Over the years, I’ve experimented quite a lot with on-line text ads. I’ve discovered that making a successful ad isn’t as easy as it might seem at first.
It has cost me a lot of money making mistakes along the way. If you’ll send me $100 cash, I’ll share my secrets . . . . .JUST KIDDING.
Let me say this before I continue: While I believe what I share with you is generally sound, there may be exceptions that would fit outside the box I’m about to draw.
Every website, whether purely for fun or for business, has a desired response for the person viewing the pages. The response that is desired must be the ultimate guide you use to gain the kind of traffic you need.
First, some of the mistakes to avoid when running on-line ads.
Don’t think that more traffic is equal to more desired response.
Why do you want more traffic? Each person is one more chance for the desired response, Right?
Thinking it is purely a numbers game can be very costly. To be true, you will get more desired response with ten times the traffic, but it will cost you ten times the money to get ten times the traffic. Your net gain with more traffic is NULL. Your averages will remain the same.
Here’s a rule of thumb about running ads for high quantity traffic. The more generic the search, the more generic the visitor.
Don’t think bidding higher will bring better customers.
Bidding higher does one thing besides cost you more for the same keywords. It puts you higher in the search listings. Being higher in the listings means you will get more traffic that is costing you more for each visitor.
Ok, it cost more per visit and gets more of the exact same traffic you’re getting. That’s fine if you like the kind of traffic you are getting. For now just notice that you are getting a certain kind of traffic based on your ad. With a higher bid, you are getting more of the same kind of traffic and costing more.
We’ll discuss when you would want to be higher or lower in the listing later.
Don’t think high traffic keywords are always best.
Really high traffic keywords usually have two things making them such high traffic. Either they are extremely generic, meaning they have high traffic because they capture an entire category under them–like the term ‘work.’ Or, they are extremely desirable, meaning they capture the heart of a category that is desired by everyone–like the term ‘money.’
Either of these terms will bring a ton of traffic with a high cost. We will discuss when this can be good. For beginners, just understand this usually isn’t what you want.
Ok, I haven’t said anything truly helpful yet. Let’s start by pulling two major things from what I have said.
First, the kind of traffic your ad generates is critical to it’s success.
Second, your ad simply must generate more income than it costs–period.
Allow me to show you the logic to making good ads. To help understand, let me ask you what kind of traffic you are right now? Yes. You–reading this right now? Didn’t consider yourself traffic right now?
Well, what do I know about you at this point?
I know you clicked a link that has to do with running ads on Google.
I know you may read a news feed, a blog site, or were searching specifically for help running ads.
I know you really want to know about this, since you’re still reading.
I know it didn’t cost me a penny to get you here.
From this I can guess some things about you. You have a website, an opportunity, or a product or brand to promote. If not, you are considering it, or have done so in the past. If this isn’t true, you are a very curious person wasting time on the internet. Or, you’re an information hound soaking up anything you can find anywhere you can find it.
So, what should my website do to get the desired response from you?
That’s right. Every website has a desired response. Remember?
So, the very first thing you must do to create a successful ad is define the response you need in the first place.
Since knowing how you got here tells me things about you, controlling how you got here even more will tell me even more about you. I can know exactly who you are if I control how you got here completely.
How?
Let’s say you were selling JoJo Car Insurance from your website.
1) Define the desired response.
2) Define the visitor who would perform this response.
- one who wants car insurance
- one who will pay on-line
Which search do you think will generate more traffic for this:
insurance?
free?
Yes, ‘free’ will generate tons more traffic. Will they respond as you want? No.
What about insurance?
Here is where I want to introduce you to some key elements for creating successful ads.
Google will drop your ad if it shows thousands of times without a click. They will require you to change it. So, this forces you to make an ad with text that people will click. However, you want to make an ad that only responsive visitors will click.
Which keyword do you think will cost more?
insurance?
buy insurance?
‘Buy insurance’ will cost more. Why? Because advertisers will bid more. Why? Because someone who types ‘buy insurance’ in a search is obviously looking to buy insurance. This is exactly the kind of visitor you want.
So, here’s where the balancing act and artistry of ad creation begins. What if you bid the lower price for insurance, but put the following ad text:
Buy JoJo Insurance
Car Insurance OnLine
Secure Payment
jojoinsurance.com
Take a look at what this does. You bid the lower, more generic keyword. So, your ad text is designed to keep anyone from clicking who wants another brand, something for free, or other payment options other than on-line.
Here’s the whole of this in a nutshell.
The more generic the keyword, the more restricting you want your ad. The balance comes in keeping it clickable enough to keep Google showing it, but restrictive enough to scare away costly clicks that don’t generate income.
Ok, which search would you pay more for a click:
‘buy insurance’?
‘jojo insurance’?
That’s right, if a search defines you exactly, this person knows who you are. They are the absolute best kind of visitor.
Now, for a second major principle. How well does your website sell? The better your site is at closing a deal, the more of the generic traffic you can afford. This adds a slightly different color to the whole thing. This can change everything about how you run ads.
If you have multiple products, or proven visitor freebies that end up causing business, you can afford really generic, extreme traffic keywords.
How much do you make on a sale? You can have a successful campaign that would typically cost a hundred bucks or more to generate a sale if the commission is huge.
OK, back to being higher or lower in the listing. I know I said higher bids are just paying more for the same kind of traffic. Allow me to refine that with some examples of when you would want to be higher.
I already mentioned when someone searches for you specifically, you want to be there.
Now, consider that you are selling as an affiliate for commission. Most affiliate sites will use cookies to track a visitor. They may typically place a cookie that lasts a month on a visitors machine to give credit to the advertiser should the visitor return. This can cause you to do a lot of experimenting with your ads based on the following question: Does the first advertiser get the credit or does the last advertiser get the credit?
This can be a cost problem. It usually ends in a bidding war between a couple of big dogs in the program. If you can find a happy middle for this, you can offset it with the final concepts I’ll give you here.
There’s a lot more I need to say about this. Let me share this one last thing for this article.
More and more advertisers are getting wise to this, so it isn’t as good as it once was, but you can offset you traffic and generate some extremely directed traffic by looking for misspellings and higher definition keywords.
Like what?
In our insurance example:
- by insurance
- by iinsurance
- buy iinsurance
- buy insuranse
- buy insurense
- by insurense
- buy inshurence
- buy isurance
- jo jo insurence
- jojo car insurence
And on and on and on
And some higher definition keywords:
- buy insurance online in texas
- buy insurance ca
- buy car insurance online in ca
The key to these is literally entering hundreds of them. They can be very cheap per click. They won’t generate much traffic on any one of them, but hundreds of them can generate a lot of quality traffic.
You can look at it two ways. Both are good. Smart people can enter typos too. Or, an idiots money spends just as well. Either way, the misspellings are all good.
And you might be surprised how many people [like me] enter very restrictive highly defined searches in a google or yahoo search box. I do it because I want exactly what I am searching for to be all I see. So, that kind of searcher is likely a very serious searcher.
I hope this gives you ideas about how to make better ads that generate more income for you. There is a great deal more I could share. This article is already too long.
Regards.
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