As long as I’ve been pay-per-clicking I’ve never been able to turn a profit advertising on Google Adwords content network. My search ads have a great ROI, and the content ads produce triple the revenue of the search ads but the expense is more than the revenue. I’m pretty sure this is the result of “push advertising” concept that is the Google content network. The network brings in tire kickers rather than buyers.

So I called in the big guns to help me figure out the problem. George (Werty) Kepnick, the pay per click prodigy, gave me this advice:

Well Google now allows you to have both a content and search prices. I
would suggest tracking the content vs search network and measure the
ROI on either. just start low on the content side and work your way
up.

Throw this in your add url:

{ifsearch:googlesearch-}{ifcontent:googlecontent-}{keyword} (more info)

It will tag your url as googlecontent-key_word which should then allow
you to track things based on that.

Hopefully, I can get this Contextual PPC going because I know I’m leaving a fortune on the table. Anybody else have any good tips?

Update: Werty also informed me, “It would make more sense to run [the campaign] at a loss probably and work your way down to the ’sweet spot’. If you go the other way you may never reach the ’sweet spot’ due to lack of exposure.”

I can build traffic to a site much quicker with several thousand PPC keywords than by trying to get content ranked organically. In setting up some of these few thousand word PPC campaigns, I stumbled across a great stratagem for organic keyword targeting for both e-comm and affiliate sites. Rather than relying on a questionable keyword tool to find keywords that I actually want to organically rank for, I can merely look at my highest converting Adwords keywords through my analytics package.

By using keyword tools you may be able to hash out some great keywords that you build some content around… only to find out that that traffic isn’t converting. On the other hand, by actually testing out the keywords first in PPC you’ll get a good idea of not only what kind of traffic that term brings, but also how well it converts.

Like I said, you may already have thousands of PPC keywords for your site. Words that you never thought of trying to get ranked organically, but kick butt on PPC. You may want to take those words and make some content around them (assuming you have some ranking power in the major search engines) to capture that FREE traffic.

Not using an analytics program to track your Pay-Per-Click (sometimes referred to as Cost-Per-Click) campaigns is like trying to find a black dog at night, so to speak.

I recently did a consult for a company that was spending a significant amount of money (for a small company) with Google Adwords. They showed me their keywords list, which was fairly extensive, but they had no way of tracking conversions.

I’m here to tell you this is an absolute killer. Most people that do this usually end up giving up on PPC because they can’t get it to make money.

I prefer to use Google Analytics to track my campaigns mostly because its free, and it automatically tracks all your Adwords cost and ROI (return-on-investment) data. There are some others out there though. My tin-foil-hat friend is of the theory that Google might just use this data to increase your bid amounts. In other words, he doesn’t want the fox guarding the hen house. I haven’t seen any indication of this, so I use Google Analytics for now, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled.

If you’re not tracking your PPC campaigns you could have a keyword that is costing you a huge percent of your spend without any return. Most analytics programs allow you to drill down to specific keywords and tell you what the cost is and what the return is. This not only allows you to kill the keywords that are bleeding money, but also allows you to refine and A/B test ads to increase your ROI significantly. Look into implementing some sort of PPC tracking soon, because I guarantee you that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

In the coming weeks I’ll give all you affiliate marketers some tips on what you can do to set up analytics to track your ROI, since the sale doesn’t actually take place on your own site.