Concluding our series on pay-per-click advertising–Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, November 2007.

With any paid strategy, where dollars are flowing–in some cases quite rapidly–out of your pocket for your marketing, you want to be sure you’re tracking and tweaking and tracking again.

Sometimes, changing a single word in the headline or reversing two lines in the body of the ad can shift response enormously. So you measure your results, make changes, test the results again. You do this for any ad medium, but the beauty of pay-per-click is that you can get the data very quickly, make the tweak within minutes, and test again. So you can refine your tactics on the fly, rather than waiting months if your campaign is based on (as an example) print advertising in monthly magazines.

You need to test the ad headline, the ad body copy, the landing page headline, design, body copy, offer, etc. Testing is so critical that if you’re not willing to put in the time for testing, I don’t think you should be doing PPC to begin with. This is the big reason why I haven’t really used it so far; I just don’t have the time to look at how well it’s working.

The traditional way is to test one element at a time–but that takes too long and is far too much work. I’d recommend using “multivariate testing” software that automates the whole process and allows you to test a number of variables at once.

Since I have no experience, I can’t recommend a specific solution–but here’s a link that will connect you with lots of possibilities. Ask questions like:

• How much will it cost–upfront and ongoing?
• How many variables can you track at once?
• Is your solution appropriate for my size business–why or why not, and if not, what would you recommend?
• Please give me a rough idea of the technology you use.
• Please send me a link to objective third-party reviews.
• May I have contact information for some happy customers?
• How long have you been in business?

If money is a factor, this link goes to freeware and shareware possibilities

Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip - October 2007

Mark Twain once apologized to one of his correspondents for writing a very long letter, noting that he didn’t have time to write a short one.. Anyone who’s had to write copy for a very tiny format such as pay-per-click ads can certainly relate.

Pay-per-click offers one of the smallest workspaces of any advertising medium. It’s like a small classified ad. You get a headline, a few words of text, and a web address (which I’ve left out of the examples). Yet fortunes have been made with pay-per-click campaigns.

I went to a random page on one of my own sites to grab the largest and smallest ads I saw. It happened to be the page on the speeches I have available; these are two of the four ads shown at that moment (they will rotate as Google’s inventory and displaying formulas dictate).

Effective Presentations
Learn How To Overcome The Ten Myths Of Public Speaking. 1 Day Seminar.

The body text is just 13 words (the first two words are a headline, in bigger type).

Speeches
Looking for speeches? Find exactly what you want today.

That’s a one-word headline, nine words of body copy.

Is that enough to say *anything* useful?

Yes, actually. This ad showed up on my frugal fun ideas page:

Creative Romantic Ideas
New Romantic Ideas Added Weekly. Easy To Search And Completely Free!

It’s easy to see where someone who was surfing around looking for something different than the usual dinner-and-a-movie might be curious enough to click. And it’s only 11 words.

In my case, I didn’t click because I didn’t want Google to think I was pumping up my commissions (grounds for terminating the program). But Google ads always display the URL, so I simply typed it into my menu bar.

Just as in writing any short-form copy, your goal is to grab the reader’s attention and pull that person to take an action–in this case, the action you want is a click on the link.

Let’s say I wanted to write an ad for my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. The book is about the idea that ethical businesses are well placed on the road to success, if they understand how to harness the marketing advantages that this position opens up.

I might start with a grabber headline like
Ethics Equals Profits
Ethical Biz is Profitable
Ethics Equals Success
Forget Market Share–It’s Profit You Want

The nice thing about PPC is that I could test each of those before settling on one. And some researchers report that something as simple as changing one word, or flipping the position of a word, can make enormous differences in the return. If you authorize enough clicks, you can have meaningful results in hours. Also, nothing prevents you from running several different ads if they all pull well.

Similarly, I’d test variations on the body copy. But you want to measure not only clicks but also conversions: people who take the next desired action once they get to your landing page. An ad that pulls a lot of clicks but few conversions will waste vast sums of your money very quickly, whereas an ad that gets clicked enough to stay prominent in Google’s rotation but attracts a much greater percentage of actual prospects could be one of the most effective forms of paid advertising you can create.

In my case, the first thing I want to do is discourage non-readers. So I say right in the body copy that it’s a book. So these are some variations I might test:

Award-winning 160-page book, Principled Profit, shows how. (seven words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. (nine words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. Find out why. (twelve words)

Jack Canfield, Jay Levinson, Mark Joyner, 76 others all say, read this book. (fourteen words–but at 76 characters, it might be over Google’s character limit. If it is, I could change “all say,” to a colon.)

The last headline above is going for a different market segment than the others, so for that variation, my copy might read:

Profit when customers just have to tell friends. Award-winning book explains. (11 words)

As you might guess from a careful reading of this article, I haven’t actually tried PPC ads for this book. In fact, I’m kind of a greenhorn at the whole thing. I did a PPC campaign many years ago on GoTo, now known as Yahoo–before Google even took ads.

But it’s something I’ve wanted to try for PrinProfit for a while, and writing this series will move me closer to it. It takes time that I don’t have at the moment–to write the ads and landing pages, test, track the results, and analyze what’s working, and then repeat the cycle as you refine your campaign–but when I get caught up, I’ll experiment–and I’ll let you know the results. I’m planning to redesign the Principled Profit website, and as I do this, I’ll be looking at how to set it up so it’s friendly to PPC campaigns.

Of course, you do have the option to pay an expert to run your PPC campaign for you–but that’s more than I want to invest.

Among the many sweeping changes the Internet has brought in the last decade is a powerful reinvention of the centuries-old marketing form of classified ads. Popularized by Google and its amazing ability to match the content of a page with (mostly) appropriate ads, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) has completely changed the advertising world. And somehow, I haven’t talked about PPC before in my newsletter. For the next four months, we’ll fix that.

In the old days, classifieds were much-loved by direct marketers because they were trackable. You could easily use a department number or other device to find out how many people responded to the ad. If you were lucky, you might have been able to negotiate payment based on the number of inquiries or orders. Otherwise, you had to pay based on circulation.

But…back then, there was a long learning curve. In some cases, you had to place your insertion order months in advance, and results would trickle in for weeks after publication. If you committed to three months in a row, you wouldn’t know if you were wasting your money or making a fortune–and you also would either have to recommit to the ad before the results were in, or wait another several months to reinsert on the basis of meaningful data. And even if you were doing an “A/B split”–testing different versions in different parts of the print run, it was a long time before you really had the data.

The first attempts to bring the classified model to the Web were horrible: pages and pages of un-classified (or very loosely organized, at best) ads thrown up on a web page with no other content; the only people who saw them were other entrepreneurs placing their own ads. Yuck!

Pay-per-click on the Web changed all that. It combined the strengths of the print model–careful classification by subject, targeting to specific audiences–with the strengths of the Web: searchability, quick response. And it added something from the model of print display ads: the classifieds were right up next to relevant editorial content. Even better, most websites using classifieds quickly went to PPC, so that marketers only paid for results.

Google is not the only player (there are hundreds, including Yahoo and MSN)–but Google did a few things that were very, very smart:

• Created algorithms to automatically analyze a page’s content and retrieve very appropriate, relevant ads that people would actually click on; though sometimes you can search for a term and get ads that are waaay off base, overall, its accuracy is astonishing.
• Made partners of hundreds of thousands of websites that could monetize their own content by letting Google automatically display ads–thus providing far more “eyeballs” for the ads!
• And of course, thoroughly integrated PPC results into its own search results pages, as did the other PPC engines.
• Fine-tuned the process so that the most popular ads get displayed more frequently, even if they aren’t the highest bidder
• Allowed advertisers to participate at a very low entry cost, test extensively, and refine their ad strategies on the fly.

So now, a marketer can roll out a new website, start PPC campaigns for carefully targeted keywords, and if the budget is high enough and the search terms popular enough, measure the results within hours, change some elements, and test again.

Recommended book to supplement this article: Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, which has nine full chapters on Internet/online marketing, with lots of cost-effective strategies you may not have come across elsewhere.

Coming in parts 2, 3 & 4:
August: Keyword Analysis

September: PPC Copywriting

October: Fast And Effective PPC Testing Strategies

With this issue, I’m switching from plain-text e-mail to a blog that lets me format the newsletter more attractively. Each month, you’ll get a summary e-mail like this, and a link to a post that lets you click to any of the stories.

Seminar TODAY: Write, Publish, Promote a Marketable Book

Deadline to register 2 p.m. Eastern if you want to join us live (5 p.m. by phone). Or you can buy the recording at any time.

The New Format for My Newsletters

Advantages to you, the reader–and to me, the editor/publisher

Zappos.com: Positive Power of Principled Profit Spotlight, June 2007

This month’s featured business: “A customer service company that happens to sell shoes.”

Another Recommended Book: The Rise of the Rogue Executive: How Good Companies Go Bad and How to Stop the Destruction

Explaining Enron, WorldCom, and other business ethics scandals

Other Places to Meet/Hear Shel

Speaking in person in Massachusetts and Nevada, and worldwide via phone and/or Internet

Latest Content on Our Websites

Visit http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters

Shel’s Award-Winning Books–Which Should You Own?

See why experts agree that Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World are some of the most value-packed resources on marketing that you’ll find. If you think the tips are good, you should try the books!