Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

You need to research keywords that will bring in traffic yet cost you .05 cents a click. Couple that with a landing page which is designed to convert and well there you have it. If you need help with this I can offer my services for trade. The last PPC campaign I managed converted very well.

Start by first improving your conversion rate.

For your organic searches: make sure that you've got your site well keyword optimized. For example, on your site have the alternate spelling of "jewelry" (not just jewellery). You've done good work getting backlinks.

You can get cheaper links if you do your PPC campaign targeting a country other than the U.S. For example, I noticed that your site has free shipping to U.K. It would be a natural to start your campaign for them, and see what clicks cost. It'll save you money and build your experience.

As Jay says try to get a better conversion rate. Better targeting, ease of use, and landing pages could help.

Reduce the cost per click. Not sure you can get to $.05, but using Yahoo you might get to .10 0r .15. and Google, if you can get traffic with lower cost key words.

You might try service such as Social Diva www.socialdiva.com who have newsletters going out. This is all women so it could work.

Also, I think you have to start looking at a customer in terms of more than one sale. It is possible the same person will make additional purchases on your site during a one year period. So what might have been a $60 sale could be an annual value of $180 or more. And if you give them a reason these customers could tell their friends and family which will help generate additional revenue.

I would recommend you explore non-web advertising mediums. Magazines for one.

Hey Paul

Unfortunately, the only way to succeed with AdWords is to spend a lot of time and effort getting it set up right.

Google gives your ads a 'quality score', which they determine based on how well your keywords relate to your landing page and your ad content. If you have a good quality score you can pay less for a higher position than someone with a lower score will pay for a lower position. That helps a lot.

(Note: a landing page in this conversation refers to the page that someone would get to when clicking on your ad - it can be your home page or a particular product page or a specialized page that you wrote just for this purpose.)

To raise your quality score you need to optimize a landing page for your keywords. You can do this by creating a custom landing page that matches your keywords and is, effectively, an 'entry' page into your site, or you can target keywords that are already on that page.

For the entry page method, make your keyword appear in the page title, page URL (i.e. handbags.html), and at least three times in the text.

To target the keywords that are already on that page is really cool because it's how you get those famed $0.05 clicks. What you do is target the less-searched, but more specific, phrases, such as 'gold trimmed handbag' or 'big capacity handbag' - the words that are already in your item description.

The value of this method, which is known as the 'long tail' of search, is that these searchers are more likely to make a purchase if you can answer their query. For example, someone searching on the phrase 'handbags' is likely to be browsing, not ready to purchase yet and likely to look at lots of sites during their visit. But someone who is looking for 'brown leather six pocket handbag' is going to be ready to buy when they find it.

The downside of this is that it takes more effort and set up from you - you'll need to uncover all of those keywords and then go and build your AdWords campaign (download the Google AdWords Editor to make this MUCH easier) and make sure that those keywords go to the right product page (you can set the landing page by keyword, to make sure that each keyword lands on the right product page on your site).

The upside is that these phrases are much less competitive and therefore much cheaper. Paying less for a higher-converting visitor is a better proposition, don't you think?

It's a pain in the arse, but it's the way to make it work. I do this for my clients and get them more clicks from within their budget at higher conversion rates than they get by themselves. I also manage their campaigns on a daily basis - I adjust their bids by around 10% each day, up or down depending on performance - to make sure that they are never paying too much. Some keywords don't need to be at your max daily bid to get good results and others do - the value you to you is that every penny you don't spend unnecessarily will bring you an extra click on another keyword!

Don't get bogged down in the conversion rate per keyword (unless you're someone like me that lives and breathes this stuff) - look at your overall budget versus profit. For every $10 you spend on AdWords you want to be making $100 in profit. Or, perhaps in your industry it's $25/$100 and you have to do more business to make it worthwhile.

You need to make sure that you are up overall.

Of course, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't suggest you call me and let me take care of this for you. Part of my value proposition is that the fees that you will pay me are still part of the profit consideration - perhaps for every $100 profit you make your PPC campaign now costs you $15, including my fees.

https://www.sterling-advertising.com.

Good luck, and feel free to contact me if I can help you understand this better.