Category Archives: Pay Per Click Management

All My Free Cheat Sheets, Mp3s, and Videos

Been cataloging and organizing the last 5 years of MP3 interviews, PDF Cheat Sheets, and Conversion Videos…

Thought I might as well give you the benefits of that too 🙂

Right click the image above and you’ll get a PDF full of links to my BEST Cheat Sheets, Interviews, and Conversion Videos…

It’s all my best stuff, all in one place!

(Don’t say I never gave you anything)

Now go turn some visitors into buyers, would you?

Dr. G 🙂

PS – If you haven’t already joined the LIVE CONVERSION WEBINARS club, you should do so now.  If for no other reason than (a) the “best conversion secrets of 2012” video is about to scroll out of the archived club recordings and become a $67 product in it’s own right; (b) the “Persuasion Architecture” bonus audio contains the crowning jewel of all my work for the past 8 years and (c) today you can still download both of these for less than five dollars

PPS – If you’ve been through the hyper-responsive club but never got around to implementing the work (or not quite as thoroughly as you wanted to)–OR–if you’re servicing clients and think whitelabeling Glenn’s hyper-responsive bulls eye research behind you might make you look stronger to your client… get your tuchas over to BullsEyeMaster.com

PPPS – If you’re spending more than $20K/month in paid advertising and would like my team to start optimizing your landing pages and conversion funnel FOR you, well, you may be in luck!

PPPPS – If you’ve got a system that converts really well online but you’ve got NO telephone follow up in place, you really ought to consider letting this funny looking phone genius do it for you on commission.

A ZILLION Ps S:  Would much appreciate you SHARING this page, posting it in your forums, passing around the PDF by email to ALL your contacts, and telling your mama’s how cool it is to have Dr. Glenn’s stuff. (Not particularly modest, but hey, I’m too old for that)

Nuances of Conversion Rate Optimization and PPC Budgeting

Did you ever consider the relationship between your Pay Per Click budget and the time, money, and energy you spend on Conversion Rate Optimization?

Have you ever wondered what stops you from doing more testing?  (Or doing testing AT ALL?)

Listen to this intriguing interview with the author of AdWords for Dummies, Howie Jacobson, Ph.D.  (And myself of course)

Enjoy!

Dr. G 🙂

PS – Howie and I are also offering a new conversion rate optimization service.  Have a look if you haven’t already!

The Strangest PPC Secret

OK, so here’s the strangest clickthrough secret I’ve come across in my years…

Something which has the capacity to take your prospect OUT of a competitive environment and position you as the obvious solution to their problem…

And something largely counter-intuitive, so I need you to stay with me please.

Here’s the secret…

When you’re in a high volume traffic stream, advertising to a specific demographic segment of the market can actual increase your volume of sales and overall profits, even–and sometimes especially–when that segment represents a smaller proportion of people searching.

For example, let’s suppose you’re selling a solution to stop excessive barking in dogs.  Let’s call it the “Shut Up Machine” OK?

OK.  And suppose we’re paying $1 per click for our best performing ad on “stop barking” for this ad:

CTR = 1%  Conversion = 1%
Cost Per Conversion = $100
Conversions Per 1,000 Visitors = 10

Now, let’s further suppose–and these are just wild assumptions since I haven’t actually researched this market–that the search volume in this market breaks down as follows:

  • Women Under 40 = 35%
  • Women over 40 = 30%
  • Men Under 40 = 15%
  • Men Over 40 = 20%

Common sense might suggest you’d need to keep the generic ad, because there’s no demographic which makes up the overwhelming majority of the market.  (So one might think that advertising to women only, for example, would drop our clickthrough by 35%, since women represent 65% of the search volume).

But in many cases I’ve seen this just isn’t true.    Especially if you’ve analyzed your BUYERS and found a bias therein.

For example, suppose ShutUpMachine.com’s buyers were 50/50 men and women, despite the fact women outnumber men 2 to 1 in search.  What this says is, men are disproportionately responsive.

Now suppose we dig even further (by surveying our buyers) and discover that 80% of our male buyers are over 40. (We’d expect only a slight bias towards the over 40 range given the search volume breakdown above) .

This tells us that men over 40 are especially responsive to our offer.  Indeed, 40% of all our customers are men over forty  in this scenario (50% of all customers are men x 80% of male customers over forty = 40% of all customers) , even though this demographic represents just 20% of the search volume.

In other words, men over 40 are twice as responsive to the generic offer.

Can you imagine what would happen to the system if you optimized it for them?

Here’s what I’d do in that situation…

I’d aggressively test optimizing a WHOLE PATHWAY for men over 40.

So we might write an ad like this:

And then we’d land them on a page with a story from a man in his 40s who wants nothing but some peace and quiet when he comes home from a hard day, finally finishes taking care of wife and kids, and just wants to relax.

We’d paint a before and after picture with that story…

And because we’d knock our visitor out with the “Holy Crap!  This is exactly for me!” experience, we’d probably get an even higher conversion rate on the landing page.  Let’s assume 50% higher.

What might the numbers look like?

This is the strangest secret…

Because often when you’ve done this kind of analysis of your buyers to isolate the most responsive demographic, you can create a situation where the CTR doesn’t drop at all.

In other words, you might be targeting a much smaller percentage of the market, but their click responsiveness makes up for their lack of presence in the market as a whole. (And even when that’s not the case, you can often make up for it with increased landing page conversion)

For example, you might see something like this:

A few important things to note:

  • Even though the CTR is the same from the PPC engine’s perspective, the truth is you’re getting a 5% clickthrough from your target audience.  You just can’t SEE that because you can’t restrict the exposure to the rest of the audience in general PPC advertising. (Sometimes you CAN do this with email buys and banner advertising, but you’ve gotta be very, very careful because advertising vendors will often jack up the price for these kind of “selects” more than the increase in responsiveness warrants.  Run your spreadsheets and know your numbers before testing this!)
  • Even though the price per click is the same, we get a bump in conversion by taking the prospect OUT of the competitive environment and re-assuring them we are the ONLY vendor positioned to meet their unique needs
  • As with so many other things in marketing, going after a “higher percentage of a smaller percentage” is so often the answer
  • There’s nothing to stop you from developing ANOTHER site for women over and under 40, etc.  in order to look for more volume with additional conversion bumps.  However, by rank ordering your customer demographics in terms of responsiveness you’ll be able to estimate the effectiveness of these efforts as compared to the time and money you need to allocate to accomplish them.  (In the example above, we found women were modestly less responsive than men as a whole.  Still, you should expect SOME increase in conversion due to the demographic segmentation (assuming you’ve studied how the product plays out differently in their lives), so it’s just a matter of math to guestimate which segments are worthwhile to pursue as such, and in what order.
  • There’s also nothing that stops you from ALSO running the generic ad if it’s profitable.  (You should test  running both a generic and a segmented ad vs. running only the segmented ad)

If any of this math was hard to follow, let me restate it in simple English…

  • If you survey your customer database, you might find you’ve got more women than men, more young people than older people, etc.
  • Compare the percentages you find in your customers to what Quantcast.com and/or Alexa.com says about the demographic breakdown for search volume in your market.  (Enter a few of the top search engine ranked websites to find out)
  • If you DO find your percentages are different than what you see in Quantcast, etc, that probably means there’s a demographic group that’s MORE responsive to your offer than average…
  • Test targeting a teaser ad and landing page to THAT unique demographic and see what happens

Yah?

Got get’m!

Onwards and Upwards My Fine Marketing Friends…

You can clear away SO much confusion if you’ll just take the time to master a few fundamental conversion principles.  And now you can watch me do it LIVE on site after site.  (Get started as of the time of this post for less than $5)

Dr. Glenn :-)

Your “Web Sales Hero(tm)”

PPS – Want a simpler way to increase your conversions?   Put evangelistic audio testimonials  on your site. Listen, testimonials sell, but they’ve got to be done right.   You want to support the specific claims you make in your USP with specific results obtained.  And you need to get the customer to describe their results in contagious, emotionally compelling language that BRINGS THE TESTIMONIAL TO LIFE.   (Do It Yourself |   Let Us Do It For You)

PPPS – The above example is hypothetical.  Please don’t attempt to advertise with these specific ads.


Make More Money By Turning OFF Your Advertising

If the escalating expense, difficulty, and time to generate a high volume of profitable internet sales is crippling your growth–or crushing  your morale–I’ve got a very important audio for you to hear today…

Because it’s entirely possible that…

“You Can Make More Money by Turning Off Your Time Killing, Morale Crushing, Migraine Inducing, Pain-in-the-Ass Advertising System!”

Listen to this interview with Ryan Levesque, my partner in an extremely weird new marketing experiment which just might be your saving grace 🙂

Hal Varian – Quality Score and The Google Ad Auction

Hal Varian is the chief economist at Google, and certainly one of the main forces behind the economics of the Adwords Auction AND Quality Score.   Google’s had this video available for over a year now, but NOT ONE PERSON I’ve spoken with about their Quality Score concerns had watched it. (Thanks to Rob Sieracki, Chief Operating Officer at RocketClicks.com for pointing this out to me)

In any case, it’s definitely THE starting point for understanding the components of Quality Score, especially the key role Click Through Rates play, and the VERY specific economic impact Quality Score has on bid price.  It’s something which EVERY AdWords advertiser should watch.  (Especially since it’s under 10 minutes!)

In my humble opinion, Quality Score is all about “Getting them there and keeping them there with relevant content”… which means (mathematically) a high Click Through Rate, a Long Time Spent on the Site, and a Low Bounce Rate.  What that means in Plain English, however, is that you simply have to know what your best prospects want, on an adgroup by adgroup level, if not down to the keyword.  What’s the best way to do that?  Join the hyper-responsive marketing club of course!

Content Network Negatives and Risk Management

According to Jered “The Content Network Exorcist” Klima (who has managed hundreds of thousands of dollars per month), there are nuances of negative site usage and risk management on the Content Network which elude virtually all AdWords users…

Things which Google themselves point out in the depth of their documentation…

Which have dramatic implications for how you manage the content network… it’s a real paradigm shift.  Without question, it’s the most valuable thing I’ve learned about Adwords this year, and it’ll only take you 15 minutes to go through.

Highly Recommended,

Glenn 🙂

Rocket Clicks PPC Management |    Beat the $20/mo Price Increase (2/26/10)

PS – The thematic shift Jered presents is entirely consistent with the focus of my hyper-responsive club.  Essentially, you need to start thinking THEMATICALLY, which requires you to more tightly define what your entire site is about than ever before.  In fact, one way of understanding Quality Score is a recognition that if you don’t take the time to clearly outline your exact place in the world of keyword conversations, Google will define it for you!

I’ve thought long and hard about the best way to define your space, then conquer it with focus and determination in Google (both Search and Content) and beyond.   This is NOT  a technique or a fad, but a set of principles you implement with a step by step over-my-shoulder system.

I’m implementing one last price raise jumping to $97.   So if you’ve been on the fence following me, consider this your limited opportunity to LOCK IN YOUR RATES FOREVER.  (Note: I never raise rates on active members ) Beat the Price Increase

MP3: Insights for Search – Practical Uses

You’ll be Genuinely surprised at all the practical, immediately useful applications Rob Sieracki’s got for you using this underutilized and undervalued Google tool!

Enjoy 🙂

Rocket Clicks |    Beat the $20/mo Glenn Club Price Increase (2/26/10) |  Coaching Priority List

Getting More Profitable AdWords Impressions

Most of the Quality Score chatter online seems focused around dealing with low scores which make playing the game all but impossible.

But what about getting higher scores on keywords which are already performing for you?

What about moving from 6s and 7s to 9s and 10s?

And more importantly, how do you maximize your PROFITABLE IMPRESSIONS on keywords which are already performing well for you?

Other than Google, I think perhaps no one knows better than Rob Sieracki, recently promoted to Chief Operating Officer at Rocket Clicks.

If you’ve got even one keyword which runs profitably in AdWords, I guarantee you’re going to kiss me for putting this interview together. (No complaints about the beard please)

Enjoy!

Dr. Glenn 🙂

Glenn Club |   Coaching |  A to Z Product for Newbies |  Advanced Adwords Seminar

Why Ignoring AdWords is Never an Option

Here’s a conversation I repeat often which makes my brain hurt!

It goes something like this:

MARKETER:  “I think Google’s become entirely too random and unfair with their Quality Score system, so I’m just going to focus on SEO”

GLENN: “OK, well, where does SEO Traffic come from?”

MARKETER: “Uhm, well, I guess it comes mostly from Google”

GLENN: “So, what you’re saying is, you’re going to ignore Google and focus on Google instead?”

MARKETER: “Yeah, but on the organic side, you don’t have to deal with their crazy landing page quality scores, and it’s free so you beat the constantly rising bid prices”

GLENN:  “Why would Google clean up one side of the street (paid ads) and not eventually apply what they learn to the other (organic)?”

MARKETER: “Um, OK, good point.  But Google’s not the only source of traffic.  There’s Twitter, Facebook, Article Directories, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more…it’s a very big internet out there”

GLENN: “Very true.  But are you talking about using these things because of the power they have to get indexed in Google, or in order to attract the people who come from them directly?”

MARKETER: “Both”

GLENN: “About what percent of traffic comes directly from the social media vs. from the indexing power social media provides in the search engines?”

MARKETER: “I don’t know.   Let’s say it’s 50%”

GLENN: “Which converts better, traffic from social media, or traffic from search”

MARKETER: “Oh, definitely search, because they’re looking to solve a problem, not interact with friends”

GLENN: “Right.”

MARKETER: “OK, I see where you’re going, but even if social media doesn’t convert as well, there’s a LOT of FREE traffic there, and you can always roll it out on the paid contextual networks”

GLENN: “So, you’re going to work with a very broad and diffuse audience while they’re  socializing, develop a website to convert them even though you can’t really pin down their core conversations and objections, and then go buy more traffic for that system?”

MARKETER:  “Well, there’s affiliates too.  I can recruit an army of affiliates.”

GLENN: “Where do they get THEIR traffic?”

MARKETER: “Well, I could get into one of the CPA networks with an offer.  Have you seen the flood of traffic you can get there?”

GLENN:  “Sure.  If you can build a website that converts like crazy, you can definitely do that.   How are you going to do that?  What traffic are you going to test it on?”

MARKETER: “I want my Mommy!”

—

I’m exaggerating above for illustration, and of course there IS traffic you can convert which never touches a search engine (especially blog visitors on other people’s sites, participating in forums, and/or good article writing–not the crappy seo articles everyone tells you to write), but here’s the point…

Google’s got the BEST leads.

Google’s got the PUREST leads.

Google’s got the MOST MOTIVATED leads.

Yes, Google’s very hard.

Yes, it’s getting more expensive all the time (that will stop only when it becomes cheaper for marketers to find equally good leads for less money in similar volume… a fact of life in a Darwinian economy).

And sure, we all pine for the days when you could just put up your money and slap up a one page site.

But if you suck it up and learn their system, you get the opportunity to build a site that converts, and you learn which keyword conversations really work for you. (THEN, if you really want to,  you can turn off your Adwords account and take it to the contextual networks.  THEN you can focus on social media.  THEN you do all your article marketing, etc.  But if you do it all right, you won’t want to stop buying PPC)

Because, despite what everyone says, Quality Score is NOT random, it IS fair, and you CAN master it.   Not by looking for techniques and tricks, but by learning certain principles of marketing which, in the end, actually benefit you more than Google.   (I know that’s a controversial statement which is going to earn me a lot of hate mail, but 8  years of PPC marketing experience, thousands of customers, hundreds of direct reviews, and dozens of agency employees  give me the confidence to make it, and it’s in your best interest to seriously consider what I’m saying)

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say it’s something you MUST master if you want to succeed online.

The internet as a whole used to be the Wild West.  But the Sheriff is coming to clean up the town.    He’s gonna make his rounds everywhere Google’s got tentacles.    We can try to run and hide, but Google’s got REALLY BIG tentacles, and they keep getting bigger. (The analogy kind of breaks down here because we’re not really criminals… but you get the point)

Beyond this, I predict the organic side of the street is going to shrink this decade as Google figures out how to make sure people can find exactly what they want from paid advertisers, and learns how to minimize searcher complaints.

I’ll be turning my focus to Quality Score Principles (not techniques) in coming months, and you can expect to hear me say things no one else will tell you.

I know it’s hard to understand (because Google’s sheriff is more like Stephen Hawking than John Wayne) .

I know it hurts.

But we can fix this, and it’s good for us.

Suck it up,

Glenn 🙂

Glenn Club |   Coaching |  A to Z Product for Newbies |  Advanced Adwords Seminar

PS – The AdWords account banning spree is also NOT random or evil, but principle based.  It IS possible to develop a stable, secure AdWords account and still sleep at night.

PPS – If you’re spending anything significant in AdWords and you’re not coming to the Advanced Adwords Seminar, may I ask why?   (Comments below please).  In my mind, this is one of the very few seminars where you might learn something during the day, go back to your hotel room at night and immediately implement it, then start seeing financial improvements the very next day while you glance at your account on your laptop in the seminar room.  Plus, Perry’s good for his guarantees, I can tell you that.   (Thru the middle of the second day you can bail out and request an extra $500 plane fare).

I’ll be there personally with Sharon, and so will Rob (who is now the Chief Operating Officer of Rocket Clicks by the way).  But you know who you really need to see?  Bryan Todd.   Bryan’s Perry’s co-author, and is generally the quiet man in the background.

But if you push Perry on the point, he’ll tell you that Bryan is better at Adwords than he is.

Bryan’s also become a personal friend of mine (and not the kind of “friend” you hear marketers always talk about, but the kind you share deep personal thoughts with which go way beyond making money), and has given me some of the most profound insights into Adwords and the internet than anyone else I’ve known.

Bryan’s going to be teaching us how to leverage Facebook PPC, and I personally can’t wait.  Because I know this isn’t a presentation he’s just whipping up in a few weeks.  Over the past 18 months Bryan’s been periodically talking to me about his research into the Facebook project, asking me how to integrate it with my methods, talking to me about the psychographic data you get access to and how to use it, and how to integrate AdWords learnings.

I hope I’ll see you there Advanced Adwords Seminar

PPS – Yes, these are affiliate links.

More Unusual Adwords Tips to Save Money in 2010

OK, well, the year is rapidly drawing to a close, so let me leave you with several additional quick adwords tips to save you money in 2010 (Thanks VERY much to Jerrold Burke, Jered Klima, Dan Zuzanski, Laureen Hoeft, Rob Sieracki, and all the rest of the Rocket Clicks PPC team for helping me compile this):

  • Don’t judge the success of the content network without cleaning it up first.  Aggressively look for site and category exclusions (in the content placement report AND the standard user interface for the campaign).  As a last resort consider managing effective placements discovered on a CPM basis while you gradually throttle  down the automatic placement campaign (you can drag and drop placements between two campaigns using the Adwords Editor)
  • In your most profitable adgroups, don’t necessarily split test a new ad with 50% of your traffic unless you’re very early in the game and you’re fairly sure you’ve got a good change to beat the control. Instead, use the Adwords Editor to make several copies of the existing ad, and change only ONE of them.  This way, you’re only exposing the TEST to a small percentage of your otherwise profitable traffic… if it’s a bomb, you lose a lot less.  If it starts to look like a winner, you can delete many of the other copies to increase the exposure frequency of the test ad (but be careful not to delete the CONTROL copy with all the history until the winner has been firmly declared)
  • Don’t be content using just text ads. Local Business Ads, Ad Extensions, and Ad Site Links are very effective yet underutilized media for many businesses.  (And in the content network, don’t forget to test display advertising)
  • Test something wildly and insanely different from your existing control ad. I mean, something which kind of irks you to try.   Onesentance.org is a good source of inspiration for ad copy in this light (thanks to David Bullock for pointing this out).   Another good source is to write a controversial ad which goes 100% against all the benefits your competitors are touting.  For example, in the adwords market itself you used to see ads saying “You will make money tonight”… so what you’d do instead is say “Some of these animals are lying!  Be the tortoise, not the hare”… see where I’m going?
  • Take advantage of Google’s Betas, especially if you’re a more traditional e-commerce marketing with an actual catalog of products sold through a shopping cart.
  • Don’t use the same copy or landing pages  in the content network as you do in search. Content surfers are READERS, searchers are SCANNERS.  (We’ll do more on this in a future audio)
  • Go through the reporting center once a week to see if there are new metrics available which could be of use. (These days, new data points seem to be accelerating on an almost monthly basis)

And for heaven’s sake, if you’re not a member of my Hyper Responsive Club already, get out there and join before the price increases forever on Friday (or when I hit 1,000 members, which is looking like it might happen before then since Perry Marshall decided to tell his list of 250,000+ people to jump on board today).

Because without the information in this club, I can virtually guarantee you haven’t carefully defined a very specific keyword target to conquer online with focus and determination.  And if you haven’t done that, I know you’re suffering with much lower click through, conversion, and quality scores than you’d otherwise have. Join now

I know everyone hesitates to join a new monthly club, and no one wants to commit to a new monthly expense. (Note: you can cancel any time, and even the first month is refundable if you decide you don’t like it for any reason, or no reason at all)

But the thing is, hardly anyone is sorry once they’ve joined mine.  Join now

That’s because:

1) YOU’LL SEE A REAL BUSINESS BEING DEVELOPED: This club is one of the very, very few places you can actually watch a real business being developed from scratch. In other words, I don’t only TALK about what to do in some electronic classroom in the sky, I actually SHOW YOU me DOING it as I develop a REAL business.  Join now

2) YOU GET 6 To 12 HOURS FOR MUCH LESS THAN WHAT OTHERS CHARGE FOR ONLY 1 HOUR: While most other gurus are charging $97/mo for only an hour or two of  THEORY, Glenn’s delivering virtually a whole seminar (6 to 12 hours/mo) for much less.  Join now

3) YOU’LL LEARN FROM AN AGENCY OWNER: I’m not only a marketing educator, I’m a Rocket Clicks founder and I’ve seen hundreds of business models from the inside out. Which means, I don’t just guess about what’s working and what’s not, I’ve seen the dollars in vs. dollars out reports. I’m not talking theory, and I’m not going to pee on your back while I tell you it’s raining.  You’ll get the straight truth, even when it’s not sexy.  Which is what you NEED in order to succeed, rather than just to feel good for a few months while you consume another piece of intellectual entertainment.  Join now

4) I’VE LIVED IN THE REAL WORLD: I’ve consulted for dozens of real companies … Lipton, AT&T, Novartis, Panasonic, Whirlpool, Colgate-Palmolive, Bausch & Lomb, Nextel, etc. I might be known in our circles as “the guinea pig direct response guy”, but my techniques are explosive in these circles because they come from an entirely different industry.  Join now

5) I’VE DONE WHAT I’M TEACHING: I’ve launched over 17 markets profitably, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the IM crowd. I’m not a guru who’s done nothing but be a guru.

6) I’M HONEST: You won’t get rich next month using my work. It’s not even within the realm of possibility. But you WILL learn how to build a secure foundation for your business so it can grow and grow and grow.  Join now

7) YOU’LL LEARN A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT MARKETING: Perhaps most importantly, I’ll teach you a different way to think about marketing which will last you a lifetime.

BEAT THE PRICE RAISE (On January 1st): Join now

And have a Happy New Year!

Dr. G 🙂