Hey Charley,

There are a ton of advertising opportunities out there. As you mentioned, I do like Facebook, just because they are so easy to work with. Google can be a nightmare, which you may find out. They also often won't let you advertise squeeze pages. It depends on how you structure it. But the consistency is nice with Google as compared with FB which does have those lulls that you mentioned.

Here are a few places you can pay to advertise. (Keep in mind, I have not personally used all of these networks).

Facebook

Google Adwords

Microsoft Ad Network (Yahoo and Bing)

Click River - http://clickriver.com

FindIt Quick - http://www.findit-quick.com

Hey Charley,

Off hand... what was your landing page score from google?

I had also been approved for a squeeze page in the past that scored fairly high (considering it was a squeeze page) but I think it's because I did have an open link to the blog content on the page (waaaaaaayyyy at the bottom... really small).

With ppc, google looks for a couple things:

1. Relevance (this is a biggie, google wants it's customers to find what they are looking for.  They keep track of the back button being clicked)

2.  Whether or not people take an action on your page, like browsing other content on your site or opting in. 

In other words, if people land on your page and your opt-in process is optimized (high opt-in rate)  you may find your cost-per-click dropping considrably over time.

It's a good idea to be super targeted with ppc.  For instance, if you were to target "smooth jazz" you would want to make sure you had some on-page things like title, headings, image alts and what-not to reflect that keyword.  However if you wanted to target "saxophone jazz" you may want to make a totally different squeeze page (or at least a copy of your current one with the on page factors to reflect that keyword).

What I'm saying is, don't serve the save page for both keywords.  Your costs will be higher if you do.

Also it's a good idea to use negative keywords as well.  simply put a minus sign in front of keywords you want your page to not show for.

A real- life example from one of my campaigns is I'm targeting "Start a band" however my add will show for "start a rubber band ball" unless I include -ball and -rubber  AND -rubberband.

Hope that's not too convoluted for you.  🙂

-Steve

Hmmm…   You made me wonder if they actually deprecated the quality score, but according to them it's still in play
http://adwords.google.com/supp.....swer=10215

Now I wouldn't go "hiding" links if I were you.  But on the footer of your squeeze page you can put little links to things like your privacy policy, terms of use, sitemap(!yes!),and maybe even your blog.  What I'm suggesting is that you can make them small enough (10pt. or something) so that they don't take away from your call to action.

The goal of ppc, after all, is conversion.

Charley Langer said: " Would it help me to have a link to and from that video, even if the one on my squeeze page is not easy to find (intentionally)?"

I would avoid "reciprocal linking if I were you.  This may actually hurt your video ranking.  Instead you want to leverage the video's ranking to help bring up the ranking of your squeeze page.

You can do this 2 ways: 

1. Have a link in your video description directly to your squeeze page.  (the full url)

    2.Or you can do what I did and that's put the link to one of your relevant blog posts in the vid description, but also put the entire article in there as well.  This will bring your blog article up.  Then you can use the keywords in your blog article as links to your squeeze page.  This should bring up both the article and the squeeze page in ranking.  This is not a PPC strategy, but rather an SEO one.

I actually posted a screenshot of this exact strategy in another forum post.  Let me grab the link for you:

http://www.musicmarketingmanif.....lorer#p502

As far as ppc, the part about serving different pages for small bunches of keywords (saxophone jass vs. smooth jazz… and even smooth sax jazz) is a strategy your competitors probably have not figured out.  This means that if you use it, you'll enjoy higher rankings (relevance) and lower cost-per-clicks (because your click thru rates will be higher) and ultimately you'll turn your campaigns into profitable vs. break even ones EVEN if you don't see an increase in conversion rates.

But since you know about website optimizer now, you'll see an increase in those too.

For negative keyword ideas, just search for your desired keywords and see how much of a mixed bag you get in the results.  Simply negate the words which are not relevant to your squeeze page and remove them from your ppc ads (actuall you add them, but with the minus sign in front of them).

Go kick some ass Charley!

Hey Charlie,

Steve's right, relevance is very important to Google. They are trying to make their paid network function similarly to the organic network. In other words, I search for blue bicycles and I get an add about blue bicycles and when I click on it it takes me to a page that is a resource about blue bicycles. And your price will go down if your click through rate is high, and your quality score is good.

I haven't looked in 5 months or so but if memory serves they did away with the 1 - 10 ranking system and replaced it with a high - poor ranking system... but I might be wrong. To see it you need to go into your display settings for the columns and tell it to display the quality score. I'd have to dig around to find it but if you Google "how to see my adwords quality score" or something to that effect you should find an explanation. It's going to display next to the individual keywords.

Adwords is awesome if you can get it to work for you, but it can be really expensive, and they can be terrible to work with. I have spent a lot of money with them on very above board stuff, and then one day they suspended my account for ads I ran years ago because of policy changes between then and now. It was crazy. To get reinstated they want me to go and somehow buy back my old domains (which I don't even own anymore), and rebuild pages that are compliant with their current terms and conditions. It's so illogical that I can't even get my brain around it. I have many marketing colleagues that have had the same kind of thing happen. If you get very involved with PPC you'll start to hear a lot of adwords horror stories. That said, if you dial in to a profitable campaign, you can make a lot of money with them.

You might try the Microsoft ad network. There is not quite as much traffic but it tends to be cheaper and some say it converts better as well. They have been a pleasure to work with by contrast. In fact I have a campaign running with them as we speak.

Charley Langer said:

First day of running ads on MS Network. Click cost was good (0.20 CPC) to be in second position. Conversion rate today was a tad lower than my 30% goal, but I realize you can't really tell until you have some history. OTOH, the potential benfefit is that this may motivate me to work harder to improve my squeeze pages to get conversions up. LOL! I like the "set-and-forget" aspect. We'll see...

It's always great to see you taking so much action Charley. Not to mention how well you're grasping this stuff. It's pretty rare. Well done.

Hi Kat,

I haven't done Facebook ads, but I can give you some insight on the rest...

squeeze page to subscriber - anything above 25-27% is doing okay, however even 35% means there's room for improvement.  If you find yourself on the under side of those numbers, either your copy/free offer needs some improvement or your visitor targeting needs to be tightened.

subscriber to confirmed subscriber - I don't count unconfirmed because if they don't confirm they are not a subscriber (you can't follow-up or sell to them).

Confirmed opt-in to buyer - most markets convert conservatively around 1%.  Again if you're a little under, it may just be a simple tweak to your offer copy to bump you over.  Things like scarcity, limited time offers, limited print runs work really well to boost sales.  It also pays to learn a bit about good sales copywriting to try and understand how to use words to move people from interested to taking action.

As far as the harvesting thing you ran into, you may be able to fix the problem by simply putting a really small link back to your blog waaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the page.

Google has become increasingly tough on direct response marketers over the last few years.  They had originally rejected some of my ads because of the same thing.  Having a tiny link to some actual content seemed to do the trick, but it also defeats the purpose of having a "forced- opt-in" type of squeeze page.

Generally you don't want to let your paid traffic leak out from the squeeze page, but if you can't get the ads approved, then you're not paying for anything or getting traffic either.  It's a crappy trade-off, but the upside is that after I made the switch, that particular squeeze page converted near 40% and my cost-per click was a lot cheaper than some of my competition ( i was not being charged as much for my clicks despite bidding myself onto page one.)

I'd love to hear how others have gotten around the harvesting issue.

Hey Kat,

What ad platform are you using where you are paying that much and what interests/keywords are you bidding on? There are so many variables with this stuff that everything can affect price and volume quite dramatically. A buck is too high to make this work though, and 4 clicks a day is pretty pointless. You want hundreds of clicks a day, at least dozens. Something is off with what you're doing.

For a Facebook ad you want to see at least a .1 click through rate. The highest I've ever had is .4. I've made things work with less than .1 but it's hard. the higher your click through rate, the less you will pay. Usually the picture effects things the most.

I wouldn't stop testing until you get at least a 25% conversion rate on your squeeze page. Anything over 40% is awesome.

Subscriber to confirmation, I'd like to see over 80%. I am dealing with a campaign that is lower than that right now and I think something is off. I wouldn't run paid ads if you can't get it up around or higher than 75%. I sometimes turn of the double opt in on pad campaigns.

Purchase conversion rates can range anywhere from 1% to 10%. Seems most IC members that have a grasp of this stuff are reporting 3-4%. I'm talking percentages when calculated against list size, not actual clicks on the offer.

Hope that helps.