The HeavyChef Project

Since the topic is about Pay-Per-Click, I thought I would share this story with you.

The other day, I was trying to educate a client
about some of the amazing ways that technology could assist the
marketing effort of her burgeoning company.

The question was posed:
Whats the most important reason why we should spend our money on
Pay-Per-Click?

What a question. Not that easy to answer especially when in a crunch meeting just before budget time.

I stumbled through a response, but in
the car on the way back to the studio I thought of what I should have
said instead. The French call this L’esprit descalier which means the Spirit
of the Staircase. Its all the things you think of saying once you’ve already walked
out the door after an argument.

In this case, the answer should have been: Accountable Advertising.

The client in
question had just spent a monster whack of money to put an advert in a
trade magazine. It was done as a knee-jerk response to a lag in
sales, and they felt a quick print-ad campaign was the best way to give their marketing
effort an adrenaline shot. The problem was: no feedback. After the ad
went in, they did get a blip in customer queries but they had no idea
where the customers were coming from. This would not have been the case in Pay-Per-Click. With all the tools at our disposal, we can study the behaviour of our customers and react accordingly. No wonder advertising agencies are so worried about their future.

Quite simply, Pay-Per-Clicks power is in solving retailer John Wanamakers
timeless problem: I know I am wasting half my advertising budget. I
just dont know which half.

- Fred

This really is note worthy news for web marketers and companies out there and it might change the whole face of advertising online (but we said that about Adsense too).

A lot of the blogs have been commenting on Googles new venture over the last couple of days, but I thought Search Engine Land (who google have used to launch the product) sum it up best:

“Google announced a limited U.S. only beta for a new service they are calling Pay Per Action
ads. Google Pay Per Action will allow advertisers to create ads that
cost only when a desired action is triggered. The advertiser sets the
price per action; for example, an advertiser can decide to pay $5 per
lead acquisition, as opposed to paying per click or per impression.”

It raises a couple of questions:

1) When will it hit South Africa? I’m keen to try it!

2) Will the affiliate networks support the tracking it would require?

3) What will happen if you place an ad in your web page/blog and then the advertiser pulls the ad?

It will be interesting to how far this goes, but I have a sneaky feeling that this one could be huge for advertising companies the world over.

Whilst the final adjustments are being made to the site, our resident PPC expert, Andy Harris from Custwin, felt it worthwhile to express some of his frustrations with using Google Adwords. Its really useful information to know so we thought it would be worth sharing it with you:

It’s well-known that Google would love advertisers to use very generic keyword phrases when setting up campaigns.  Quite simply, the more people competing for obvious phrases, the easier it is to push up click prices and there’s much less potential for advertisers to prove that Google aren’t playing fair. These conspiracy theories arise due to very little transparency and advertisers have no idea whether advertisers above or below them in the results listings are paying more or less per click and the gaps between just one position can be huge in terms of click costs (contrary to the old 1p difference).

It’s also long been thought that Google discourage advertisers from using numerous variations of keyword phrases when setting up campaigns.  Quite simply, if Google decide that a phrase isn’t ‘good enough’ then they’ll make it inactive, quite often as soon as you create a campaign.  Suppose you want to use a phrase such as ‘SAP R/3 Logistics Execution Forum’ - now, that’s a very specific phrase that has no meaning to most people but to certain groups of people, that means something and as an advertiser I’d want an advert to appear when someone types that phrase.  However, Google, as always, plays God and decides to disable that phrase as soon as it’s created, saying that it doesn’t match its quality criteria.   

Disabling of such niche phrases is more common when creating huge campaigns with thousands of phrases in them.  Admittedly, many of those phrases may not be typed much, if ever, but as an advertiser, if I want my advert to be visible when someone types such phrases, then surely that’s my prerogative?!   I’ve seen several cases where owners of companies want to have their name set up in Google but the system rejects them saying that their name isn’t of high enough quality - total insanity when it should be the advertiser that has choice.  What appears to happen when creating a large campaign is that, after some time, the Google system will effectively say "hello, someone’s creating lots of niche phrases that won’t get typed much, and therefore don’t have much competition so we have to offer them for cheap costs per click".  As a cynic that works with Adwords on a daily basis I believe the system then says: "I know, let’s penalise them now and make them think that they have to use more generic phrases so we can make more money from those".

Some would say: "But have you got enough monthly budget and click cost allowance set up for the phrases?".   The answer to that is: Yes.  Anyone can run this experiment - try creating a campaign that initially has a huge budget allowance and huge cost per click allowance - fill it with very niche phrases, thousands of them, and you’ll see that after a time of setting up, the Google system starts to disallow phrases.   If budget is ok then the only blocking factor would be the ‘Google quality score’, another phrase that to me means ‘Google discouraging people from using niche phrases’.

Bit by bit, Google appear to be penalising advertisers that innovate with their keyword phrases, preferring instead to push people down the route of paying for more expensive phrases.   This is an extremely short-sighted approach, and is certainly something that Google would deny they’re doing.  The majority of businesses in the world are small businesses who don’t have deep pockets and those that innovate can gain huge amounts of business from Google for little cost.  It’s not uncommon for clients to gain 1,000 visitors to a website in a month for just 100 investment in clicks but unfortunately, it seems Google are trying to stop this happening, which creates a smaller number of keyword phrases that can effectively be bid on and makes Google unattractive to small businesses.   In time, small businesses will start dropping out of using Google Adwords and will start using other systems that (hopefully) will have a fairer system.

Having said all this, Google is still a good system but it’s far too dominant.  It has huge holes in the way that it works (or doesn’t), which, as a PPC expert, I see much more easily than advertisers who are just getting to grips with PPC.  My view is that it’s time that Google had a more open dialogue with people in the industry and started to develop a sytem that will continue to be mutually successful for the longer term instead of going down the path of pushing up click prices and sending small advertisers elsewhere.   I have no doubts in my mind that if they carry on this path, there will be lots of reports about Google’s reduced market share within the next couple of years.

Two months after starting the "Pay per click for web profitablity" category on the blog we finally get around to actually doing the pay per click campaign:-)

The site (www.artrevision.com for those that have forgotten) sells hand painted replicas of famous works of art. You choose the artist and their work and the highly talented Yolande will paint the replica to order.

For the first step of the campaign I took a very similar approach to the way I would go about an SEO campaign: Research the keywords. In fact Nicola (my lovely wife) was at a loose end this afternoon so I asked her to do it.

When we had all the data my first instinct was to look at it from an SEO point of view. Where were the gaps we could exploit and what were the popular or niche words that people searched, yet had little competition online.

But with PPC it is slightly different. Yes you need to know what people are searching for and what the competition is like, but the added factor of "cost per click" is vital. At this point I thought it best to send the results through to Andy (from UK PPC firm Custwin - www.custwin.co.uk) and see where he takes it. So now I’m ready to sit and learn whilst I watch a master at work. (No pressure there Andy :-)

Initially we’ve set a small budget of 100 (R1400) for the month and will focus on maybe one particular artist. The low budget is always an approach we recommend with most of our web marketing. Start small and build up - watch what works and what doesn’t. That way you can adjust anything from the site to the text to the images to the ads, etc, etc - until a good return on investment is reached, then you can invest more knowing the return will be worthwhile. Remember: pay per click is about creating profitable websites, not going bust quickly.

Yeee haaaa! The site is finally live. Check out www.artrevision.com and take a gander at all the beautiful, stunning artwork - and I’m not just talking about World Wide Creative’s graphic design work. Do us a favour and let us know what you think - any feedback or ideas are welcome!

Now, onto the web marketing. Google, here we come!

Hi Andy,

We are about to make live the Art Revision website for the Heavy Chef project at www.artrevision.com.

Mike said it would be a good idea that I should speak to you before I go ahead with the Google advertising.

What do you reckon the steps I should take from now?

My thinking is this:

• Come up with a list of key-words that potential clients would search for to find the site
• List the goals for the site
• Set up a Google Adwords account
• Set the daily budget
• Review whether the goals are being achieved

What do you reckon?

- Fred

I’m really starting to love You Tube. Same guys at Sage Rock giving a really good introduction to using Pay Per Click for web profitability.

First things first: We have to pick a company and build a website before we can start the Pay-per-click campaign. We chose my wife’s new profession, painting, as our company. The reasons for the choice are as follows:

• She is nearby
• She will allow us to do pretty much what we like with the design
• She will make us some chocolate cake when we finish
• She is pretty damn good painter, way better than me! (check out the pic in the design below - that was her first ever painting!)

The ‘company’ is called Art Revision; has one ‘employee’ - my wife; will be run under the World WIde Creative accounts; and will sell replicas of famous paintings for around 200 or R2500 in South African terms. She is really good at making copies, and is now getting pretty confident with the brush.

So here is the first design. I have stuck to a tried and tested formula as we don’t want to get too complicated.

• Simple, easy to follow navigation
• Nice big examples of the product
• Clear goals (’Click here for limited time offer!!‘)

Any thoughts or feedback are welcome. One question I’m not sure of is should we have a newsletter sign-up form?

- Fred