The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Advertising has always been about multiple points of action. On one hand, advertisers expect to earn a return on investment. But they also want to brand themselves in the marketplace. Sometimes you can do one or the other but not both.

The first step to using PPC advertising as a branding tool is to set your goals. Determine what your point of ROI is for each click price point. Can you achieve branding effects by limiting your ad spend to a maximum so that you can also realize an ROI? If not, then you have a choice to make.

Is branding more important or is that ROI more important?

The key to using PPC as a branding tool is to plant your company name or product brand in the top of your prospect’s mind. You want them to think of your company when they think of the benefits of using your service. To do that, you’ve got to establish your brand as a top brand through psychological condition. That may require throwing out your advertising budget and just focusing on being No. 1.

Large corporations have been making these decisions for years. Online, with PPC particularly, it’s a decision that even small companies can make.

Does it matter how much you spend on advertising? Does it matter how much you spend on pay per click advertising? I’d say it only matters if you are not achieving an ROI on your investment. Or, rather, it doesn’t matter if you are achieving a positive ROI.

It seems that Google is making hand over fist on the top 20 PPC ad keywords.

No wonder. Look at the top 5:

• Insurance
• Loans
• Mortgage
• Attorney
• Credit

If you are in the banking, mortgage, credit, or legal business, then you have to pay top dollar for your PPC ads or risk big chances that you won’t get much traffic from your advertising. But the bottom line for any advertiser is, How much ROI do you realize based on your ad spend?

If you are a small insurance company, for instance, and you target your PPC advertising toward a specific niche within the industry or a geographic location, then you can cut your ad spend down based on a narrower market definition. You are also more likely to realize an ROI.

The key is to target your advertising to the specific niche you want to do business with. Narrow your market down as far as you can before you advertise. Long tail keywords are much more profitable for smaller budgets than general keyword phrases.

There are different ways to skin a cat, as they say. But when it comes to kicking off a brand new Internet marketing campaign, there are certain things that you definitely want to include in that effort. Leave them out at your own peril.

Here are the steps you need to take in your online marketing campaign. Some of the steps can be performed in any order while others should be performed in the proper order stated. I’ll let you know when it’s OK to veer into a different direction or rearrange the order.

• Competitive research – Start with understanding where your competition is and what they are up to. Someone was in your space before you. Find out who they are and what they’ve done and are doing.
• Keyword research – You should include keyword research along with competitive research, but it does extend beyond competitive intelligence. You want study the competition’s keywords, but you also want to do your own independent research.
• Pay Per Click – PPC advertising will be your first test of your keywords. It’s fast and gets you the information you need quickly, plus you can drive instant sales with PPC.
• Search engine optimization – Next, take what you’ve learned from your competitive research, keyword research, and PPC and build a solid SEO campaign. You can do SEO before PPC, but I recommend performing PPC first so you can us it to test your keywords.
• Social media marketing – You want to save your social media campaign for later in the game. It’s a lower threshold type of marketing. It’s good for branding and building relationships, but you want to get your SEO and PPC going first so that you can use them to test your keywords and strategies.
• Video marketing – With videos, you can market with them before social media or after. It makes little difference, but you don’t want to start your video marketing campaign before SEO or PPC.
• Link building – Other forms of marketing like articles, blogs, and link building efforts are ongoing. Start them as soon you get your SEO campaign going and don’t ever stop.

In the 1980s, it was chic to buy a mailing list from a list broker who might promise that the list was targeted to a specific type of customer within a specific industry. You could call the list or use the list for direct mailing. Either way, you were spending money. And if you used the list and it brought you some business, then you were effectively buying targeted sales leads. You were buying customers.

Can you do the same thing online? Can you buy targeted sales leads or customers online? You sure can.

It’s called pay per click advertising. With PPC, it’s all about buying clicks. You bid on what a click is worth to you, write an ad that draws attention, point your link to a landing page, and snag the contact information from your prospect.

These types of leads are solid leads because they have responded to your calls to action. They responded to your ad. Then they responded to your landing page with a request for private information. If you use an autoresponder with a double opt-in process, then they’ve given you permission to contact them twice. They couldn’t spell it out for you any better.

So what do you do with those leads then? You market to them. Aggressively. Tell them what you have to offer and how much is costs. Sell them on the benefits. When you close a sale, it’s because you effectively bought a lead. A targeted lead.

We’ve extolled the virtues of pay per click advertising over and over again. We’ve also praised the benefits of local search marketing. But what about local PPC? Is it all that?

Yes, it is. And a bag of potato chips too.

Our take on local and PPC marketing is that you should always drill down as far as you can in any channel you are trying to develop. If you are optimizing your website for search traffic and you are a business that caters to a local clientele, then you should be targeting your SEO efforts to local traffic. If you are using PPC, then you should be targeting your PPC efforts to local traffic as well.

This drill down is much more effective, believe it or not, than the alternative. Just think about it:

If you sell widgets and you write your PPC ads to appeal to people searching for widgets without a local geotargeting key phrase, then you’ll be paying for traffic that you may not want. But if you sell widgets in your local shop and you want to reach a strictly local business, then local PPC makes a heck of a lot of sense. Geotarget your ads and you’ll pay only for local clicks, not global.

Not only is local PPC effective, but it is often more effective.

Over the years, many Internet marketers have compared search engine optimization with pay per click advertising and offered their opinions on which is better. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but at least the fruit are in the same family. Both rely upon keyword research and use search engine marketing principles. But what about a comparison between PPC and social media? How would that fare?

While the comparison between PPC and SEO is more akin to a comparison between a lemon and a lime, the comparison between PPC and social media optimization is like a comparison between a raison and a tomato. Both may be fruit, but they have very little in common.

Social media, for instance, does not require keywords in order to be effective; PPC does. That’s not to say that a social media campaign cannot incorporate keywords. If social media is keyword-based, it can influence your search engine rankings. The jury is still out on whether PPC influences such rankings.

Another difference between social media marketing and PPC is that social media is about building relationships. PPC is about driving traffic. Period.

You can develop a relationship on social media and lead your prospect to a sale right there on Facebook or Twitter without ever getting them to your website. With PPC, your goal is to get them to your website or landing page. Period.

PPC is better for short term results. Social media is a marathon. Can short term results happen? Yes, but if you don’t get short term results in PPC, you’ve failed. Not so in social media.

Both social media and PPC can be effective, but the threshold for success on PPC is much higher. You can expect lesser results on social media and still be effective. Plus, it’s easier to measure results with pay-per-click marketing.

Would I discourage you from using either channel? No. I think you should use both deliberately. But understand their differences before you do.

If you were to use your entire keyword list for a natural search marketing campaign, it would cost you a fortune. And you might spend a year or two learning which keywords are performing best and which ones are more profitable. We can do that in a month or less with pay-per-click advertising.

By using PPC to test your keywords, we can group those keywords into tight target groups and test them against different ads and landing pages. Using a multivariate approach helps us to gain a better understanding of your keyword effectiveness.

Let’s take an example: If you have three landing pages and five ads that can be rotated to test your keyword list and find that you have one keyword that performs well consistently on all ad and landing page combinations, then we know that’s a strong keyword. But if another keyword consistently fails to achieve any meaningful results, then we know it’s a weak keyword. We can strike it from your list and not waste our time creating content for natural search.

This approach saves you money and time. You will not have to wait a year to determine that certain keywords are ineffective for natural search and the small investment in PPC you make to determine that will save you tons of money on the back end.

A few years ago, if you wanted to advertise using a pay-per-click model, you either had to go with Google or opt for one of the smaller search engines, pay less, and get less traffic. In fact, that wasn’t too long ago. But now, Facebook advertising is growing at a very rapid pace and seems to be threatening Google’s dominance. One thing that could tip the balance for advertising is real-time advertising.

According to AdAge, Facebook has started experimenting with real-time PPC ads.

It works like this: You post a status update that says, “I love peanut butter sandwiches.” In that instant, an ad appears on your wall promoting peanut butter. Maybe it’s Jif, maybe it’s Peter Pan, but you know it’s peanut butter. Would you click the ad?

I’m guessing that many users would click the ad – probably enough to make it worthwhile to advertisers to spend money on real-time advertising.

The article doesn’t say whether real-time ads would cost more than regular PPC ads, but if the value is there, it might be worth paying more. Virtually anything can be promoted in real time just based on users’ posting habits. This takes PPC advertising to a new level and it could push Facebook ahead of Google as the preferred PPC provider.

Did you know you can try out PPC advertising with a no-risk account? It’s true. Try it out today and you can get a $100 coupon – for FREE.

Click the link above and fill out the form on the right hand side of the page. Your PPC campaign can be managed by Internet marketers with years of experience in PPC management. It’s a no-risk plan for getting started in what could be one of the most profitable ways of marketing online in fifteen years.

Kick your PPC campaign off with some basic keyword research. We’ll search and find the best keywords for your business based on your landing page, your goals, your competition, and past marketing initiatives.

With PPC marketing, you can test your keywords before you use them in your organic marketing. It’s a great way to test new keywords and keyword groups. Why spend countless hours building landing pages and promoting them through social media and articles when you aren’t 100% confident of the keywords you are using? You can be confident in less than 24 hours just by testing them in PPC ads.

Get your free coupon for $100 of PPC advertising right now. Click the link and fill out the form.

Internet marketing is a very broad field taking in every online aspect from web design through search engine marketing and on to social media marketing. Whether you need all of these services, or just some components, before shelling out what resources you may have, consider asking these questions first.

• Do they offer agency support for all search engines – many firms can offer support for Google, but they are not the only player.
• What sort of training and experience have their consultants had
• Do their consultants have technical knowledge and expertise of the search engines; again, not just Google
• Do they have PPC management experience including keyword selection and split testing
• Do they have access to PPC Beta programs
• Can they identify and monitor click fraud
• Can you agree to a month-to-month contract rather than committing to longer periods
• Can they offer complementary services such as video production and the creation of Facebook Fan Pages
• Do they have social media marketing experience
• Can they provide professional reviews or examples of the work
• Can they guarantee results

The last is almost a trick question. If they do guarantee results, ask them on what basis. In most cases, Internet marketing professionals may offer guarantees on their work, but not necessarily on the results since there are so many uncontrollable variables. If they offer guaranteed results – be wary.

When asking questions of prospective Internet marketing firms, you are looking for two things. Number one, you are looking for a team that is professional and proficient at what they do; and, number two, you are looking for a team that you can comfortably communicate with. The latter is almost as important as the first since poor communication often leads to disappointment and unsatisfactory results. It’s your money and your business – you need the best that you can afford.

How many keywords is enough for your SEO or PPC campaign? The truth is, you can never have enough keywords. How you use your keywords is far more important than how many keywords you have.

When it comes to SEO, the more keywords you have the more opportunities you have to capture rankings for those keywords. You figure you have two chances to rank for the same keyword on the same website at Google and once or twice at Bing. If you have a 1,000 keyword list then that gives you about 4,000 chances to rank for those keywords with a 1,000-page website.

With PPC it’s a little different. Pay per click campaigns operate best with tight keyword groups. If you group your keywords effectively and write good ads that lead clickers to well-optimized and conversion-ready landing pages then you should have a profitable marketing plan. The more keywords you have in your arsenal the better your chances of reaching that goal.

But pay per click advertising and search engine marketing effectiveness depend on your use of the keywords you have. Your SEO efforts will be greatly improved if you have a good army of keywords.

Don’t get wrapped around the axle on numbers, just find good keywords.

If you have a web site – why? Is it to help market your business and build a brand? Is it to attract customers, make sales, and over time, deliver a healthy return on your investment? If your web site is connected to a business, or in reality, the whole business, then I am sure your answer to those questions is a resounding yes. If that’s the case, how do you intend to attain those objectives. For most businesses, they use one or more of the following:

Search engine optimization – who can argue with free organic traffic? Of course, that’s not an overnight program so you may use:

Pay Per Click Marketing – if you can’t secure free traffic overnight, why not buy it? That is essentially what PPC marketing is all about – buying traffic. That will kick start your business so you decide on:

Social Media Marketing - you get social perhaps building a Fan Page on Facebook and building up a list of followers on Twitter.

There are many other methods that you could use to try and attract traffic. The one thing that is missing in this process is the human element. Aside from business-to-business commerce, you are trying to sell a service or product to a human.  Whether it’s SEO, PPC or Social Media Marketing, you should never lose sight of who your customer really is.

SEO is a prime example of becoming wrapped up in finding a way to the top of the search results while forgetting that your customer is actually a person. Finding a keyword that is well used but is easy to target may get you to the top of the search results. You may even gain bandwidth-busting traffic – however, if the search term has little to do with actually purchasing the product then it’s likely your sales will be low. The reason – you have missed the human element. You have gone for a perceived easy target without considering it’s worth to your business.

The same is true with PPC and social media marketing. The latter is littered with small online businesses that have looked for quantity when it comes to followers, and not quality. Your customers are humans, not numbers or keywords – forget that, and no amount of internet marketing can hope to achieve your initial goals.

A lot of pay per click marketers place too much important on click-through rates. Yes, it’s true, click-throughs (CTR) are important and you want to measure your CTR, but at the end of the day what is really important is ROI.

Let’s assume that you spend $1 per click on a PPC campaign. In one day you get 10 clicks so you’ve spent $10. How many of those resulted in a sale? If you got no sales then you had no ROI. You’ve spent $10 and made no money.

But let’s suppose that you are paying $2 per click and you got the same number of clicks. Now you’ve spent $20; but suppose that one of those clicks resulted in the sale of a widget that resulted in a net profit of $22. Now you’ve got an ROI of $2.

That’s not much, I know, but it’s better than $0, right?

It’s great that you’ve got an ad that can draw clicks, but you have to look beyond your ad and see your landing page for what it is. If it isn’t converting your traffic then you’re just throwing good money after bad. We’ve discovered that sometimes a simple tweak of a landing page can result in more conversions.

Now imagine in that second scenario above that you got 2 conversions instead of 1. Your ROI moved from $2 to $24. Now imagine doing that every day. Isn’t ROI a lot more attractive then CTR now?

Before you begin a pay per click campaign it is always a good idea to get a PPC evaluation, which is a way for your PPC manager to see what you’ve done, how it’s affected your ROI, what worked, what didn’t, etc. There are 5 key elements to a good PPC evaluation.

1. Website Evaluation – There are certain aspects to your website that are important for consideration when you use PPC to drive traffic to it. First is usability. Do your visitors find your website usable or is it difficult to navigate? How about conversion optimization? Are your landing pages ready to receive orders? And we’ll also take a look at your page load times to ensure that your PPC ads have a high quality score.
2. Existing PPC Accounts – Do you have existing accounts? How effectively were they managed? What potential issues are there in those accounts, what are your missed opportunities, are you targeting the right keywords, etc.?
3. New PPC Accounts – You’ll need to outline your PPC strategy, estimate your average cost per click on each keyword, set your monthly budget, and define your marketing channels.
4. Google Analytics Account – Do you have one? We’ll set one up for you. You also need to set goals and establish lead funnels.
5. Custom Pricing – Finally, you’ll need to get your pricing set for your campaigns. Not a one-size-fits-all budget, but the cost for your campaign.

If you’ve been struggling with PPC and you’re ready to take on a campaign that will be successful, get a PPC evaluation.

Before you hire a company to handle your Internet marketing, whether you want them to do your SEO, you PPC, or social media marketing, ask these questions (and make sure you get responsible answers):

• How do you budget Adwords to simultaneously maximize the number of clicks and minimize cost?
• How do you know which keywords to optimize for natural search and which ones are best left to the “bubble chasers?”
• Which search engines have the lowest incidence of click fraud?
• How do you set up a tracking phone number? Why should you?
• How do you track and handle leads when they come in to your firm?
• Is it better to have a lot of ad copy on a landing page or a lot of bullet points?
• How do you write your ad copy so people will fill out your contact form or call you?
• Where should the phone number be on a page? Which pages should have them?
• How do you fix a “page highjack?”
• Is there a penalty for putting too many keywords in your meta-tags?
• What are the benefits of a “content management system?” What are the drawbacks?
• How do you know when to use a broad match, phrase match or exact match in a Google Adwords campaign?

Internet marketing is not rocket science, but I wouldn’t say that anyone can do it either. The truth is, a professional company will look out for your bests interests. They’ll develop a useful strategy for marketing your company to your intended clientele. And it will make sense that they do the things that they do.

One of the benefits to running a pay per click (pay per call) campaign is that you can track your phone calls to see where they are coming from. Call tracking results in the following benefits:

• Fewer missed calls – When a caller calls she gets an automated e-mail and the call is stored in our internal database. You can get an on-demand call report at any time.
• Call blocking – Receive only the calls you want to receive based on area code or state.
• ROI tracking – Know for sure how much money your PPC campaign is making.
• Call recording – Record every call for monitoring purposes and to better train your employees.
• Get a local, toll free or international number – Use the phone number that best makes sense for your marketing and customer service purposes.
• No additional charges – One monthly fee and no extra charges.

Track your calls to see how effective your PPC – pay per call – campaigns are. Get actionable intelligence and act intelligently upon it.

Visit our case studies page and you’ll learn how we’ve helped some clients save money on expenses while increasing revenues. We saved one client 47% on expenses and increased profits by 14%. How did we do this? With these 12 steps:

1. Shifted content matching to serve targeted sites only
2. Identified broad match keywords with low conversion rates and drilled down to exact referring keywords
3. Rewrote ads and split tested to determine maximum click-through rates
4. Started a keyword campaign based on competitor names
5. Reduced image files to increase page load speeds
6. Added a script to highlight referring keywords
7. Improved shopping cart usability and lowered abandon rates
8. Improved website’s internal search features
9. Retargeted previous visitors to increase return rates at a fraction of the cost of PPC click-through rates
10. Made navigation menus easier to read
11. Regrouped keywords into tighter groups and rewrote landing pages to improve quality score
12. Used special offer pages more effectively

We did all of this in 40 days. We’re sure we can help you improve the efficiency of your PPC campaigns as well. It doesn’t cost anything for an initial consultation.

If you run pay per click marketing campaigns and you aren’t checking in on them every single day (or more often) then you are probably losing money. You cannot run a PPC campaign and just let it sit.

Managing a PPC campaign is time consuming. You can’t just allocate money for your campaigns, select your keywords, write your ads and then forget about it. It requires constant monitoring.

To manage a PPC campaign effectively you’ve got to narrow down your keywords and see which ones are working for you. You can’t do that if you aren’t checking in. You should check your campaigns at least once daily. Find out which keywords are most profitable, which ones are getting the click-throughs and which ones are leading to sales. In essence, you want to know which PPC campaigns are most profitable for you.

Until you know these things, you cannot be effective in pay per click advertising. It’s not a set-and-forget deal.

I read somewhere on another blog (don’t remember where now) that running a PPC campaign is like renting traffic. The analogy makes sense, but if you think that renting is a bad thing then think again. Renting traffic can actually pay off.

There is a difference between renting and owning, however. While PPC is like renting traffic, SEO is more like owning it. Here’s how they differ.

When you spend $100 on a PPC campaign and receive 100 visitors to your website then you’ve paid $1 per visitor to read your offer. But let’s say that you close 1 in 10 of your visitors or, to say it another way, you have a 10% conversion ratio. Each sale costs you $10. But you only pay for that sale whenever you have your PPC ads turned on. Stop the advertising and you stop the sales and the traffic.

Measuring ROI is a different thing altogether. Let’s say you sell pink widgets for $20 each. For each sale you pay $10 to obtain you also earn $20 to close. But that’s not your profit. You also have material costs. Let’s say it costs you $3 to make your widgets. Your profit is $7 for each widget you sell. There’s your ROI.

SEO works a little differently. Let’s say you pay an SEO professional $500 to optimize your website. Your conversion ratio is still 10% and let’s say that you get 1,000 visitors from the search engines each month. That means you make 100 sales every month and at $20 each you earn $2,000 on your search engine traffic the first month. That’s an ROI of $1,200 the first month and $1,700 every month after that.

Obviously, the money you can earn from SEO has a lot greater potential than the money you can earn from PPC. But, realistically, you have to wait 2-6 months for that SEO traffic to become profitable. If that $500 investment doesn’t start paying off for 6 months then you do not realize an ROI for 6 months on your investment whereas you can realize an ROI on your PPC the very same month. It’s a lot more immediate.

Question: Would you rather earn $70 additional income today or $1,700 additional income 6 months from now?

Consider that your $70 ROI will add up to $420 over a 6-month period. If you re-invest that money into other vehicles then $420 could turn into more. So don’t knock the lower numbers today that you can earn from PPC. I’d recommend that you utilize both channels – PPC and SEO – for your online marketing efforts.

BTW, the numbers in these examples are not reflective of actual sales and ROI numbers. They could be higher or lower for both PPC and SEO. Some companies actually earn higher ROIs from PPC.

Can you imagine Google without pay per click services? It’s really what built the search engine giant into the mega-corporation that is today. Advertisers.

There’s a reason Google can point to pay per click advertising as the backbone of its search infrastructure. Even though search technology came first, pay per click algorithms are base somewhat on search algorithms and advertisers have relied on the technology as much as Google has.

While search and pay per click do not necessarily influence each other directly, they do go hand in hand. You should supplement your SEO efforts with well optimized and well managed pay per click campaigns. That is where most successful Internet entrepreneurs make their money – by spending it on the advertising.

While search rankings can move up or down at the whim of the search algorithm, pay per click is pretty steady and is based more on quality score criteria. If you can manage your quality score then you can manage your PPC campaigns.

If you really want to succeed and make decent money online then you’ve got engage your audience through paid advertising. It’s the goldmine of the Internet.