How I Cracked the PPC Code and Turned a Monthly $50,000 Advertising Budget Into $1 Million in Revenue
“Without good marketing a bucket of diamonds is just a bucket of rocks.”
-Ben Joven (Online Marketer, San Diego, CA)
Imagine your eccentric, deranged uncle that used to lick the eggnog bowl at Christmas died and left you with a paint bucket full of perfectly cut, flawless diamonds. You receive the bucket via FedEx and it’s sitting on your living room floor and you’re scratching your head asking yourself, “What the heck do I do with these rocks?”
Great question.
Rocks are rocks, unless you create value and launch an effective advertising campaign so you can dump these sparkling beauties for some cold hard cash.
So you do your research and you find an interesting ad platform called Google AdWords. You do the math, crunch the numbers analyze the market and research your competitors. You look at your blue-print of your campaign and you come to the conclusion that AdWords is the jackpot in advertising. It just seems too profitable to be true
Never before in the history of advertising has it been possible to spend $5 and in 10 minutes have 100 million eyes looking at your product, service of ad. Now here come’s along Google Adwords-the best thing to happen to advertising since the Super Bowl commercial.
Ad Copy, Emotional Intelligence and Cosmo
A potential client of mine came to me with a challenge. They were spending quite a bit on PPC every month, and it still seemed like a crap shoot to them. They were contemplating pulling the whole AdWords campaign because they were getting frustrated and had a lost of trust for a advertising that they did not understand.
I took a look at their Google AdWords account and it didn’t take long to find that their AdWords campaign had more leaks than the Iraqi Navy. I’m pretty sure that the went into this with a wad of advertising dollars, shooting from the hip blindfolded, and luckily I came around and did quite a bit of gentle hand holding. If you don’t want to make the same mistakes as my misguided but ambitious clients made I suggest you follow some of the tips:
- Find your customers gross net and use a ROI calculator to find out how many units or clients you’ll need to become profitable
- Utilize every free AdWords Tool on the web
- Use Google Editor
I made sure that i was armed with every tool in the book and after I researched our competitors it was only a matter of time before I turned this advertising budget 2000% profitable in a month.
The Genius of the Cosmo Magazine Cover
Good copy can sell magazines. Katherine Heigl on the cover doesn't hurt either.
Standing in line at your local grocery store may not be one of your favorite pastimes but-I on the other hand-have found ways to amuse myself. One of them is picking up the latest National Enquirer and trying not to laugh out loud at some of the some of the craziest stuff published in print.
I am also a big fan of some of the most genius ad copy to come around since the, “Got Milk” campaign kept cows busy around the globe.
Take a look at the cover of a Cosmo you will and you will be reading some of Madison Avenue’s finest scribes working hard at capturing the hearts and minds of the American Woman.
The copy on the cover of Cosmo is usually so lurid and risque that it borders ludicrous but there is a reason that they are the #18 most circulated publication.
The words on the cover of Cosmo is not only great copy for your text ads(about 30 or so characters a line) but they are also excellent examples of titles for your blog posts.
There is a certain element in the copy of Cosmo
that plays on the insecurities of your average female but I’m under the school of thought that you are what you buy and consume. So if you don’t like feeling fat don’t look at pictures of anorexic models.
Cosmo Copy Examples
Here are some example of Cosmo copy from the cover above:
Wow! Talk about marketing being about having emotional intelligence, this is a classic play on the emotion of fear. I’m not even a female and I want to pick up this magazine and skim though this particular article, I guess a blend of gross and sex is a magazine pusher.
Ah-ha! Ad copy such as this one above drives you to know what Cosmo knows, doesn’t it? Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, and Men’s Magazines like Maxim, Men’s Health have great examples of copy that could be used for a Google Adword’s campaign or any PPC campaign where you’re limited to the amount text available. When writing copy for Google Adword’s PPC campaign you have to first focus on who your clients are and how to have the most compelling conversation with your constitunency.
Secrets of Google Adwords Copy
“To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”
- Walt Whitman(American Poet)
Walt Whitman was right. If you have something to say, your words are just hot air without an audience. Luckily for us we have a new platform to voice an opinion, campaign, and service. With the Internet it allows you to find people with similar interests.
For a business there too many opportunities online to list, but in this article we’re going to focus PPC. Below is an example of the campaign that earned my client $1 Million US Dollars:
With an average 25% CTR on most of my PPC Campaigns it's not hard to win!
There are hundreds of factors that weigh into making a successful AdWords campaign, and there are many online marketers that have thrown away their advertising budget, frustrated because of the lack of return-on -investment.
As more advertiser’s and businesses jump online the PPC highway will become more and more congested with competitors trying to maximize their exposure. That’s why it’s very important that you have somebody managing your campaign aggressively and with precision.
The example above is a snapshot of the type of work you can expect from an PPC Manager who knows exactly what he’s doing. You should expect nothing less, but high CTR is not the end game, the landing page has to have strong call-to-action. My clients were taken aback by the amount of phone calls and buzz that this campaign was yielding, and we were extremely busy scrambling to build the better mouse trap so that we could maximize our PPC traffic into customers.
Copy here is very similar to Cosmo's magazine titles.
Here is an example of an ad that generated over $24k in revenue for the month of June alone. This is very aggressive copy, gunning for me clients main competitors and biggest rivals on the market. I specifically targeted a few heavy traffic key terms and received an average of 30% CTR on those key terms.
That means that any time someone would research a few specific key terms they were clicking on our ads 30% of the time. Was there click fraud? Yes I’m sure, but Google was kind enough to cut a check at the end of each month for any suspicious activity.
The Bottom Line
There are too many businesses throwing money away with their PPC campaign and getting a bad taste in their mouth from no ROI on their campaigns and it is crucial that you contact somebody-such as myself-to manage the campaign from the ground floor up.
There are changes to AdWords policy and the trends to what is effective is changing day to day, it is important to have a specialist, consultant, in-house online marketing person, etc., to handle this for you. Let them focus on the advertising so you can focus on what you’re going to do with all the profit.
Google is reproting close to 100% growth in searches, which is very impressive. They reported $5.541 Billion in revenue for the Quarter in September of 2008 so it’s going to be interesting if they can keep their “CTR” up.
