believe that Guerrilla marketing is the best way to go for small businesses. Large businesses are less agile to compete with small business in the Guerrilla marketing department. If you are a small business owner, you are way better off spending your money on Guerrilla tactics than fancy tools or wasteful advertising habits.

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.

Let’s say you are running a couple of campaigns on Google Adwords and you are trying to figure out ways to optimize your campaigns. You have optimized your landing page, your keywords, your ad headlines, and everything else under the sun. Is that all you can do? The answer is no. One important factor that most marketers miss about pay per click campaigns is the quality of clicks that you are receiving on Google network. At the end of the day, Google clicks have a different quality than AOL or other search network clicks. Now, I am not suggesting that Google clicks are more valuable than other clicks. It all depends on what you see in your data, but you should always seperate your campaigns to figure out how the clicks from the search network are doing.

One easy way to do that is by having to absolutely identical campaigns on Google Adwords. One that has Google and search network checked and one that has only Google checked. You should then increase the bids on your Google only campaign by 10-20% and keep everything else identical. What that does is make sure that your Google only clicks go through your Google only campaign. All the other clicks that you receive on your G+S campaign will be likely from the search network. Now you got to make sure you give all your keywords their unique URLs so you can measure their success.

Depending on your product type, you may find that Google search network is useless to your business. But unless you have hard data to back it up, you shouldn’t discard the search network. By seperating your Google clicks and search network clicks, you can gather enough data to take your campaigns to the next level.

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?