PPC Newbie (Not Really) ;)

[mike_01]

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Hi Guys,

I hope you all are doing really well :tup. Being out of the affiliate marketing for a long time, I have now decided to make another entry. And this time it would be more of automated processes, except the constant manual PPC monitoring.

I did the same long back (a year ago or may be more than that) but somehow changed the track but now I am thinking of repeating the history with the new records and milestones for myself .

To get started, I would be concentrating on both SEO & PPC (Google) activities and hoping that I can make it work with both the cases. I will be keeping my main stream of traffic from PPC (Google to start with) initially and then later from the SEO along with the PPC (may be on other Search Engines too). Now to get the game started, I would be needing advice from the industry experts like you and any help or support would be very much appreciated :tup

I have designed my PPC plan for Google Adwords as follows and any corrections/suggestions/advice’s to crack down the nut would be really helpful;

1. Find out a niche you have interest in, so that you should keep yourself attached to it and put the best of your efforts.
2. Get the list of the best selling products from the market research, affiliate networks, merchants, competitor’s websites research etc.
3. Make a list of product names and find out the keywords (long tails too) using Google keyword selector tool and your general perception.
4. Prioritise your keywords and start writing every search string you will try if you really wanted to buy it online. (Also not to forget, have the list of negative keywords too.)
5. Write down the ads, titles, description for the ad groups.
6. Once ready with all above, go ahead and load the data into the Google Adwords.
7. Schedule the Ads + Turn off the content network.
8. Keep your eyes wide open & use your brain  to analyse the data (clicks on the ads, clicks to the merchants, click to sale conversion ratio, total cost, total earning) & make modification in the Adwords Management Area accordingly.

How good or bad the planning is? Any suggestions appreciated.

Now I have set of questions and I would be seeking your advice on the same;

1. How to track the keywords as the visitor will be moved on to the merchant’s website by clicking the affiliate link and there will be no transaction on my website? (The website would be in PHP – if this helps).
2. How to decide upon the bidding value (CTC) for the individual keywords in the first attempt? Though the final CTC is dependent on many other factors but what should I first enter?
3. Any help on analysis of the Google Adwords data & sales report would be really nice? I don’t really have any template at the moment which I can use as the base platform for the analysis hence if would be really good if anyone of you can help me with it. Or I can also make one if you can show me some pointers.
4. What is the minimum time frame do you suggest me to try the PPC, at least before I say “It’s not going the way I expected or I can’t afford the loss anymore”. Most of the time it depends on how much I can shell out but still what do you all recommends.
5. Should I try using “Keyword Inclusion” into my titles or keep it handmade?
6. Any special do & don’t which I have missed out in my planning or have planned it wrong?

At the moment, this is all I can think of and I would really appreciate if you can help me sorting things and moving towards the bright, sunny affiliate path.

Keeping my hopes high, I would be keeping you all updated with the progress of the PPC campaign.

Kind Regards,
Mike…

[PPCBully]

Mike,
Looks like you know 'something' on PPC
I bet will succeed!
I noticed that you didn't mention a keyword tracking tool for conversions and long tail keyword identification...be sure you use this them.
As for Keyword research be sure you choose keywords wisely (yes,very easy to say that) and I would give about 200-300 clicks per keyword before making a decision.
YET, It can be a good keyword but that Ad may be 'BAD'...or the Landing page...
so spend time on research the competition
Cheers, Emil

[mike_01]

Thanks for the pointers PPCBully... much appreciated.

I did asked about the keyword tracking tool to get the information on the best converting keywords as i dont really have an idea about. Can you help??

Also, I am expecting few more pointers as this may also be helpful for newbie PPC affiliate marketers who know something on PPC but not everything.

Cheers,
Mike...

[mike_01]

Come on everyone shed some light over the questions asked and any suggestions would be really nice.

Thanks again.

[D-Mac]

A great post!

1. How to track the keywords as the visitor will be moved on to the merchant’s website by clicking the affiliate link and there will be no transaction on my website? (The website would be in PHP – if this helps).

I track this at the 'Ad Group' level, but store the full referrer string in a database for further analysis. E.g. the Ad Group could be 'Yellow Widgets', with several keyword variations associated with it. 'buy yell widgets', 'cheap yellow widgets', 'big yellow widgets', etc.

At the end of the URL from Adwords to my site, I add something like this: ref_ID=18
e.g.

http://www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php?ref_ID=18

In a database table I store 'yellow widgets' with ref_ID '18'

When the user lands on my site I assign them a user_ID which is stored in a database table with the ref_ID 18. I also add the full referrer string to the same row in the database. So the database table consists of 3 fields: user_ID, ref_ID, referrer_string.
Each new user gets a new row in the db table.

Finally, when a user clicks through to the merchant site, via one of my affiliate links, I append their user_ID to the tracking code (epi, k, clickref, etc). When a sale is reported on the affiliate network I can cross reference the user_ID against the original search terms used. You should soon get an idea of which keywords are converting well.

You can of course dispense with the whole user_ID bit, and just send the keywords or adgroup as your tracking ID, but it is generally better to withold this info from merchants wherever possible. Your don't want your best converting keywords getting into the wrong hands!

[D-Mac]

2. How to decide upon the bidding value (CTC) for the individual keywords in the first attempt? Though the final CTC is dependent on many other factors but what should I first enter?

You really want to get a good clickthru rate to (CTR) start with, so perhaps bid double what you consider a sensible bid to be. Once you start getting a decent amount of clicks (you should be fairly high up the listings so it may not take long), you can start to reduce your bids down to more sensible levels.

[D-Mac]

3. Any help on analysis of the Google Adwords data & sales report would be really nice? I don’t really have any template at the moment which I can use as the base platform for the analysis hence if would be really good if anyone of you can help me with it. Or I can also make one if you can show me some pointers.

It's really worth using Adwords Conversion Tool as an easy way to track clickthrus from your site to the merchants. To do this, set up a page a redirect page between your exit page and the merchants landing page. You can then add Google's tracking code to this page and track exit clicks. You can also use the same page to log exits against the user_ID. You can do the same kind of thing using Google Analytics Goal tracking too.

[D-Mac]

4. What is the minimum time frame do you suggest me to try the PPC, at least before I say “It’s not going the way I expected or I can’t afford the loss anymore”. Most of the time it depends on how much I can shell out but still what do you all recommends.

A common rule of thumb is 100 clicks. I tend to use 100 clicks per AdGroup. If there are no sales, or the sales are too low, pause the AdGroup and work out how get better results. Poor results don't necessarily mean bad keywords - it could be that the landing page just isn't converting.

5. Should I try using “Keyword Inclusion” into my titles or keep it handmade?

I assume you mean the Adwords titles. I personally don't like them, but they are goof if you're setting up loads of ads across loads of keywords.

6. Any special do & don’t which I have missed out in my planning or have planned it wrong?

A/B split testing of your landing pages can make the difference between making a profit or a loss. Test, test and test again!

[mike_01]

Sounds really great. Thanks D-Mac for taking time to solve my questions.

I really liked your way of tracking the keywords though it requires a good amount of work at the backend. I will surely see to it that i can use it in the best way to gather some good information on the PPC efforts.

I am still open to wonderful suggestions or pointers like D-Mac suggested in the post.

[mike_01]

A great post!
I track this at the 'Ad Group' level, but store the full referrer string in a database for further analysis. E.g. the Ad Group could be 'Yellow Widgets', with several keyword variations associated with it. 'buy yell widgets', 'cheap yellow widgets', 'big yellow widgets', etc.

At the end of the URL from Adwords to my site, I add something like this: ref_ID=18
e.g.

http://www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php?ref_ID=18

In a database table I store 'yellow widgets' with ref_ID '18'

When the user lands on my site I assign them a user_ID which is stored in a database table with the ref_ID 18. I also add the full referrer string to the same row in the database. So the database table consists of 3 fields: user_ID, ref_ID, referrer_string.
Each new user gets a new row in the db table.

Finally, when a user clicks through to the merchant site, via one of my affiliate links, I append their user_ID to the tracking code (epi, k, clickref, etc). When a sale is reported on the affiliate network I can cross reference the user_ID against the original search terms used. You should soon get an idea of which keywords are converting well.

You can of course dispense with the whole user_ID bit, and just send the keywords or adgroup as your tracking ID, but it is generally better to withold this info from merchants wherever possible. Your don't want your best converting keywords getting into the wrong hands!

David, Thanks so much for taking time to guide me to the process of tracking the best performing keywords. It is indeed a great piece of advise to track the progress of the PPC campaign. Now I do get it on how to get the information imported into the database and incoporate the tracking ids into the affiliate links but would this make an impact on the landing url and possible issues with the SEO process too.

Let me explain you with an example;

Before adding the process of tracking the keywords my url will look like;

www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php?productid=21

which will later become;

www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php?productid=21&adgrp=12&userid=999&keyword=CHEAP%20BLUE%20WIDGETS

Now in the same scenario;

1. It will cause the duplicate page & content issue with a different url on the same website which i think will have adverse effects on the ongoing SEO process and the Quality Score too. Is there a way to get rid of such issue????

2. The merchant will get the information of the keywords from the referring website url which are converting into sales and hence I may face direct competition :sneaky from the merchant on the same keywords. Which I dont think anyone would really like hence looking for some pointers.

Correct me if I am wrong or suggest on what best can be done to overcome such issues.

Once again, thanks for the help.:tup:tup

Cheers

[D-Mac]

Once you've created a user ID for a visitor, you can set is as a cookie on their machine, then retrieve it on your redirect page (to use as your clickref). This way you don't need to pass all that data around in the URL. It will all be stored in the database anyway.

The merchant won't get hold of your keywords, just the user ID, which is worthless to everyone except you. When a sale is reported, check the user ID that will be listed in the networks stats, against your database to dig out all the important info.

I don't think duplicate pages is an issue, as it is only on the URL that you give to adwords that you have to append the adgroup ID. Googlbot (for SEO) is different from the Adwords bot, so Googlebot will never see the pages with the appended tracking data.

[mike_01]

Thanks for the advice David but it seem to be getting more complex now. :scared

I am still not clear with how am I going to collect the important information like;

• Adgroup
• User id
• Keyword

without a adding them into the landing url.

I can generate a random user id on the fly which will be for any visitor coming onto the website without a need of parsing the same into the url but how about the ad group, and the keyword as in order to get the same i have to add it in the destination url of the website.

Any help on the same would be really nice.

OR

One thing that striked me just now is,

1. to keep the adgroup id in the destination url in the adword account.

I dont know but not really able to find out the best way out of this problem.

Thanks again.

[D-Mac]

To get the referrer string use the PHP's $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']
On the landing page do something like this:

$adgroup = $_GET['adgroup'];
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

// Make you database connection
require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/includes/mysqlconnect.php';

// Insert a new row into your database table. There are 3 fields: user_ID (set to auto increment), adgroup and referrer
mysql_query("INSERT INTO `tbl_users`(adgroup, referrer) VALUES('$adgroup', '$referrer') ")
or die(mysql_error())

// Retrieve the last inserted user_ID from the database
$user_ID = mysql_insert_id();

Then set a cookie or start a session containing the user_ID
PHP Tutorial - Cookies
PHP Tutorial - Session

Then retrieve the user_ID variable when your user exits via an affiliate link, and send it to the network as your refclick, k value, epi or whatever it is called on your choice of network.

To answer your last question, yes, just use your adgroup variable in your google adwords links. e.g. http://www.myppctrackingsite.co.uk/y...php?adgroup=18
I hope this helps

ps sorry for changing variable names between posts

[mike_01]

wooohoo... :tup

Thanks for the help David, it really solves the equation. Things are pretty clear now and makes it really work.

Without taking too much time I have a final question (I hope the final at the moment);

In order to make the entire thing work, i have to call the adgroup id in the destination url as without that i wouldn't be able to track the adgroup.

Correct me if there is another way to track the adgroup without changing the destination url from;

www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php

to

www.mysite.co.uk/yellowwidgets.php?ref_ID=18

And, this would surely result in the adverse effect in the SEO.

Yes, No & How to get over this problem??

[D-Mac]

The only way around it would be to store the ref_ID on the landing page as a variable. This would mean updating the pages if you make changes to your ref_ID on adwords, so probably isn't worth it.

Appending the ref_ID to the end of the URL is the method Google recommend (I think). I am confident it won't adversely your SEO efforts as Googlebot will never see the the URL with the appended ref_ID, so there is no danger of that page being indexed.