SpeedPPC

New Site Just Launched!

mike.lowe — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:57:33 +0000

Welcome

We’ve just launched this new website and we’re glad to welcome you as one of our very first visitors.

We need your help. If you happen to spot something that doesn’t look quite right or if you come across a broken link or the like, would you kindly help us by
letting us know and we’ll sort it out pronto.

Thank you for visiting and welcome to SpeedPPC.

Customers Speak – Part 1

mike.lowe — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:10:22 +0000

The SpeedPPC community is made up of people from different walks of life, living in different parts of the world, who do a variety of different things online. Amongst all the differences the commonality is a great love for SpeedPPC. This is because it’s changed what was once a boring process called ‘normal PPC campaign building’ forever!

It’s great to hear from our end users who work the coal face mining for increased profits using our suite of tools.

As you read this series you’ll gain insight regarding the ins and outs of how and why they use SpeedPPC.

In part one Scott Clark who manages several million dollars in PPC spend says he couldn’t do without productivity tools like SpeedPPC. This is a great read for those of you who are dealing in big dollars and need to rely on the advanced functionality that SpeedPPC also provides. Enjoy!

“I am a PPC turnaround artist. The tools in my bag include SpeedPPC, and I cannot even remember how I managed large campaigns without it. I use it in three main ways:

First is in the creation of long-tail keyword sets. These take control away from Google and put it back in my clients’ court. We take the time to run through server logs, keyword research tools, and our own experience with search behaviors and build a sort of root phrase spreadsheet. In the end, the keyword list is quite long, but now a controlled variable upon which we can build ad text, landing page, and analytics strategy.

The second way we use SpeedPPC is to improve use of dynamic keyword insertion. DKI done properly is not always easy – but has a dramatic improvement on clickthrough rates (CTR) if you get it right. Allowing Google to do DKI on ads with anything but exact match can be dangerous and produce unwanted ad text. SpeedPPC makes it easy to quickly set up all match types and still keep control over the ad text output.

The third and final use for SpeedPPC is in communication with landing pages. By using page parameters and some clever parsing we can take in long-tail campaigns and produce highly optimized landing page experiences for searchers without having unwanted or embarrassing text inserted on the landing page.

Results

For campaigns where I took over management for a new client, improvements in clickthrough rates of 300-400% conversion rate improvements of 50%-100% on lead generation campaigns are definitely doable in as little as 2 months while reducing lead costs by as much as half.

For many B2B companies, this adds up to tens of thousands of dollars per month saved and a busy sales staff! Once these clients see what is possible in tweaking ad text and landing pages, lots of gears start turning in their heads about promotional and cross-sell techniques.

For regional PPC (like franchise sales) I use SpeedPPC to build campaigns to catch “local qualifiers” in search and transfer city or state information to the ad text and landing pages helps us to account for the “other half” of geotargeted campaigns we cannot capture using the search engines’ targeting tools.

So many clients are letting Google do the matching for them, not using DKI, and sending searchers to generic landing pages. These techniques hurt quality score, reduce click through rate, and drop conversion rates even when the client thinks they have a well organized Google Adwords campaign.

Favorite Features

Integration with Google Adwords offline Editor.
Ability to “copy” ads, which promotes split testing.
Ability to do “two levels” of dynamic keyword insertion
Ability to easily tweak destination URL parameters.

SpeedPPC’s value

I would consider it the second most important tool in my PPC toolbox, right after Google Adwords’ offline editor. It has paid for itself dozens of times over.

Why I wouldn’t attempt PPC marketing without it

I manage several million dollars in PPC spend all by myself. I could not do that without having productivity tools like this.

I also specialize in highly competitive markets (CPC as high as $28) like franchise lead generation, credit card sales, and business finance. More often than not, I am called to take over campaigns managed by others who have not achieved the results the client hoped for. My forte is turning these campaigns around and SpeedPPC is very important in that regard.”

Customers Speak – Part 2

mike.lowe — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:19:19 +0000

People often say that PPC is too expensive. Well, for some it’s true.

Many guzzle through their ad budget like there’s no tomorrow with little, if any return.

But a little applied knowledge can make a major difference.

In part two of this series, Blase Des Marais tells in his own words how he built a SpeedPPC campaign for a client that generated thousands of dollars in sales for less than $40 with Google Adwords.

Sounds too good to be true? You be the judge.

“This Stuff Really Works!” That’s what a client of mine said 24 hours after I launched his adwords campaign using Speed PPC.

Here’s the story, I do any number of things for small business clients. One of my clients wanted to use Adwords.

I know enough to get by, but I don’t do a lot of Adwords advertising and I have never done it for a client. I always felt it was to risky spending their money on something that I wasn’t really good at.

Well this client was asking for a massive amount of work to be done and he insisted that I was going to do it for him.

He had almost 1000 part numbers from 18 different manufactures that he wanted to list in Adwords. I knew right away this wasn’t a job I wanted to do by hand.

He also wanted the visitor to be at his sales page for the exact product he was searching for in two clicks.

Which makes sense, but man that’s a lot of work I thought.

I had read about Speed PPC before and I thought it would be perfect. I also priced the work for this client to include my cost for Speed PPC.

I read the manual and started playing with it. Once I started messing around I could see the power, potential and the huge amount of time I was going to save. It was pretty straightforward. I had a few questions and the team always responded back with an answer on the Speed PPC forum very quickly.

I built a landing page using some very simple PHP, which was well explained in the training. Loaded up Speed PPC and put everything on Google adwords. Since then I have built him even more targeted landing pages using the same simply PHP code.

With in 24 hours the client was on the phone at 7:00 am! He was so excited all he could say was, “This Stuff Really Works!” He had already gotten two orders from his store.

He now has 18 campaigns, 1000 keywords, 2000 ad groups, 4000 ads, and 18 landing pages for his product line. He is paying .07 per click because his quality score is very high.

This client has sold thousands of dollars worth of product and has paid Google less than $40!

He’s a happy guy and so am I, plus my confidence in using Adwords has gone way up thanks to Speed PPC and the team.”

Customers Speak – Part 3

mike.lowe — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:40:33 +0000

For those of you who manage PPC campaigns for clients you’re probably already aware of how difficult it can be to create improvements and increased profitability in already successful campaigns.

Regardless, most clients demand it… More profits for less and they’re always on the outlook for someone who can deliver.

In this interesting read you’ll discover how Jamie achieved these aims fairly effortlessly as he shares some great ideas that may be of assistance to you.

“Since starting with SpeedPPC 6 months ago my business has changed dramatically. I have now made this a permanent part of any new campaign’s setup process meaning that I can now offer my clients more bang for their buck with more targeted and qualified campaigns, ad groups and advertisements. This has also allowed me to start charging more money for the setup of campaigns due to the improvements in the service I can offer without spending much more time implementing this.

My goals for using SpeedPPC were quite simple:

Reduce the amount of time spent setting up campaigns
Improve clients accounts
Increase my profits
Have more time to provide great customer service to my clients.

I feel that I have now achieved all of these goals and much quicker than I ever thought that I would. I genuinely feel that not only have I benefited from using this software but so have my clients which makes for a very successful-long term relationship.

For my existing clients I have been able to wow them with the improved results that SpeedPPC has produced. For example, I used it for a client of mine and ended up creating over 200 new ad groups within a matter of minutes. The CTR increased from 1.5% to over 3% in the first day while the cost per click fell by over 20%. It was very pleasing to see how happy the clients were with this increased performance. As many agencies probably know AdWords can be hard to continue to grow and improve once a client has been with you for a while.

Another client of mine had a retail website that sold 100’s of different products. Normally I would have had to create individual campaigns and ad groups manually taking me days. Using SpeedPPC I was able to setup this account in only a few hours which saved me a lot of stress and reduced my workload quite significantly (not to mention increasing my profits for the setup of that account too!) This account is now enjoying a great quality score with high CTR’s and lower than average CPC’s and I expect that client to stick with me for a long time.

Since that day when I purchased SpeedPPC I have never looked back and don’t think that I will ever go back to the ‘old’ way of using Google AdWords. I mean why would I when me and my clients are happier than ever.”

How to get 10,000 visits for just $700.00

mike.lowe — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:29:57 +0000

Looking for champagne results on a beer budget?

This is a great way to drive massive, highly relevant PPC traffic without the normal associated price tag.

When the adwords system was first introduced back in 2000, pay per click (PPC) marketing was in its infancy.

This meant that it didn’t require a big budget or too much know how or creativity to enjoy good ROI.

Back then you could bid on generic keywords such as "bicycle", "notebook" or "credit card" and with a simple ad and landing page, good profits would start to flow.

Today, a decade later, the industry has come of age and with this growth has come the growth of cost per click.

Nowadays, competitive keywords can be costly. Check out the average Adwords CPC on these phrases:

school loan consolidation $69.16
college loan consolidation $68.35
car insurance quotes $66.88
school consolidation $66.29
auto insurance quotes $65.90

Unfortunately, these figures came from 2008 and like inflation, they aren’t coming down.

Some New York professionals have ascended into the 3 figure click cost category. Hey, take it easy on your click trigger finger if you’re looking for a lawyer in New York! Well, I guess they can afford it.

Let’s have a look at some figures from today. We’ll assume that you’re spying out the often lucrative credit card offerings market.

OK, $11.86 ain’t too bad. But if you’re tight on nickel or your conversion rate and/or profit ratio isn’t out of this world, it probably wouldn’t pay to gamble here.

But this is what many newbies do. They start bidding on the most common and expensive keywords and wonder why their ads won’t show up. Frustrated, they boost their bid price and blow their budget without any return. Perhaps you’ve heard a few of those “Adwords chews you up and spits you out!” rumors floating around the traps?

Let’s try and get into something a little less savage on the wallet. We want to try and make money, not throw it away!

How about, “credit card new york”?

Hmmmmm $7.62. Well, at least it’s heading in the right direction.

With a little bit of sniffing around and a little bit of digging, look what we found today:

You little beauty! Please forgive our unbridled enthusiasm but at 5 – 9 cents a click we can pull 100 times the traffic for the same 100 bucks that would have gotten us 10 visits bidding on "credit card". It’s 10 visits or 1000…. Your call.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize there’s something here but whilst these gems exist, they can be a little hard to find.

This is where a tool like SpeedPPC can help. “Oh no, this is a sales pitch after all” I hear you groaning. Hang on, there’s great value here. You can do this manually… If you’ve got a few free months to spare.

What’s wrong with this picture? The thing with these keywords is that they are low in cost but also low in search volume. As in the pic above, these guys pulled approximately 58 – 140 searches in the USA during December 2009.

Now let’s round them off by supposing that they each average 100 searches a month. Can you handle that? We’ll also assume a CTR of 5% (quite possible with relevant ad text in this often forsaken environment).

To get your 10,000 visits for just $700 (based on your 7 cent CPC average), you will need… Hang on, we’ll need the iphone to figure this out….

That’s…

5 clicks a month per ad so …

10,000 divided by 5% = 2000.

What’s that? 2000 ads? This means setting up 2000 bid prices with different match types, creating thousands of unique ads that mirror the keywords used by the user and let us not forget, 2000 landing pages parroting the users search terms in the page title, meta tags, keywords and body content. That’s best practice. Not much fun for 5 clicks a month hey?

By the way, it’s been determined that relevant, descriptive phrases tend to convert better than the general, generic phrases do.

When you think about it, a home recording studio buff searching for a new set of speakers would more likely search “yamaha ns-10 studio monitors” than “stereo speakers”. Why? Not because they sound good, they sound lousy but because they’re an industry standard studio monitor.

A relevant PPC ad is going to appeal to his or her click finger before ‘loud speaker‘ ever could. This is probably why descriptive, relevant ads tend to pull better CTRs.

Google Cash Detective 2 Review

Jay Stockwell — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:40:19 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve done an review update with lots more examples and strategies here. Probably best to read this after this original review post so you can see the context of the second post.

You might have heard about Google Cash Detective. Lots of people are talking about it.

The old version was a bit of a disaster so I was a bit unsure how this one would shape up.

I was looking to launch a new campaign of my own today, so I thought I’d try it out within my usual work flow.

After spending a few hours with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that this thing is going to be a bit of a game changer for PPC affiliate marketing. It’s that powerful.

To try and show off its power, I created a video for you, however I ran into a few problems. So instead, I’ll show you “old skool” with screenshots.

Here’s how it all played out.

THE CASE STUDY

Firstly, I looked for a profitable looking niche in Clickbank using our own proprietary in-house Clickbank software. This software is cool in its own right. Unfortunately, it’s not publicly available (I can give some of you access – see below).

This is what it looks like.

We use a variety of measurements and filters to drill down into good Clickbank offers.

Shown are some of the filters we use including gravity parameters, commission and payout rate. The filtering power is very useful as it helps you drill down quickly and easily into offers that meet our parameters. We aim for offers with decent gravity, 75% commission and a payout of over $20.

We figure, most sites convert on average at 1-2%, so if we can buy traffic for less than 50 cents we can break even. We then improve from there.

The really cool thing about this software is we’re tracking trends as well. We like to see products that are increasing in both gravity and popularity. Check out the product below and how it’s gaining momentum nicely. This is a positive sign.

Here’s a screenshot of it nicely filtered.

Based on our drilling down, we’ve selected the GOVTRECORDS Clickbank publisher to work with.

So now we’ve got what we would consider to be our golden niche using our in-house software, I want to try out Google Cash Detective to see what sort of goodness it can reveal for me.

USING GOOGLE CASH DETECTIVE

I firstly want to know whether anyone is making money from this offer in the first place. We can tell this by finding affiliates who’ve been paying for traffic to this offer over a long period of time. We can assume that if they’ve been running it for a long time, it’s either profitable or they have more money than sense.

So I jumped into Google Cash Detective and used the wildcard feature and looked up EVERYONE who is promoting our selected Clickbank publisher.

I clicked through and found a couple of people who had only been advertising a few days. This doesn’t instill much trust that those keywords and ads work.

However, it didn’t take me long to find some profitable campaigns. Man… I found some doozies!

You’ll notice in the screenshot below, there is a ratio (e.g. 55/57). This means that they’ve been advertising 55 out of the last 57 days which is a great sign.

Check out this person who’s been advertising for months with the keyword “us army”. This keyword gets 1.2 million searches a month! You could safely say that this person is making a heap of money from this keyword alone.

All I then did was simply go through each affiliate showing signs of profitability and record the keywords that are working for them.

I reckon out of 100 keywords I try, only 10 of them make me any money. The rest lose money. So, using this method, we can find out what keywords work without spending any of our own dough in the process. We can learn from other people’s mistakes for free. :)

While we are at it, we want to find out what ads are working for them. Often times, it’s the ad copy that makes all the difference. After all, if you can double your click through rate, you halve your costs.

It can take months to find good ad copy for a particular market. We’ve again had these folks do the hard work for us again. Saving us both an incredible amount of time and money.

THE GAME CHANGER

Now… here’s the real game changer that GCD does that I’ve yet to see any other software successfully achieve. Read this carefully and ponder for a moment. This is big.

Once you’ve found an affiliate that is already successful (using those strategies above), you can then find ALL their other direct linking campaigns in ALL their different markets.

This is staggering (and worrying if you’re that affiliate).

I discovered that one of the successful affiliates promoting this product also had success on acne products and spyware related products as well. Brilliant stuff!

(I blurred the affiliate ID for privacy)

If you want a fast track to affiliate success, this is certainly the way to get it!

SO HOW MUCH TO GET A PIECE OF THIS ACTION?

The good and bad thing about GCD is the price. It’s not cheap. In my books, that’s a good thing as the power will hopefully stay in the hands of just a few people, not the entire affiliate community. From what I’ve heard there will be limited spaces as well which should help things.

As you can probably tell, I’m really excited about this and if you can afford it, I recommend you make GCD part of your marketing arsenal.

Now remember GCD is not going to suddenly make you ultra successful without work. However, I’m a strong advocate for investing in things that allow you to leverage your time to the max. That’s exactly the reason why I created SpeedPPC.

Your time is your most valuable asset, and if you can leverage it further, you’ll make way more money.

THE ULTIMATE COMPLEMENTARY BONUS PACK

In line with this, I’ve put together what I consider to be truly the best bonus pack if you decide to buy through my affiliate link. This isn’t just a list of off-the-cuff, over valued teleseminars. This is real world value.

Check this out. Here’s what you’ll get if you order using our affiliate link:

BONUS 1: 12 months access to the in-house Clickbank Mining tool I demonstrated above. I guess if you price this at $99 a month, that’s around $1200 value. Not to mention the competitive advantage you’ll have because it’s not a public tool.

BONUS 2: A free SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro license to leverage your time further in creating perfectly structured PPC campaigns that will allow you to beat pretty much anyone at their direct linking game. This is $497 worth of real value.

BONUS 3: I’ll teach you a technique that we’re exploiting right now using SpeedPPC, the affiliate datafeed software included with SpeedPPC and direct linking. No-one is talking about this stuff. It’s cutting edge and I’ll share it with you. I don’t know what price to put on this. This information could be worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the right hands.

All you need to do is clear your cookies, and then click the link below immediately before purchasing. Then just forward me your receipt to jay@speedppc.com to claim these bonuses.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER GCD AND OBTAIN ACCESS TO THESE BONUSES

If you have any questions, hit me in the comments below or via the email address above.

UPDATE: I’ve written an updated blog post with some cool new examples, especially if you’re into CPA affiliate marketing. I’ve also detailed two new bonuses.

UPDATE 2: Given the somewhat off-topic nature of some of the comments below (I don’t mind, it’s just they probably don’t interest everyone reading), I’ve closed comments on this post. You can make any further GCD related comments on my new post here.