I'm building it right now But you can use the Google conversion tracking thingie to do it as well. Put the tracking script on you confirmation page. If you are a commerce site, make sure you pass it the sale amount. If you aren't you should still be able to assign a value to an actin, such as a sign up or whatever. Google will then track conversions cost for you. You, however, will have to take take the Google reports and do some back end calculation to figure out you Gross Margin and return on advertising spend (ROAS). Basically: GM = Sales - Advertising ROAS = Sales/Cost A/S Ration = Cost/Sales Before you go into PPC, or any other direct response advertising effort, you need to know how much profit you realize on each sales and how much a new customer is worht to you (life time value). If your average custoemr comes back and makes additional purchases, it might be worth it to take a loss on that first sale since you will make it up on additional sales later.
You mention this as a web application, are you going to have the members here help you test this? Will there be a charge to users once the bugs are worked out of it?
Very true but I'm a bit hesitant to pass that stuff to any 3d party, inc Google. Customer acquisition and I sometimes call a variation of it sale acquisition. Once you have enough data yuo can work out How much it costs to 'buy' a customer. Or how much to 'buy' a sale. Then indeed depending on your margins etc. yuo can choose to up or lower the spend until the curves join at the optimum. No rocket science but a lot of people don't seem to have a clue.
Hey Anthony- No idea on how I'm going to offer it yet. If will require 3 things to work: all clicks pass through a page on my site that grabs information then passes to whatever landing page you want on your site. Landing pages can be assigned by keyword. A tracking pixel on the confirmation page of your site to feed back final info on a per click basis, and cookies must be enabled on the customer's computer or it won't track, although I could set it to work with a session variable as well, but then I couldn't set it for much longer than an hour or so. The stopper here is horsepower. Let's say you have 100 keywords in Google and 50 in Overture. That's 150 rows of data a day, or 4500 a month. Not too bad. Now let's say there's 100 people running 150 keywords. Now I'm adding 450,000 rows a month. Yu can see how quickly the DB would grow, and if it takes 10 minutes to return reports becasue I don't have the horsepower to wade though a gajillion rows fof data, it's useless. So will if be free or for a fee? I don't know yet. It depends on how my hardware handles it and if there's any opportunity for ancillary income based around the tool, as Shawn has done here. When I get close, I will be lookiing for hepl to test it-
My site is 1 month old. I spend $10.00 a day. I use a tracking tool from roi-tracking-pro.com which is inexpensive and sufficient enough for a small site.
It is pretty nice tool, but I'm always open for suggestions and like to try other tools. Because relying on only one tool is not a healthy process for my sites. I have determined that most tools do not always give accurate results. I have never been able to put two different tools up against one another and arrive at the exact same results, so I usually use various tools and derive at a census from the collaboration of tools to get better results. But roi-tracking-pro is a primary tool I use for click-throughs (ppc/banner/etc.), keyword research, and roi.
surpise surprise Adowrds doens't convert. It is all hype driven by adwords ebook marketers. How many times have you clicked on a banner ad and actually bought something? My point exactly.
If I need something I have. As a matter of fact, I am probably 7 for 7 through AdSense. You have to remember, we are all a bunch of AdSense subscribers who are trained to look away from AdSense unless: a) it is on our site b) we see a unique way of displaying ads c) we catch someone doing something wrong. Otherwise, a quick glance and adios, UNLESS I need something and have found a site who has ads that serve quality products or services...
I'm managing over $65K a month in spend; I use an in house system to track conversions and cost down to the keyword level, and I can tell you absolutely positively that AdWords ads do convert and do make their advertisers money. It's far from 'hype'. I will extend, however, that not one of the accounts I manage has AdSense enabled. The few experiments I tried with AdSense tripled conversion costs, so in my opinion, at least with my clients, AdSense doesn't work.
Adwords converts for me, but of course I have free signups...so all I need to do is get targeted traffic to my site and the rest is history. But, if you have other alternatives that convert well, besides Adwords, Overture, Looksmart, FindWhat, Kanoodle, or 7Search then please share. I like trying new platforms. I have noticed that click fraud seems to be up on all the mentioned platforms. My CTR is higher but my conversion rate has zero change...its still stablized. Whomever, defeats the click fraud first, will be the platform on top...so far I think Overture may be winning that race, but they haven't defeated it yet. I have been considering Quiqo, Casale, BidVertiser, AzoogleAds, and others. Anyone have any experience with any of these or similar? Do any of these provide better results than the mentioned above? I had used clicksor for publishing ads, but didn't like it much. There was another platform which published ads the same as clicksor (within the site content)...I can't remeber the name of the site...I thought it was TargetPoint, but when I went there I couldn't find anything ....does someone know the advertising site I speak of?
Someone sent me a PM asking for pointers, but I thought I'd posted it here as well for all: The most important thing is tracking. I'm a Search Engine Marketing Manager for a direct marketing company and we use our own software. What we do is drive the clicks through one of our pages to record all the info, then we also have a tracking script on the order confirmation page of our clients that tie back into our system. This gives us the capability to track conversions down to the keyword level, and that's what you need to do to be successfull. In order to do that you need essentially 2 things: you need to know the keyword and you need to know the value of the sale or signup. Google has a tracking script you can use that will allow you to track keyword level conversions. You'll have to do a tiny bit of tinkering with their script to get it to grab sales amounts or hard code your sign-up value. Once you know impressions, clicks, keywords, and sales you'll be able to figure out your cost per conversion and return on advertising spend. From that you can determine which words are working and which aren't and adjust your bids accordingly. It's ESSENTIAL that you have a target to work toward. You're client needs to understand how much gross margin they have on each sale and how valuable a customer is over the long haul. They need to be able tell you "We want to acheive a $5 per conversion cost." If they can't tell you a target, then they need to understand more about themselves before they do PPC. PPC is a numbers game. Typical click through rates run about 2-5 percent, and sales rates off that also run 2-5 percent, sometimes even less. As an example, let's say your client sells Widgets for $10. They have a 100% markup which means they buy each widget for $5. That's gives them a $5 gross margin (GM) on each widget they sell. That means they would need to achieve a cost per conversion of $5 or less or they are losing money. With a 5% conversion rate, that means they will make 1 sale for every 20 clicks. So the max cost per click they could pay and not lose money would be $5/20 =.25 click. If they told you they wanted a cost per conversion of $4 because they wanted to make $1 on each sale, then it would be $4/20=.20 per click. So in setting up you campaign, you'd go out the gate with a .20 per click cost and see what happens. Then, based on your keyword tracking, you would see what keywords work and what don't. Keywords that have a greater than 5% conversion could be bid up, while those words that had less could be bid down, all while you work toward that $4 cost per conversion goal. This is a single sale scenario that doesn't take into account lifetime value. Let's say they know that the average new customer will comes back 1 time in the following year to buy another widget. That means that first sale really has a margin of $10, because they know the person will come back and buy another before 12 months has passed. That means you really have more than $5 to work with. You really have $10. So if, at the end of the year, they want to have made $1 off that new customer, then you can work toward a target of $9 cost per conversion or less, which means you can bid more. If they are a new company with no customer history, they will only be able to work off the initial sale, but experienced marketers should still be able to make a guess as to the lifetime value to give you the numbers you need.
I have a budget of 10,000CDN a month but am having trouble actually spending it I prefer adwords over overture but their system makes it really hard for someone to get good placement in a really saturated market like pharma. Still working on it though
Agreed, Nice Post! PPC is definitely a price game that can easily be learned and mastered to save where possible. I am constantly testing my accounts and can't stress that enough. TEST TEST TEST, and TRACK TRACK TRACK. Find to the penny where you are spending, and what is and isn't converting. From there trim the fat and only keep the winning campaigns I have been doing this for clients for a long time now and have mastered my craft well KG
Thats sounds great guru, but I can tell you 10 stories of people who have had terrible, horrible, ghastly results with adwords. If you look at adwords in term of phychology a click is simply an impulse. A buy tends to be a calculated decision. You can see how the two would conflict. Even $5/day can add up. In a a lot 9-5 job thats 30 minutes of hard work. Or about 150 bucks a month. Ouch! Why not just send that 150 to the DNC or RNC. Im sure they would find better ways to spend that money. And don't fall for the .05 cent minimum bid gimmick. A .05 cent bid ensures your ad won't be seen by the human race...except yourself when you go looking for it to confirm that it is infact listed (on page 13 no doubt ) Adwords LINGO: (a lot of poester here tend to use vague lingo. I will translate.) still working on it= losing money mastered= Really difficult; if not impossible for most people adwords tracking= a sophisticated method for determining how your money is being syphoned from your bank account into google's account 5% clickthrough rate= and elephants can fly experiment=money lost