Pay Per Click Basics

While on IRC today I did my social service by helping some guy with his zip submit campaign on Facebook. He wanted to know if it was time to stop the campaign and give up or what he needed to do next. The poor guy had already spent $400 on advertising and had made about $130 from it.

The problem is that he hadn’t tweaked his landing page at all until I mentioned it. He tweaked it ads to get the CTR high enough that facebook was now giving him 0.08 clicks but nothing else. He didn’t really do any of the math in his head and he just expected it to ‘work’ after he set it up.

Here is how I broke it down to him. The very basics.

With 1,799 clicks on his ad he said that he had 83 conversions. (pretty bad) I didn’t get the info on how many clicks made it to what pages of the lander. But he had gotten 0.08 clicks which is good enough for a zip submit/poll landing page.  Getting his click cost made this much easier.

At a 1.30 payout and 0.08 a click you would need 1 person in every 16 to complete the offer for you to break even. Which I told him should be his goal. I recommended he send about 100 clicks per change that he made to the landing page to test if helped. Which means he is going to spend $8 per change which is much better than $400 before any changes.  If you need 1 in 16 and 0 in 100 don’t do it odds are that if you sent 200, 300, 400 not much will change. You will not magically become profitable unless the offer deals with time. Like after 3pm for school kids, or after 6pm for the people getting off work.

Now this is all very basic because he is dealing with a zip/email submit type campaign. Things get much more advance when dealing with a higher payout and a multi page lander. You always need to figure out what you need to be profitable first. If he had known from the start that he needed 1 in 16 to breakeven he would have never spent that $400.

In pay per click you need to watch everything like a hawk. This is AM for guys that love numbers. You need to know every detail for every ad, keyword, and what the visitors are doing.  With enough data and number crunching you could make any campaign profitable. If you only have 1 keyword that gotten any conversions and the rest suck up money pause/delete the lame ones and instant profit. If its not enough for you add more keywords, tweak more. Work should never stop until your happy.

Test, test, test, and test more.  Get your am to place tracking pixels, use p/t202, use the adwords/yahoo conversion tracking. Use anything you can to pull as much data as possible and then figure out how to make that data work for you. Its not rocket science, just basic math and intuition.