PPC Software - The 7 Must - Haves
When you use pay per click advertising, do you generate profits for yourself, or do you just add to Google’s ever increasing bottom line ?
At dawn (sometimes before), across the world many thousands leave their beds, do they dress first, perhaps visit the bathroom, no they head for their PC’s. First the Google home page, then ‘advertising programs’, followed by ‘Google Adwords’, followed by a groan as once again the sales column is empty and the ‘cost’ one full !
In many cases they may as well be checking national lottery numbers because they are gambling much more so than they realise. The days of the enthusiastic amateur are numbered, as far as PPC is concerned, these days you need to be much better organized. I would love to know what percentage of total ppc advertising spend produced profit for those spending it in the first place but I would be surprised if it’s more than 10%, after all it is estimated that 90% of all internet businesses fail within three months !
You will find, on my website and across the web, articles where I have gone into, in detail, keyword list creation and how to compose the ads themselves, but no room for that here. All I will refer back to is my belief in starting with large numbers of keywords and ads but remember, don’t even think about bidding on them all ! The best way, I have discovered, is to have a very large campaign loaded into Google Adwords but only have a fairly small (perhaps a couple of hundred) ‘live’ at any one time, cutting out the unsuccessful and replacing them with more from your ‘paused’ list.
To give a real life example, I recently put up a campaign consisting of more than 4,000 ad groups, with only 200 of them appearing on the web, as keywords failed to perform they were deleted and another from the main list taking their place. Once up there, these large campaigns are, for reasons we don’t have time to go into here, easier to manage but that poses the question is ‘is it possible to put together such a campaign in less than a week ?’
It can’t be done manually, if you don’t want to scramble your brain, the only answer is PPC software that can cope with the whole operation. I then set out to find if software existed that would do everything I (a hopeless techie) needed it to.
After a lot of research it came down to two outstanding examples of PPC software, both of which fulfilled my wish list.
1. Handle keyword lists of any size.
2. Give every single keyword some sort of tracking code so I could figure out which produced sales and which should be ditched.
3. Could place two versions of an ad within every ad group so that I could see which performed best.
4. Make the keyword, where possible, the headline of the ad.
5. Where the keyword was longer than Google’s maximum of 25 characters, substitute a default headline, automatically, that had been prepared in advance.
6. ‘Explode’ the whole campaign so that it could be loaded directly into Google’s Adwords Editor in minutes without any fuss.
7. Very clear tutorials and an excellent help desk
For me a very important factor was, and still is, cost, one at $147 and one at $399 but, of course, no good going for the less expensive one only to find it wasn’t up to the job.
With some concern I went for the cheaper one, after all it did have a thirty day guarantee and the people involved with it had a very good reputation. I used Ad Grenade once and was hooked, it worked beautifully and for someone as technically challenged as me that’s saying a lot.
Making real money online when PPC advertising is used can only be achieved by tightly controlling large campaigns and that can only be realized by adding top quality PPC software to the mix. As someone who uses Ad Grenade for all my campaigns and can’t imagine how I could manage without it, I urge you to, at the very least, watch a demonstration of it in action.
Tagged with: Pay Per Click
Filed under: Pay Per Click
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