How can I get PPC to work for me

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We are about to launch a new Wordpress website for our long established business. The main emphasis during the build has been on SEO.

I am hoping that if our designer has done his job that the site will be well optimized, he came highly recommended.

We feel that we should also be running PPC campaigns however, whenever I have tried them in the past, I have ended up losing money.

My theory is that our items (home produced cds and mp3's in a niche market ) that always sell well on Amazon are just to low value to make PPC work.

Our average profit on a sale is £8.00 So, if our conversation rate was as high as 5% we should get 5 orders for 100 clicks. The revenue for this would average £40 per 100 clicks which means that to break even, the most we could pay would be 40p per click. We simply cannot get our keywords in a decent position for 40p and even if we could, what is the point of breaking even?

Another thought I had was to try Bing instead of Google, perhaps the CPC would be cheaper.

Am I missing something?

Any help would be appreciated.
#ad networks (cpm/cpl, display) #ppc #work
  • I think Adwords could just be too competitive here so the SEO strategy would probably be more suitable. BING is indeed cheaper but it has hardly any traffic (like 10% of what Google has) so getting traction might prove a bit more difficult.

    You could however try to bid on very targeted but long tail, less competitive keywords to keep the costs down so 40p a click could work ... but the drawback will be that the traffic volumes will be much lower making it tougher to scale it.

    Nick
    • [1] reply
    • Thank you for your input Nick.

      The actual CDs costs me less than £2.00 to produce, pack and post and we sell them for £10.95 so the margins are excellent. The downloads even better as they cost nothing. Some of the recordings are 5 years old and still sell well. There is very little effort, we run the whole business from a small bedroom so minimal expenses.

      The problem is how many we sell which on our current website is very few. However, Amazon is a different matter as we are selling up to 300 a month.

      I am confident that with the right SEO we can increase our visit count sufficiently to at least match what we are doing on Amazon and if this was the case, we would be very happy netting a cool 60k plus a year and with our kids gone, we can live nicely on that.

      As you say, maybe as I thought, PPC is not for us but I just wondered if I had been missing a trick.
  • Have you tried Facebook PPC? go to power editor and use partner categories you can targert people by what underwear they are wearing! seriously try facebook ads, the clicks are cheap to i pay between 0.10-0.40$ per click.

    And you can target buyers to. this is insane. Facebook keeps of track of people who spend money via facebook. and you can target them. you can target people who paid $100+ on products or less.
  • Breaking even can bea very good thing if you play your cards right. Because once you have a customer that buys something, you now have a "buyer lead" that will likely spend more money with you again at some point (perhaps many times for years to come).

    Although you should be trying to build a list of prospects (capture emails and send a weekly newsletter or some sort) but you should definitely keep a list of those who bought something on your website. Because as time goes on, you can have sales coming in automatically less new traffic.

    When you have a list of "buyers" (people who purchased from you before) you have to keep them buying. Offer them a 10% discount next time they purchase from you again or give them a free inexpensive gift with their next order.

    Trust me, this works if you do it. It's all about getting your customers to enjoy buying from you. So breaking even on a front end sale is not such a bad thing after all when an average CLV (customer lifetime value) can be worth thousands.

    Now onto PPC...

    First off, I'm not sure where badboy_Nick got the idea that there's hardly any traffic on Bing. They may not be as big as Google, but together with Yahoo, all their syndicated search engine partners and content networks, you have more traffic than you could ever need to make your business profitable.

    I would recommend you start learning and understanding more about keyword research. Learn how your target market is searching for what you have to offer. There are many high traffic keywords out there that you can test and learn what works. Bing has their own keyword research tool as well as an intelligence tool to help you find more profitable keywords.

    The best way to learn is to dive in, test small, learn what works, then scale up.

    If you're not familiar at all with keyword research, simply put yourself in your prospect's shoes. How would you search for the product that you are looking to sell your prospects?
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Thank you Beka,
    We did try Facebook last year, we got a free $50 voucher and it took 3 weeks to burn it up. Perhaps my strategy was wrong and I should take a closer look.
    • [1] reply
    • It has changed ALOT in 1 year, google more about partner categories,
      because you can target people based on their offline activites via 3rd party data analytics like
      Acxiom.

      Custom audience, this is amazing tool, if you have your own list. you can download the email address of you subscribers and make an ad only for your subscribers to see on facebook.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Hi Technito,

    Some sound advice there. We already do most of those things. Our main platform is Amazon and unfortunately you don't get their email addresses but we do stuff the envelopes with plenty of upsell. Fortunately, having been in this business for 8 years, we have a strong email list approaching 10,000 and this works well for us as long as we are careful not to overdo the mail shots.

    I watched an excellent You Tube vid from Jason McDonald JM Internet Group on the Google Keyword Tool so I am going to apply the same strategy to Bing. After doing some research, Bing admittedly does not get the traffic like Google but the PPC is much cheaper and this is vital for us.
    • [2] replies
    • I think Adwords could just be too competitive here so the SEO strategy would probably be more suitable. BING is indeed cheaper but it has hardly any traffic (like 10% of what Google has) so getting traction might prove a bit more difficult.
    • Oh ok, gotcha. That's great. Just be sure that you are staying in touch with your email list often to build a rapport and trust so they'll always know who you are when you email. If too much pass since you last emailed, they sometimes forget who you are and see your emails as just spam. Even if you are just emailing to say have a great weekend or happy holiday with your website name and logo in your signature, it matters a lot to your list even if you aren't directly selling at that time.

      And yes, it's true that Google has the most traffic. There's no doubt about that. But don't let anyone tell you that Bing/Yahoo don't have a lot of traffic, especially until you have tried it for your self.

      Anyone who says Bing doesn't hardly have any traffic either haven't used them or simply don't know what they are doing in their ad campaigns.

      I get almost 40,000 clicks per month from my Bing ad campaigns alone, and counts for about 63% of my total online revenue. So there is definitely LOTS of traffic. It's all about proper keyword research. The only exception is in certain very small niches, you may have to rely on Google to get a considerable amount of traffic.

      But I am sure you are aware you would need to utilize all traffic sources possible. So learn both Google and Bing PPC. And even some 2nd tier PPC networks (such as Looksmart, 7Search etc) can give you some great quality traffic. And yes it can be expensive, that's why you should only use keywords that are as targeted possible.

      Don't bother with bidding on broad match keywords, let the big companies waste money on their campaigns by doing that. Trust me, you can profit greatly by using only the most targeted keywords.

      One other thing I would recommend is learn Retargeting. I personally use Retargeter.com and AdRoll.com. Especially when PPC in general can be expensive, setting up retargeting campaigns can increase your sales greatly.

      Some may argue that retargeting doesn't work or it's a waste. But same as I mentioned above, those who says something don't work has either never tried it or simply haven't done it correctly. I began to make more money with less traffic within the past couple years since doing retargeting.

      Hope that helps and that you find greater success from now on.
  • PPC is not for everyone.

    If you really want to use PPC especially adword you have to learn the rules, there are a few good people here that can run it for you and even coach you for a fee.

    Sometimes with PPC you have to test the waters to see what works and gradually make adjustment to your product pricing.

    Have you thought of increasing your product price and target high end customers from adword?

    It may work too.
  • I am not a PPC expert but I have heard that Bing works pretty well if done correctly. I have used it myself and gotten some decent results.
    A seperate idea is to consider FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). Since you make your own product the competition will pretty much not exist and Amazon has the world's largest flow of buyer traffic. In a nutshell FBA is when you send some of your inventory to an Amazon warehouse, it is listed on their site and when it sells they do everything. Easy $$$ if you have a product that people want.
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    How can I get PPC to work for me

    We are about to launch a new Wordpress website for our long established business. The main emphasis during the build has been on SEO. I am hoping that if our designer has done his job that the site will be well optimized, he came highly recommended.