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Need Your Help and Advice

by lastreporter
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I sell various security electronic products and used Google Product ads through Shopify this holiday season.

I made some sales and it looked like it was a pretty good investment, but near Christmas I spent tons more on the product ads and got no return, thus severely reducing my profits. Then I got hit with two major chargebacks, which Shopify didn't catch in its payment processing, so I actually ended up losing about $1,000 for my efforts. (The chargebacks were supposedly for unknown purchases, even though I have tracking on each item and each was delivered to the person named on the card - that's another story about scamming customers and strategies they use to ripoff merchants).

Host My Own Ecommerce Site

Because of the chargebacks and the lack of predictability of running Google product ads through third-party Lexity, I decided to host my own WordPress ecommece site and restrict it to PayPal payments only, in an attempt to protect myself from the rampant fraudulent purchases out there. In addition, I decided to try some targeted Google PPC ads for my top selling products. I also want total control over my operation.

All is going well, except I just ran several PPC test ads on one of my most popular products through Google ad words and, of course, I averaged $1.81 per click, spent a fast $100 and sold nothing.

I used the Google Search option and United States only, but I noticed the visitors I got only stayed for a few seconds and none of them ventured to view other products, or check out my about page, which I have found in the past to be a good indicator of a serious prospect. My keywords and phrases have worked well in the past, but they are expensive.

* I had also totally revamped my landing page and it is very good. Still no sales.

Need Advice

I need advice from someone who really knows, not someone who wants to tell me what a dummy I am, or is guessing or parroting someone else.

Any suggestions on where I might find quality traffic other than Google? Facebook? Linked In? I am a professional writer, so I have tried original content in the past, but while it brings many curious visitors, they tend to be in the first stages of the buying process and have a very low conversion rate. That has been my experience in the past after seeding a site with 90 quality articles and reviews.

I'd appreciate any real help or suggestions from those who really know based on personal experience.

Thanks.
#advice
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    You need to figure out your demographics then find out where they hangout online, that's your direct traffic sources.

    You said you made sales with PPC so either continue paying the PPC prices or take those same PPC keywords & rank your own pages in organic SERPs. You know the old PPC keywords convert, right?

    Why not take your Adwords ads & paste the same HTML/text on all of your own pages as ads pointing to your own sales page (sort of like Adsense text ads)? Use the same copy that was on the PPC ads, that gives you 90 pages of advertising.
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    • Profile picture of the author lastreporter
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      You need to figure out your demographics then find out where they hangout online, that's your direct traffic sources.

      You said you made sales with PPC so either continue paying the PPC prices or take those same PPC keywords & rank your own pages in organic SERPs. You know the old PPC keywords convert, right?

      Why not take your Adwords ads & paste the same HTML/text on all of your own pages as ads pointing to your own sales page (sort of like Adsense text ads)? Use the same copy that was on the PPC ads, that gives you 90 pages of advertising.
      Thanks, Yukon. These are good suggestions I never thought of before. I will try them. Again, thank!
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      Charm City Gallery
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Hi lastreporter,

        I can help you get better results from your PPC campaigns.

        The first thing to look at is your keyword Quality Scores, this will give you a good indication of where the problem may be. If your Quality Scores are all QS8 and above then you probably have good ad text, however if you have QS6 and lower then your ads will need to be rewritten, and/or you account restructured.

        It's a crucial first step to get your Quality Scores as high as possible before spending a lot of money on tests using PPC. You could easily save 80% of your ad costs by performing this optimization step first. Once you have great Quality Scores you can run your tests with confidence that you are not wasting money on traffic.

        You can use the AdWords Scripts feature to create a script that will calculate your overall account level Quality Score and generate a report. I suggest that you learn how to do this before proceeding with a larger campaign. If you need help with this let me know and I send you examples of scripts.

        Once your QS is in great shape you can then afford to send traffic toward you landing pages to test various layout designs, headlines, sales copy and CTAs as part of your landing page Conversion Rate Optimization campaign.

        After getting those two steps completed you will be able to test various ad positions and bidding strategies to maximize total monthly profit from your PPC campaigns.

        Keep in mind that you should continuously improve your campaigns by constantly testing new ad text, landing page elements, and bidding strategies, in doing so you will be able to keep up with the competition which is likely to also be on a continuous improvement program.
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        * Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
        *         Don Burk Advertising & Marketing - www.donburk.com

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