New pay per click advertisers tend to get wrapped up in certain details that aren’t necessary. They can also ignore details that are. Of course, everyone must start somewhere and then learn to compete. But these mistakes could be costly:

1. Focus on too many keywords - Some new Pay Per Click advertisers will use every keyword on their list for their Pay Per Click campaigns instead of focusing each campaign on the specific keywords that are just right.
2. Fail to narrow to keywords to the proper match types - Broad match types are not the answer for most Pay Per Click campaigns.
3. Write descriptions without benefits - Your description should be centered on what the user wants, not on what you want.
4. Joins the content network - This is a sure way to get eaten up by click fraud and untargeted clicks.
5. Doesn’t set a daily budget - If you don’t establish your limits early on, you’ll exceed them early on.
6. Sends traffic to a non-optimized landing page - Your landing page is one of the most important parts of your campaign; don’t neglect it.
7. No tracking - Use the conversion code to track your sales; otherwise, how will you know if you’ve met with success?
8. Doesn’t test the ads - Do some ad testing to determine which ads are most successful and eliminate those that don’t pass the test.
9. Bids on brand unnecessarily - Focus on keywords that searchers will search for, not on your company brand.
10. Not enough keyword research - Success begins with the proper keyword research.

Are you making any of these 10 mistakes? If so, you should perhaps go back to the drawing board and rethink your Pay Per Click strategy.

Did you know you can use Pay Per Click to upsell your clients on your product lines? It’s not bait and switch if you do it the right way. Let’s say you have a Super-Duper Widget that you just have to get out to market, but customers are still hot on your old Widget style. Obviously, widget is your keyword and the product that you are marketing. So let’s play it up.

You write your keyword-optimized ad and send ad clickers to a landing page optimized for the popular Widget that your company sells. There are three ways that you can upsell them to your Super-Duper Widget, the new and improved version. Here are four ways to upsell from your Widget landing page:

• After discussing the benefits of Widget, include a link to the new Super-Duper Widget, which will take clickers to a new landing page
• After the buyer clicks on “Pay Now” for the Widget, ask them if they want to learn about the new and improved Super-Duper Widget and give them a link to click on for more information - they can opt to buy that one instead of the Widget
• Redirect clickers to the Super-Duper Widget landing page instead with a message at the top of the page that says something to the effect, “I know you wanted to see the Widget but I thought you might like the Super-Duper Widget instead; if not, click here” and you can send them to the Widget landing page with one click
• Send your buyer to the Widget landing page, but include a pop-up for the Super-Duper Widget with a way to close the box if the clicker isn’t interested

Which of these ways is best? It depends. This is where you have to know your customers. Some marketers swear by pop-ups, but some don’t like them. It’s up to you. Any of these ways of upselling can be used and different marketers have tried them all to varying degrees of success. Any way you look at it, however, you can use Pay Per Click to upsell your customers to the latest product offerings your company has.

You know, it’s still not too late to get that Mother’s Day Pay Per Click advertising campaign off the ground. You may be a little later than your competition, but you’re not too late. The beauty of pay-per-click is that you can start a campaign the week before a holiday or special day and drive targeted traffic to your website. It just takes a few minutes to set up a campaign and to set your budget. So why not start now?

If you already have a Mother’s Day Pay Per Click advertising campaign in the works and you aren’t satisfied with the way that it is going, maybe you should tweak your keywords a bit. Or perhaps your ad. An evaluation from a third-party eye might not be a bad idea.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your Mother’s Day Pay Per Click  advertising campaign:

• Use “mother’s day” as a part of your targeted keywords to appeal to online searchers specifically seeking Mother’s Day gifts
• Optimize your landing page to attract Mother’s Day shoppers
• Write targeted ad text that mentions your specific products by name
• Offer gift cards and run Pay Per Click ads specifically for Mother’s Day gift cards
• Extend your shipping and delivery options to include overnight shipping or free shipping to appeal to last minute shoppers
• Some people are still leary of using credit cards online; appeal to them through other means such as PayPal and Google Checkout

If you hurry, you can still get your Mother’s Day Pay Per Click  campaign off the ground before the end of the week.

(Source) For example, people searching with terms like “prom dress” usually want to be able to browse a variety of styles and colors, and may not click on an ad that promotes a “red floor-length strapless prom dress.”

I don’t agree with that statement at all. Most searchers in 2008 still don’t know how to conduct a search properly. But I do agree with the principle that this statement is being used to back up. You do want your PPC ads to point to a page that is geared toward selling the specific item your ad mentions. It’s more about keywords and optimization best practices than anything.

Let’s take that prom dress example again. Suppose you have a web page that is beautifully written and ready to take order for corsages. You don’t really want to write an ad that attempts to draw traffic from people looking for long evening gowns. You want your own to be optimized for the keyword “corsage”. Otherwise, why advertise?

If you are just looking for general traffic related to prom dresses and such then by all means write your ad toward that mindset and send the traffic to a general web page related to prom dresses. It could be your catalog to allow browsers the opportunity to find the dress they want. But the bottom line is keyword optimization. Without it, you are shooting yourself in the PPC foot. And that hurts.

Internet marketing has branched off into a wide variety of specialties. Among them are pay per click, social media marketing, search marketing, SEO, display (banner) advertising, video marketing, article marketing, viral marketing, etc. etc. But do these marketing efforts have anything to do with each other? Can you use them to compliment each other? Absolutely.

In fact, that’s precisely what you should be doing. pay per click advertising allows you to reach your target market through inexpensive advertising that you pay for AFTER you reach the market. It’s a post-pay system as opposed to pre-pay, which is what many offline marketing efforts are. Many online marketing methods don’t require any pay at all. So how should they work together?

Effective online marketing is centered around driving targeted traffic to one page that makes an offer. Whether that offer is a free download, a newsletter subscription, a product for sale, or something else, it must a focused effort and measurable. The beauty of online marketing is that you can drive traffic to one page, close the sale, and pay for an action based on its value to the end goal. PPC does that well.

When you set up your marketing campaign, it’s important to use a squeeze page, or landing page. Then you can use both free marketing methods as well as pay per click methods to drive traffic to that page. When you do that successfully, you’ll reach some members of your market through social marketing, other members through pay per click, some through SEO, and still others through article marketing or other methods. The common element is a well-optimized landing page.

When it comes to optimizing your website for PPC, you need to pay attention to certain factors and get your website ready for taking orders. As the Google Analytics Blog notes, the difference between website optimization and search engine optimization is that website optimization is focused on preparing your website for sales while SEO is about achieving high rankings. Note that difference. It’s important.

The first step to website optization is to know your customers. What are they looking for? Have you analyzed your traffic patterns to see where they go and how long they stay there? You need to. And you need to know why they leave.

Don’t spend time on useless activity. If you have a page that gets 100 visitors per month and another that receives 10,000 visitors per month, you need to focus on the high traffic web page. Where are visitors going on that page, and why? When are they leaving? Are they buying what you have to offer?

In a word, know which page on your sites are high value and get the traffic. After you’ve determined that, set some goals for that page. What do you want it to do? After a little goal setting, you are then ready to start driving targeted traffic and to get it ready for converting sales. You need to establish your sales funnel. How do you see the sales process working?

Get the answers to these important questions then begin your testing. You’ll need to test different elements on those high value pages to see which ones work best. As you do your testing, note what visitors respond to the most and give them what they what.

Website optimization is a long process. Don’t expect it to take place overnight. It is very important and should not be left out. If you do your website optimization correctly, you should see real results as you develop your website more.

Let’s face it, some keywords just aren’t popular enough to have a year-round PPC campaign behind them. You know you’ve seen them. They’re popular at Christmastime, but you get no use from them for the rest of the year. Or maybe you see surges in popularity in the summer, but drops in other times of year. Maybe the keyword popularity goes up or down throughout the year based on holiday schedules or other influences within your industry. How do you capitalize on that?

Good question. The first step, of course, is to know and understand what causes those spikes, dips, and surges. You should also be tuned in to when they occur. It isn’t enough to know that baseball gloves are more popular just before little league season begins. You need to know when (generally) the interest in them starts. By knowing this information, you can time your ads to hit when people will start looking for what you have to offer.

Don’t start your advertising campaign when interest spikes. That’s too late. Kick it off a couple of weeks before that. You want to be the first to have your advertising in place so that you can capitalize early on when shoppers first begin to go looking for a product. Then, when the competition enters the field, you’ll already have a leg up. That will count for more than just sales. It will also make a difference with optimization and quality score.

You also don’t want to leave out keyword research. Don’t shortcut it just because it is a short-term campaign. Run it just as you would any other campaign. Start at the beginning, do your keyword research, and bid according to the value of the keywords. You can also use match types for your short-term campaigns. Run it like you would any other advertising campaign.

But you don’t have to use the spikes and surges for short term advertising campaigns. They are also useful in your long-term campaigns. The ones you run year-round. Those keywords that are a part of your campaign can have bid adjustments based on the season. You might even run a long-term and a short-term campaign simultaneously based on the seasons and times of year.

One more way to use this information is in your choice of negative keywords. Use those spikes to determine when to make a keyword a negative keyword and when to focus in on it through your bidding strategy or match type focus. The bottom line is to increase your revenues. You can do that by increasing your sales or by lowering your bids on keywords that don’t quite make the cut - even if it’s on a seasonal basis.

If you find your PPC campaigns reaching their daily or monthly budget caps sooner than you’d like then perhaps you should tweak the settings on your campaigns to make them run longer. Here are a few ways you can stretch your budget our further:

• Budget Per Day - If your monthly budget is running out too soon then try setting a budget per day. If your monthly budget is reached in the middle of the month and you’d like your ads to run all month long then a daily budget can stretch that out. You’ll have fewer ads running each day and when you reach your daily budget the ads will stop running for that day. But they will run every day throughout the month.
• Set campaign settings to stretch the budget out - You can also set your campaign settings to pace your ads throughout the budget period instead of pausing the campaign when you reach your budget. If you set your settings to pause when your budget is reached then your daily budget might be low enough that you reach it mid-day. Your ads will then stop running at that point when you hit the budget mark. But if you set your campaign settings to run your ads throughout the day then you’ll miss some opportunities in the middle of the day but your ads will not pause until the end of the day. They will be paced throughout the day based on your keyword bids.
• Use negative keywords - By including negative keywords in your campaign settings, you’ll keep your ads from appearing for keywords that you do not want to bid on. This will cut down on unwanted clicks.
• Narrow your match types - Instead of setting your campaigns for broad matches of your keywords, narrow your match types. This will also cut down on the number of times that your ads run and eliminate unwanted clicks.
• Establish a time of day - Is your peak conversion time in the evening or the middle of the day? You can set your campaign settings to keep your clicks active during your peak conversion times. Establish a time of day that your ads run and eliminate unwanted clicks. This will also save your budget for that time of day.

If you want to make the most of your pay per click advertising then you need to start tracking your conversions. Google AdWords makes that easy with its free conversion tracking tool.

As explained on the Inside AdWords blog, by tracking your conversions by keyword you can narrow down which keywords are converting better for you per landing page and per product. Then you can use that information to bid on keywords that deliver more ROI. You can actually bid higher on those keywords that you know convert more sales and bid lower on those keywords that don’t. It’s a very powerful tool for the serious advertiser.

Google AdWords has recently updated its conversion tracking tool to help advertisers do a better job of watching their conversions and increasing their ROI (isn’t that good news?). You can now define and track types of conversions. Just click on the Conversion Trackink link in your account to use the tool and start optimizing your landing page and your ads for better conversions.

You may notice from time to time that your minimum bids move. If you’ve had a PPC campaign that all of a sudden stopped because your ads no longer met the minimum bid for the approval process then you’ve likely been frustrated by that. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a solution for you that will help you keep an eye on that minimum bid.

When you log into your account you should see a notification that lets you know your ads no longer meet the minimum bid. Let’s say you bid 10 cents for your keyword and the minimum bid is 13 cents. On your user interface within the advertising management system, you’ll see your actual bid and a red note one field to its left telling you that your bid is too low. Right below the red type you’ll the the actual minimum bid necessary to keep your ad active for that keyword.

What you do is log into your account and click on the Keywords tab. If you haven’t seen that before, it’s because that’s a new tab. But it lets you see all the keywords for your PPC ads no matter which campaign they are associated with. That’s a cool tool. Now you can see the minimum bid information described in the last paragraph. You can either raise your bid or let your ads pause for awhile. An easy way to manage all of your keywords at a glance.

Another cool feature of this new tab and new reporting tool is that your ads do not automatically go inactive right away like they do with Google AdWords. Instead, you have a grace period during which if you raise your bid to the minimum then your ads will never pause. You won’t lose a beat. If you do not raise your minimum bid, of course, then your ads will pause, but you at least have the grace period.

While your ads are pending inactive, you can raise the bids for your keywords to the minimum necessary to keep them active, but the minimums are just that. They are not minimum bids for competitive purposes, only minimum bids to keep the ads active. So be sure to remember that.

A new lawsuit accuses Google of deception with regard to its Google AdWords Content Network. But David Snyder isn’t buying it:

The idea that Google would knowingly deceive advertisers seems a bit far fetched to me, well not that they would deceive, but that they did deceive.

I partly agree with this. Google really has nothing to gain by draining advertisers’ budgets. If that happens then those advertisers will no longer advertise. That would result in a long-term loss of revenue for Google. It makes more sense to slowly seep their pockets of cash by getting them to spend a little bit per month over time and to allow them to “win” in some cases - like Las Vegas casinos. But we’re pretty sure that isn’t happening either. People ARE making money from Google AdWords ads - it’s called ROI.

With regard to the Content Network, it can drain your budget. The first thing new advertisers should do is disable the Content Network so that David Almeida’s experience doesn’t become their own. It is a well-known fact that the Content Network does get a lower CTR than ads that appear on Google’s own SERPs. If you’re going to advertise, do it smartly.

There’s an old marketing adage: Sell the sizzle, not the steak. In PPC, you want to do just the opposite.

The recommendation comes from WebProNews’s 10 steps to SEO, and I have to agree with them. Step 7 is to set up and run your PPC campaign and in the course of doing that, Dave Davies suggests that you state right up front what your offer and how much it will cost. There is unconventional wisdom in that approach and it basically boils down to what you’ll pay in clicks if you don’t.

Remember that people will click your ad based on what you tell them in the headline and description. It pays to qualify the clicks before you pay for them. If you can scare off the researchers and others who won’t buy your product before they click on the ad then those are clicks you won’t have to pay for. Your conversions will be higher and your out-of-pocket expenses will be lower. That will translate into higher revenues for you.

So the next time you write a PPC ad to drive traffic to a landing page, remember this: Every click is money out of your pocket, but not necessarily money in. Therefore, use your ad to qualify the clicks so that you don’t have to pay for them later.

I don’t generally like questions like these. Ordinarily, you’ll see the PPC or SEO question pop up and it’s a very common one. But you usually don’t see PPC compared to article marketing even though they have more in common that PPC and SEO.

It’s almost a given that every webmaster will use SEO. If you build a website you will undoubtedly show up for organic search listings whether you try to or not. But in order to engage in PPC marketing or article marketing, you have to do so on a conscious level. It doesn’t just happen. You have to take action.

I highly recommend the SEO route for everyone no matter what. But what about PPC and article marketing? Should you engage in those marketing methods?

First, let’s point out the similarities and differences between the two. With article marketing, you won’t ever have to spend any money. With pay per click, you’ll have to shell out some cash but you only do so after a desired action has taken place. Both article marketing and pay per click can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website. Both are also in a sense trackable. You can gauge their effectiveness. Pay per click is better for achieving short term results while article marketing is very good at driving results over the long term. Article marketing is an excellent tool for helping to build link popularity, a measure that is important in your overall SEO efforts. Pay per click is not. Finally, both are great at delivering targeted traffic.

So which one is better? I think if you count the benefits again you’ll see that there is really no comparison. Both are good marketing strategies. Both can be used for different purposes. And both can deliver the targeted traffic that you desire for your website. So why not use them both?

In actuality, article marketing and PPC should compliment your overall marketing plan. Use them both and you’ll see much better results.

John Chow recently posted some tips on how to test 2nd tier PPC networks. He makes some good points and I agree. Perhaps the most useful tip is to not run your initial test on the 2nd tier network. Do it on Google, Yahoo! or MSN and only use the 2nd tier network when you have figured out your profit margins.

Another useful tip I found, and I wholeheartedly agree, is to use networks that offer you free clicks. Several 2nd tier PPC networks allow you to set up an account and give you free clicks for doing so. These clicks come in the way of $25 or $50 sign on bonuses. That effectively means you get to test the network for free.

I also like John’s recommendation to use bulk upload tools. In other words, almost all of the PPC companies allow you to import-export CSV files of your keywords. Use that feature. It will save you a lot of time.

And, of course, you want to set a daily budget. You should do that anyway. If you aren’t doing it on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN where you have your primary campaign running then you should start. A daily budget will help you manage your resources a lot more effectively.

2nd tier PPC networks can be a good source of new traffic, but it may not always be the best traffic. Track everything diligently and make wise decisions.

It’s easy for Pay Per Click advertisers to think that pay-per-click is the only effective method of advertising online. It’s so easy to track and you can analyze your results, but there are other methods of advertising online that work as well. Many of them may take longer, but they are still effective. Ideally, you will use more than one method online to advertise and drive traffic to your website or blog. Pay per click should be a part of your overall plan. These five methods of advertising should be used in conjunction with PPC to keep traffic flowing to your website.

1. SEO - Search engine optimization is still the most effective advertising online. You may not grab the top positions for your keywords quickly, but when you do rise to the top you will know the benefits are worth the time and effort you put in.
2. Article Marketing - Article marketing is old method of advertising or promoting a website. It’s been around a long time, and it still works.
3. Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is relatively new, but it’s free. It only costs your time. Like article marketing, it can be very effective with little investment.
4. Networking - Networking is still one of the most effective ways of advertising - even online.
5. Affiliate Marketing - If you are marketing a product or service, be sure to include in your pricing what you are willing to pay someone for helping you sell your product or service. Then start an affiliate program. This method of marketing is very effective and you can get other people to do your work for you.

That’s five ways you can advertise your business online outside of your Pay Per Click campaigns. That doesn’t mean you should abandon your PPC campaigns. You should keep them and add these online marketing methods to compliment and supplement what you are doing with Pay Per Click.