Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Millions compete for exposure on Google and Bing but 99% of them fail to get results.

As the founder of leading digital intelligence firm AdGooroo, search advertising authority Richard Stokes is in a unique position to reveal what’s going wrong and provide solutions to fix it.

Using proven strategies from today’s search advertising elite, discover how to drive significantly more traffic to your site, dramatically increase click-through rates, steal impressions from competitors, boost your conversions, and increase your sales by unbelievable amounts.

Since the previous edition, there have been a number of revolutionary changes in paid search. First, we are increasingly searching from our cell phones rather than desktop computers. Second, Google is no longer the only game in town. Bing now accounts for 30 percent of all U.S. searches. Finally, "search extensions" have become a powerful new technique you can use to collect phone numbers and email addresses with your ads, limit your ads to certain times of day, deliver coupons to nearby customers, and even provide handy "call me" buttons that are displayed only on cell phones. In this new edition, Stokes details all this and more.

Richard Stokes is the founder and CEO of AdGooroo, a Kantar Media company and leading provider of digital marketing intelligence. One of the industry’s foremost authorities on search engine marketing, Richard is a regular speaker on search topics and a certified expert in both email marketing and conversion optimization. He lives in Glenview, IL.

The Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising 1
Book Summary 2
Praise for “The Ultimate Guide To Pay-Per-Click Advertising” 3
About the Author 5
About AdGooroo 5
Legal Notes 5
Best Practices in Paid Search 6
Foreword To The Second Edition By Perry Marshall 19
Preface To The Second Edition 22
Acknowledgements 26

Chapter 1. 99% of Advertisers Are Failing At Paid Search 27
A Few Advertisers In Every Country Dominate Paid Search 27
Virtually Every Business Category Is “Owned” By A Few Advertisers 29

Chapter 2. The Foundation of Successful Paid Search Campaigns 33

Chapter 3. Your Marketing Will Fail without Tracking 36
What Website Analytics Will Tell You 37
Learning More About Analytics 38

Chapter 4. The First Requirement For A Profitable Paid Search Campaign 39
A Better Way to Measure Website Profitability 40
Sometimes Conversion Optimization Isn’t Critical 43

Chapter 5. Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Right For You? 44
PPC Works for Direct Response Marketers and Online Retailers 44
PPC Works for Brand Advertisers 45
Why PPC May Not Work For You 46
When Google AdWords is the least effective way to reach your target customer 48

Chapter 6. What If You Already Have a Great SEO Campaign? 54
PPC Visitors Come From A Different Demographic 54
PPC Campaigns Get Faster Results 54
PPC Provides You With Traffic Diversification 55

Chapter 7. The Water Is Always Rising in Search 57
Paranoia Is Justified: Your Competitors Are Really Out to Get You 58

Chapter 8. The $100 Bidding Myth 60
The “$100 Bidding Myth” 64
Almost Every AdWords Advertiser Is Being Throttled 65

Chapter 9. The Little-Known Metric That Can Increase Your Search Traffic 400% 66
Low Coverage = Lost Opportunities 67
Low Coverage Means You Are Overpaying for Traffic 69
Win the Battle at the Bottom of the Page Before You Fight For the Top 71
Coverage Problems Alert You to Campaign Problems 72
Troubleshooting Coverage Problems 73
How to Monitor Coverage 76
Impression Share 77

Chapter 10. Clickthrough Rates Explained 80
Why Is Clickthrough Rate So Important? 80
The Difficulty in Estimating Clickthrough Rate 81
Branded and Navigational Terms 83
The Position of Your Ads 84
Similarity Between Ad Copy and Keyword Phrase 87
Overall Competitiveness of the Keyword Phrase 89
Other Quality Score Issues 92

Chapter 11. The Ever Changing CPC Formula 93
The Evolution of Pay-Per-Click 93
Advertisers Go Gaga for Google 97
Today’s AdWords Pricing Algorithm 98
Budget and Average CPC Prices 100
Simulating CPC Using Computer Models 101
Key Concept: Avoid Gladiator Bidding 108
Summary Of Key Concepts 112

Chapter 12. How Quality Score Works in 2014 114
What Are Quality Scores? 115
Why Is Quality Score Important? 115
History of the Quality Score Algorithm 115
The Official Explanation of the AdWords Quality Score 118
Landing Page CTR 120
Do Landing Page Quality Score Factors Matter Anymore? 121
Best Practice: Managing Quality Scores 123
How to Check Your Quality Scores 124
Limitations of AdWords Quality Score Reporting 124
Best Practice: Monitor For Missing Keywords 126
Quality Score On Bing Ads 126
Bing Quality Score Components 127
How Bing Ads Brings It Together To Calculate Quality Score 128
Recommendations For Managing Quality Score On Bing 129
Absolute vs. Relative Quality Score 130

Chapter 13. How Do Shoppers Shop? 131
The Six Types of Online Buyers 133
What These Groups Have In Common 135
Takeaways For Paid Search Marketers 136

Chapter 14. How Do Searchers Search? 138
The Visitor Intention Model 138
Identifying Your Visitors’ Purchase Intention 143
The Brand Ladder 144

Chapter 15. How To Increase Your Clickthrough Rate By Nearly 50% With Search Refinements 150
Multiple Impressions Leads To Higher Clickthrough Rate 151
A Real-World Example 152
Think About Search Refinements When Creating Your Campaign 156

Chapter 16. Building Your Keyword List 158
H2 The Four Most Common Keyword Research Mistakes 158
H3 Quantity Is Important ... to a Point 160
Start With Broad Keywords, Then Expand Into Niche Terms 162
To Come Up With Keywords, Think Like Your Customers 162
A Step-By-Step Guide to Keyword Generation 163
Summary 180

Chapter 17. How to Plan A Paid Search Campaign 182
Two Common Campaign Setup Mistakes 182
Start by Categorizing Your Keywords 183
The Advantages of Planning Ahead 186
Don’t Create Arbitrary Ad Groups 189

Chapter 18. Cut Campaign Waste with Keyword Matching 190
Google and Bing Match Types 190
H2 Advanced Negative Matching 193
Which Match Types Should You Use? 195
A Simple Refinement to your Spreadsheet That Will Save You Hours of Work 196

Chapter 19. Create Your Ad Groups 198
What About Ad Copy? 199
Use A Desktop Editor To Manage Your Campaigns 199
Your Campaign Will Continue to Evolve Over Time 200
The “Peel & Stick” Technique Explained 200

Chapter 20. The Art and Science of Setting Bids 207
What About Bidding Tools? 207
Figuring out how much to bid 208
Upward Sloping CPC Curves 211
Downward Sloping CPC Curve 213
Irregular CPC Curves 221
Average Position and Conversion Rates 228
Summary 232

Chapter 21. Drag Visitors to Your Site with Killer Ad Copy 233
Write Your Ads to Mirror Your Visitors’ Intention 234
Write Ads Which Mirror The Organic Search Results 236
Ten Quick Techniques To Increase Your Clickthrough Rates 236
Seven Approaches To Writing Better Ads 242
Nine Ways to Write Terrible Ads 245
A Note About Dynamic Keyword Insertion 246
Paint a Bulls Eye on Your Ads 249
“Borrow” the Best Ads 254
Split-testing 263

Chapter 22. Landing Page Design 266
Optimization Goals 266
The Eight-Fold Path to Conversion Nirvana 267
A Real-World Conversion Optimization Example 303

Chapter 23. Monitoring Your Campaign Performance 310
Why it’s Important to Stay on Top of Your Campaign Data 310
Key Statistics to Watch 311
How to Use Impression Share 314
Don’t Blow It Off! 320

Chapter 24. Put the Competition to Work for You 323
Prioritize Otimization Efforts 323
Peek Into Competitors’ Business Models 324
Benchmark Against The Competition 325
Plan New Campaigns 327
A Good Estimate Is Hard To Find 328
Estimating Search Volume 331
Estimating Impressions 332
Estimating Clickthrough Rate (CTR) 333
Estimating Cost-Per-Click (CPC) 333
Estimating Conversion Rate and Order Size 334
Estimating Competitors’ Traffic 335
Other Uses 335
Third-Party Tools 335
Limitations of panel data 340
Summary 341

Chapter 25. Don’t Starve Your Campaign 342
How to Set Your Maximum Daily Budget 342
How the Maximum Daily Budget Feature Works 343
Would You Let a Stranger Run Your Marketing? 343
Missing Out on High-Traffic Periods 345
Diverting Your Budget to Low-Profit Keywords 346
Summary 348

Chapter 26. Don’t Blindly Trust the Search Engines 349

Chapter 27. Open All Night (Day Parting) 352
The Demographic Marketers 352
The Cost Cutters 353
Dayparting Ignores “Assists” 354
Dayparting Doesn’t Cut Costs As Much As You Think 354
Dayparting Helps Your Competitors 355
Dayparting Adds Management Overhead 355
But Sometimes Dayparting Works... 356
Summary 357

Chapter 28. Product Listing Ads 358
A History of PLAs 359
Who Should Use PLAs? 360
Targeting Options For PLAs 363
Why manually target specific keywords for PLAs? 364
Anecdotal Research 365

Chapter 29. Mobile Search and Enhanced Campaigns 367
Does Mobile Search Really Matter? 367
Will Mobile Search Overtake Desktop Search? 373
So Should You Care About Mobile Search? 377
Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns 378
Enhanced Campaign Settings 379
How Bid Modifiers Work 383
The Downside of Bid Modifiers 384
Mobile Ads on Bing 385
Comparing Mobile Ads on Google And Bing 386
Mobile Advertising Recommendations 387