Optimizing your campaigns whether its through contextual buys, media buys, pay per click, ppv or any other form of traffic all the basic rules and principles apply. This is one of the questions I am asked most so want to address some of the more basic and intermediate ways to optimize your campaigns to get them profitable as quickly as possible.

Rules:

1. You NEED to split-test atleast 3 offers and ideally 5+. Ideally on a per country level. Do not expect to spend $100 or even $500 and be profitable right away. You WILL lose money. You NEED to split-test banners/ads/test on your landing page if applicable etc. The SMALLEST change to your banner or landing page or ad can mean a 200% increase in CTR or ROI or both. Also do NOT drop a banner with a low CTR just because of the low CTR – analyze your bid and your EPC/ROI on it to establish if its profitable for you or not. Many times higher CTR may mean lower conversions and thus lower profitability overall.

2. You NEED to track by as many variables or pieces of information the traffic network gives you whether this be keywords, targets, urls, banner types, sources, etc. This is what is not only crucial to making a lot of money doing ppc, media buys, ppv, etc but its a necessity if you want to actually have a profitable campaign and make more than $50 a day. The more variables or pieces of data you can break your stats down by the better and every little thing matters.

3. Try Direct Linking vs Landing Pages. Many times direct linking can do better although in some cases or traffic types specifically typically a landing page is needed or your conversions will be terrible. Direct linking is appropriate in certain circumstances using PPC (not tier 1 networks) or even media buys. If using a landing page try MANY different versions and KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do not make it complicated with links and navigation and distractions all over the page. Keep it simple, sexy, and clean. Make it CLEAR to the user exactly what they need to do. Also keep the form or whatever information or button they need to click ABOVE THE FOLD meaning above the point at which the typical internet user needs to scroll down in their browser to see the rest of the page. ** Test your landing pages in IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and on your cell phone!! Test on as many versions as you can as many times in certain browsers many features or alignment issues etc will occur affecting conversions and unless you try it you will never know. On your landing pages typically ask for atleast name/email or both and opt them into your newsletter/list. Email lists are extremely valuable as you can mail them again and again and you only paid for that visitor once — now you know what they want and what demographic they fit into. We will save demographics for another lesson but that is extremely important as well.

4. Do NOT drop a keyword/country/banner/ad too early. If it does not get enough views/clicks etc and over a span of ATLEAST a day you do not have accurate data as your ROI/EPC/RPC (whatever metric youd like to use) will vary hour by hour so dropping a keyword or banner etc because it didnt do well for one hour one day many times is a big mistake.

5. Set the bids low enough where you don’t blow through your budget too fast as you need that daily budget to ideally spread the traffic out evenly throughout the day. You also need days and weeks and ideally months worth of data to properly start day parting/day scheduling.

6. Once your campaigns are running using some sort of tracking platform whether it be t202/p202, cpvlab, bevo or even ploose directly using source and subid parameters etc although we do recommend a professional platform with the capability for more advanced tracking capabilities, you need to then do heavy analyzation of your data. Look at which traffic sources, banners, ads, keywords you were profitable on, raise the bids if applicable, if you lost money (atleast 3-4x the payout of the CPA offer minimum) then either lower your bid for that keyword/banner or drop it completely. In the case of PPC try first dropping your “phrase match” from broad>phrase, if already at phrase try dropping it to exact match. This will lower the amount of traffic to that keyword/target but will increase the quality typically if it is a relevant keyword. Be Careful using really short keywords in tier 1 PPC as you will get a boat-load of un-targetted traffic. For Search PPC typically 3-5 word keywords do best, occassionally 2 words but very rarely. For in-text or banner networks allowing keyword targetting keep it to 1-3 words, typically 2-3 work best.

7. Watch to see how the changes you made affect the campaign and adjust accordingly. It is a process and will take time and there is a learning curve. Contact us for more help or advanced questions and more advanced and in-depth optimization techniques.

Thats all for Lesson 1 of Ploose’s “How to Optimize your Campaigns and Landing Pages Lesson 1″
Written by:
Tim Burd
CEO
NextGenAds Inc
AIM/Skype – TimPloose
1-888-933-3410 x3