Interview with Greg Marsden
Hello all and welcome back to another issue of Working IT Out! Today’s issue is great! Greg Marsden from Smart Marketing has allowed me to pick his brain about PPC and the secrets to the success he has been having.
Now, you may not have heard of Greg or Smart Marketing yet. They are the unsung heroes behind countless successful PPC Campaigns. They’re out there getting it done.
Greg and his crew have had numerous success stories in direct marketing. They have experience managing campaigns that have generated well over 7.5 billion ad impressions and 23 million clicks to date (in some of the most competitive markets online).
They have the confidence and experience to develop wildly successful, self-capitalizing lead generation models for several different companies.
Now enough of my jibba, jabba – on with the show …
David: Greg, we’ve been working with your company for about four weeks now, and we’re impressed. Could you explain a little bit about yourselves and what unique skills you guys bring to the table?
Greg Mardsen: Well, I’ve been creating and managing paid search campaigns for about five years now and have been doing Internet marketing since 1997, so experience is a big part of our success. Most recently, I’ve focused on mastering Google AdWords marketing, and in the last two years alone I’ve generated and managed over 25 million Google AdWords leads for my clients. In that time, I’ve also had the freedom to experiment a lot and really boil down things to a system that works. And when you’re spending in the 25-30k a day range, you’d better know what you’re doing or you’ll go broke in a hurry.
I’ve also spent a lot of time studying direct response marketing and have recently teamed up with a professional copywriter since getting a click from an ad is only the first part of a successful campaign. Success or failure is always dependent on converting that click into something worth more than you paid for it on average, so we also look at the bigger picture when working with clients and advise them as to what can be done on their end to make the entire effort as successful as possible as well.
David: So if I’m new to the PPC game, what are some general principles I need to take into account?
Greg: First, don’t be fooled by how simple Google or the other search engines make it seem to get up and running. It’s true that anyone with a credit card and the ability to use a mouse can create a campaign and have traffic going to their site in minutes, but unless you invest some significant time learning what to do, you’re just going to pour money down the drain. People don’t just buy in at a poker game without learning the basics, but every day eager advertisers jump right in thinking they’ll make quick and easy money simply with more traffic to their site. It’s more competitive now than ever these days, so take the time to learn the game well before you get in, or it’ll hurt.
If you have done some homework and are ready to give it a shot, I’d stress that one of the biggest keys to success is being able to clearly distinguish what’s working and probably will work from what isn’t and not likely to. To do this, you need to break campaigns up into distinct units so you can adjust your strategy quickly based on how these units perform. Using smaller groups of closely related keywords, separating true search traffic from “content” traffic as well as separating broad vs. exact keyword match types are all ways you can group these units to see how they perform in comparison. If you can’t see a difference in performance you can’t adjust for it, so being able to see that clearly is critical. If everything you’re bidding on is all jumbled together, you’ll have a real hard time trying to get more of what’s working and getting rid of what’s not.
David: So let’s talk nuts and bolts … Can you give me a generic layout for a starting point of successful acquisition campaigns? For example, Google Ad -> Squeeze Page -> Sales Page …
Greg: That’s the basic formula, though often it works better to soften up your leads first with some free information via e-mail before you hit them up with a sales offer. One important thing to keep in mind is that the Google ad is the starting point and really the first line of your sales pitch, so it needs to be consistent with the copy of the squeeze page and sales page. It should hopefully set up people to be receptive to your headline. If the message of your ad conflicts with your headline on your landing page, your conversion rate will suffer, so keep that in mind when writing your Google ads. Try to keep the full conversion path in mind – ad to landing page to sales offer – so that each part of it fits well together.
David: What are some of the biggest mistakes people are making during acquisition campaigns?
Greg: Not knowing what a lead is truly worth is a big one. At the end of the day, there are two numbers that really matter – your average cost per click (CPC) and your average revenue per click (RPC). The revenue per click is what each lead is worth to you divided by the number of clicks it takes on average to get that lead. If a lead is worth $10 and it takes 20 clicks on average to get a lead your avg. revenue per click is $0.50. Pay more than $0.50 per click and you’re losing money every click!
If your goal is pure acquisition, you’ll want to get your bids up as close as possible to matching that number to maximize your traffic and increase the rate you can get leads. But it’s amazing how many people don’t figure out what that lead is really worth beforehand or leave it set in stone without reevaluating it after a time. If this is a brand new venture, you’ll have to make an educated guess, but you need to have a number to work with initially. Also, with Google’s stricter quality score and minimum bid requirements, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic if you’re stuck below the $0.50 cost per click point. So it’s even more important these days to not only truly know what you can afford to pay but to also get that number above that mark if possible and be able to bid on more popular terms.
Another big mistake is to not adjust your landing page to better match where your traffic is coming from. If 70% of your traffic is coming from one group of related terms, see what you can do to better target your message to those search terms. If there are two or three real strong but distinctly different groups of keywords making up your traffic, you can also use different landing pages for each. So be ready to adjust your message to the available traffic you can reach. Anytime you can increase your conversion rate with an acquisition campaign, it also means you can raise bids and get more traffic.
David: So different goals require a different PPC strategy … If your goal is acquisition, the concepts you discussed above make sense. But what if your goal is product sales? Or more commonly, what if you need a certain amount of immediate ROI to offset the costs of the campaign? What kind of strategy do you recommend for accomplishing a major goal of acquisition with a minor goal of immediate return?
Greg: It goes back to knowing clearly what those two key stats of avg. CPC and avg. RPC are and being able to make changes that will affect one or the other of those numbers. Then if you need to bring in more revenue initially, you can do things that will lower your CPC like reduce bids, eliminate poorer performing keywords or expand your good keywords to include more lower cost keywords that are still related but have less competition. It’s like being able to tune your engine to run for more efficiency (ROI) or more speed (more conversions). If you need to cover your costs more up front, you’ll need to make sure your avg. CPC is a fair bit lower than your RPC to start with. You should also make sure you have a follow-up sales offer that brings in a greater volume of smaller sales vs. a big “3 installments of $299” type offer so you can get more money in up front.
One thing to be careful of, though, when looking to get revenue up front with an acquisition campaign is trying to mix sales and lead generation on the same page. It’s almost always better to focus on one of the goals of sales or lead generation with your initial landing page or you can easily miss the mark for both. Get that lead and then hit them with a sales offer with the confirmation page or in a follow-up e-mail. The fact that you’re trying to sell them something right away could send a lot of potential sign-ups to your e-mail list running. If you want sales, don’t clutter up your page with a big offer for your e-mail subscription. Stay focused on one or the other initially.
David: Have you tried any of the other services that Ad Words offers, such as banner ads replacing text ads?
Greg: I have, but in my experience nothing else performs as well as text ads, so I stay pretty focused on those. AdWords Image ads are limited to sites that have dedicated spaces for them, and, if you target specific sites, you have to bid for impressions rather than clicks, which I’d avoid as well. It’s also much quicker and easier to test different ad variations with text vs. images so that’s another big advantage to working with text ads.
David: Do you recommend mirroring your successful Google Campaigns on Yahoo or MSN?
Greg: Yes, but after you’ve done most of what you can on the Google side. They are still both much more difficult to work with when it comes to getting keywords, ads and landing pages approved, so unless you’ve run out of ways to increase your Google efforts, often the time is better spent working on your AdWords campaigns. The volume of traffic you’ll get for your efforts is still much lower with Yahoo and MSN, so I tend to wait until I’ve really got a solid, mature AdWords campaign going before I replicate them to either Yahoo or MSN.
David: Do you recommend any third party tools, such as keyword generators, that are useful in addition to the toolset provided by Google?
Greg: Google’s tool is pretty decent now for beginners, but tools like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or ThemeZoom are really useful for expanding your lists once you have a good idea of what’s working and need to dig deeper. If you’re starting out, though, be careful not to think that just having massive lists of keywords will help. Often those tools will pull in a lot of junk terms that happen to have whatever your seed keyword is. If you start with “fat” for instance for a weight loss product, you’ll get a list that includes “fat albert” or “fat cat” etc. If the tool is uncensored, then you really need to watch out what you’ll get back, as you can imagine. So it’s better to use those tools to find all the variations of two or three word combinations that are more specific to your offer once you know the most obvious combination is working well.
Unfortunately, there’s still no substitute for human intelligence when it comes to keyword selection. You just have to be prepared to do the work of cleaning your lists with these tools. Watch out for double meanings, brand names, song titles, names of bands and celebrity names, too. I remember when I used to work for a major travel dot com and having to pull out the term “Paris Hilton” from our list in a hurry when her antics started. When broad matching keywords, remember to use negative keyword matches as well. If you’re bidding on “weight loss” broad matched, it will show your ad for the term “weight loss for dogs,” so you can include “-dogs” and “-cats” to stop your ads showing for any combination that includes the negative term.
David: Have you found any third party tracking tools that work better than the standard tracking that Ad Words provides?
Greg: The combination of AdWords conversion tracking with Google’s free analytics tracking is adequate to get going with, but it’s good to have a second opinion as well. I’m currently using Omniture, but it’s a little pricy unless you’re operating on a larger scale. Hypertracker is good for a more cost-effective solution for smaller operations.
David: Not everyone will be able to afford PPC consultants. Are there any cost-effective resources you would recommend to study up on PPC?
Greg: I’d highly recommend getting Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and getting on his free e-mail newsletter as a starting point. I’ve studied with him and have been a member of his mastermind group for quite some time now, and he does a great job of teaching it from the basics right through to the most advanced methods, as well as staying on top of all the changes in the game Google likes to throw at us. If you have already got some experience with AdWords and are looking to take your skills to the next level, he also offers a 12-week intensive “Bob-sled run” program which I’ve also done, and that’s a great way to really get to expand your skills and knowledge in a hurry. There’s one starting on Sept. 25th, so if that’s something that you’re interested in, you could get going right away.
David: Any other advice for us PPC beginners?
Greg: Like any worthwhile skill, PPC takes a significant amount of study and practice to get good at, so be prepared to put in the initial time and investment to do your homework before you dive in. If you don’t have the time to devote to learning it well, you’re probably better off leaving it to a professional. But if you’re pretty computer literate, decent with math and have relatively good writing skills, you can get the basics of it down pretty quickly and be successful with just a few weeks of time invested wisely. Try it on a small scale to start with and work on trying to apply some of the fundamental concepts well from the beginning, so that when you are ready to scale things out, it’ll be with good practices and methods already understood and in place.
Thanks, Greg. That was amazing. It was like getting a crash course on PPC!
Whew, I hope you guys learned as much from Greg as I did. I can’t wait to hear what you think.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Editor, Working IT Out
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
Want a massive increase of qualified traffic to your website? Greg can do it; he’s already generated over 7.5 billion ad impressions and 23 million clicks to date for his clients (in some of the most competitive markets online). Greg is the pay-per-click consultant of choice for us here at both The Total Package and for our clients at Response Ink. If you want an experienced PPC pro to help you generate profitable traffic to your website – visit Greg at http://www.gregmarsden.com/
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Comment by Dave Martin — April 16, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
This guy is a friggin’ genius!!
I oughta know, I work with him (is it ok to say that?