For the beginner Pay Per Click marketer, here are some basic principles of PPC you should master:



Rules of the game

1. PPC = You Pay Per every Click to your site.

2. Your goal is to generate clicks by Qualified prospects who are actively looking to buy your product right now.

3. The more Relevant your ad and landing page are to the user's search phrase and mindset, the more sales you'll generate.

Extra Bonus: Search engines reward you for relevancy, letting you pay less per each click.

Making Money with PPC

Net Profit = Gross sales - your internal cost of sales - Cost of PPC
Optimize your PPC campaigns to continually increase Net profit:

(a) Increase volume of Qualified propsects, to Relevant ads, that will Convert well, by adding more keywords to your account

(b) Reduce cost of PPC by eliminating non relevant keyword-ad combinations or keywords that don't match the desired prospect mindset



Your Most Important PPC Metrics

ROI = Return On Investment. How many dollars you earn per every dollar you spend on PPC

Conversion = Visitor to your site who chose to opt-in to your offer and become a Paying customer or Lead.

CR = Conversion Rate. Total conversions divided by number of clicks, yields the percentage of users who opt-in to your offer after viewing your landing page.

CPA = Cost per Acquisition. Total cost divided by number of conversions, yields the average cost per conversion.

CTR = Click Through Rate. Percentage of users who clicked on your PPC ad to visit the site.

How To

Increase clicks:

Add new relevant keywords to your account. Use tools like Google's Keyword Tool or Wordze.

Reduce cost of PPC:

Bid smart. Go for the long tail. Pause all keywords that don't generate a single sale after 300 clicks.

Improve CTR:

Write better, more relevant ads that match the user's search phrase and mindset. 2% CTR is good. Anything below 1% CTR is bad.

Improve Conversion Rate:

Work on your landing page. Experiment with different landing page variations (at least 3). Conversion rate typically average 3% to 6%

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If you run a blog or forum, you already know one of the best ways to monetize your site is Affiliate Marketing.

When you write about a particular product or service, you can easily inject the proper affiliate links, earning commissions for all generated sales.

But what about user comments?

When users drop comments on your posts, you have no control over their content...

What if there was a way to automatically turn key phrases in user comments to affiliate links?

So when a user writes "I found a great deal on Amazon", a script will automatically replace the word Amazon with your Amazon affiliate link.

There are lots of plugins that handle basic keyword find/replace. I recommend you look at aLinks by Headzoo (it's free)



Existing plugins are limited to handling a very basic find/replace.

All the plugins I tested fail when -

1. User post their own unique Commission Junction / Azoogle / ClickBank affiliate link

2. User post a direct link to a site (http://www.amazon.com)

So I went on to develop a new plugin for one of our clients who is launching a full featured eCommerce site, with its own blog and forum.

My design goals were: Easy integration with vBulletin + WordPress ; Support basic find/replace as well as the two popular exceptions I found.

I had some old code we wrote for a little deals site you might have heard about. The old code was using RegEx which is clean but wasn't going to work here because my plugin was set to test 100,000+ phrases per each post. RegEx is slow.

Had to rewrite everything from scratch.

-

My new Affiliate Links Plugin is an elegant UpdateAffiliateLinks() php function that can be integrated with vBulletin + WordPress, updating the content of the post/comment prior to it being saved in the database:


The plugin reads a pipe delimited file that contains all the rules to be processed. Upon calling the UpdateAffiliateLinks() function, all rules are processed one by one and the content of the message is updated.

The rules file format is:

domain|parameter|value|newdomain|lastpath|separator

domain = Search string to look for
parameter = (optional) Parameter whose value we want to replace
value = (optional) new value for parameter
newdomain = (optional) completely new string to replace domain with
lastpath = (optional) replacement variable for the last url path
separator = (default is =) character identifying how parameter and value fields are separated.

Examples:

Replace the word Zappos with an affiliate link to the home page of Zappos:


Replace an Amazon affiliate ID with another (useful for cases where a user posts their own Amazon affiliate link):


Replace a Commission Junction ID with another (useful for cases where a user posts their own Commission Junction affiliate link):


Replace a specific parameter:



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I received this email from one of our customers today -


This super affiliate offered a unique tool for PPC marketers.

The tool was promoted under a "15 day trial" period, after which you were required to purchase in order to continue using the tool.

Based on our past experience with similar models, I recommended removing the trial option and offering the tool on a strict "you gotta pay to play" model.

I was happy to hear back, about how this simple change helped in significantly increasing converesions.

But was I surprised? Not really.

It all boils down to one of the oldest golden rules of Marketing: Pricing is Positioning

Think about it -

When you walk into a perfume store and you see one perfume bottle selling for $100 when another is selling for $20, what is your instant reaction? You're going to assume the $100 bottle is probably of much better quality.

The same principle applies to online products.

When you give something away for free (or offer a free trial) the inherent perception is that it's either a new product in test run or it's just not worth the money.

In addition, in the online world, a lot of users download dozens of products because they heard good things about them and then never proceed to install and test the product to its full extent.

If you offer a free trial, turn it off for a week and compare your results.

If for some reason you are absolutely committed to offering a trial, go with a "pay $1 for the first 30 days, get charged full price later" (like 1ShoppingCart.com) versus a "no credit card required, test the product first and decide later".

My good friend Kris Jones from PepperJam, is under attack by Commission Junction. This is a classic case of David vs Goliath



Here's the gist of it -

PepperJam is a full service Internet Marketing firm specializing in affiliate management and affiliate marketing. PepperJam manages the affiliate programs for a few big clients on Commission Junction

PepperJam recently launched their own affiliate network, code named - the PepperJam Network. Early reviews from affiliates have been very favorable, raving about how PJN is so much easier to use and loving the transparency features allowing you to view full contact information for the merchant whose programs you are promoting.

Commission Junction is apparently not too happy about the loss of business and began approaching clients of PepperJam, demanding that they cease promoting their offers on the PepperJam Network or else their Commission Junction account will be terminated.

You can read more details about this story on the PepperJam blog here

Traditionally, Commission Junction never required exclusivity from their advertisers. LinkShare, a competing affiliate network, does prohibit its advertisers from featuring their programs on any other network. It seems like Commission Junction is now taking a similar stand, however at this point they are targeting the PepperJam Network alone.

Apparently Commission Junction doesn't mind if you run your programs on CJ and Azoogle, but you are no longer allowed to run your programs on CJ and PJN at the same time.

And it doesn't end there -

In a strange move, Commission Junction is now actively approaching PepperJam Search Engine Marketing clients and demanding those clients terminate their relationship with PepperJam. Yikes!

What do you think?

Is Commission Junction being unfair about this? What should PepperJam's next move be?

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What is a One Page Checkout?

One Page Checkout is a single web page your customer can use to buy a product/service from you.

Most shopping carts and e-commerce stores (like Amazon.com, Overstock.com etc) include a 2-5 page process, where the customer goes through several pages to enter credit card information, shipping address, shipping options, product options, re-confirming the order and so on.

Why is a One Page Checkout important?

If you recall my earlier post about Analyzing your website Sales Funnel, you'll recall that in general, the more steps your customers have to go through before you get paid, the lower your conversion rate is going to be.

Every additional step is another option for your customers to make a mistake, change their mind, get interrupted and abandon the order.

Technology behind a One Page Checkout

In the old days, breaking the checkout process to several steps (pages) was necessary because it was virtually impossible to dynamically alter the content of the page.

I'll explain what that means -

If a customer would like the order shipped to the same address as their billing address, there is no sense in displaying a shipping-address form.

If a customer would like to pay with an e-Check, there is no sense presenting a credit card form. The thing is you have to ask the customer for their preferences first and only then can you display the corresponding forms.

In the old pre-Ajax days, shopping carts implemented several steps so that a customer inputs their preferences first, then presented with the appropriate forms and then confirms the order.

These days, Ajax and other Javascript technologies, allow dynamically altering the page based on customer preferences. So if a customer is selecting a combo box that reads 'This is a Gift' - at that point in time a new form can be magically added to the page, showing gift wrap options.

Implementing a One Page Checkout

Whether you're selling 10,000 items or 1 item on your website, it is always a good idea to minimize the number of steps before you get paid, by introducing a one page checkout.

Typically, you will have to include Billing Information, Shipping Information, Items in cart, Shipping options and Order total on a single page.

Using Ajax, the information can be displayed in a way that is elegant and nicely condensed, so that your single page is short and doesn't require too much scrolling.

SoftwareProjects Shopping Cart

The SoftwareProjects Shopping Cart comes with built-in functionality for easily implementing a one page checkout on your website.

Simply select the product or products you would like to allow one-page-checkout for, customize the screens and generate the HTML code.

Here's a typical one page checkout page powered by the Software Projects shopping cart:

One of the features exclusive to the SoftwareProjects Email Marketing system, that enables us to help clients significantly increase conversions, is the ability to prepopulate landing page forms.

Email Campaign Process Flow

A typical Email Marketing campaign process flow is:

1. End user receives your Email message to his/her Inbox

2. The Subject line is enticing enough for the user to open your message (see Subject Lines that actually work and Subject words to avoid)

3. The email message contains a strong call-to-action, requesting that the user clicks a link to follow-through to the designated landing page

4. User lands on your landing page and is requested to complete a form, before they can proceed to the next step.

Now... Which approach do you think works better?



The form on the left is blank. If the user is interested, they are required to complete 14 fields before clicking the Submit button. Scary!

The form on the right is all prepopulated with the user information (based on the fields from your email database)

Our experience shows prepopulated landing pages can triple your conversion rates.

How to Implement

1. Simply place this block of JavaScript code on your landing page:


2. Replace 999 with your SoftwareProjects Account ID.

3. Then set the matching between your form variable names to the fields in your database. In the example above we are telling the script to prepopulate TextBoxName with the user 'name', prepopulate TextBoxEmail with the user 'emailaddress' and so on. Make sure you change the field names so that they match the field names of your HTML form.

Important:

Place the JavaScript code at the bottom of your page, AFTER your form definition.

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