PPC is one of the fastest and targeted traffic generator the web has known, so if you are a new business owner your chances of making profit for your service or product is very vital online. BUT sometimes it might not be the case for some products or services that you are promoting.

What Happened???

Earlier this year, I found a very interesting local business where the competition was  not that strong terms of SEO and PPC. I decided to give it a try. As it’s a No Capital Down project – that means I have to pay for the PPC traffic for this new business. I decided to put a daily budget of $25. So my PPC costs should be around $750 total over 30 days.

Little did I know that the PPC bids on keywords for this local business was around $2 to $4. If I were to take $3 per keyword bid, I will only have 8 clicks for this business per day. Thank God that the keywords that I used are converting with average of 15% for click through rate. But it was not enough.

I was able to make some profits on the 1st month after cutting my costs, which me and my partners did not get any salary out of it. This goes on for a good 3 months.

Although every month, we could see that our profits are increasing, due to the SEO part for the website was done correctly and that the competition was not that strong either.

So on the 4th month, I decided to lower our PPC budget to $20 per day to test out. Our business did not drop, instead it became better and we had more profits. Then finally on the 5th month – our website finally received good SEO rankings for converting keywords. That was the turning point and I decided to stop the PPC all together (as well as our sponsored advertising on Yahoo and MSN).

That’s when we saw the real money coming in in terms of thousands of dollars – although we still have cost – but the major cost which was PPC was FINALLY stopped. This  meant we finally had much higher realized profits.

What went right for us?

The thing that went right for us was that we positioned our business targeting PPC and SEO together at the same time. We needed customers to start the cashflow running so PPC was used first. Also at the same time we finally continued working on the SEO aspects of the website.

During the 4 month period – it also became a good time for us to find out what are the keywords that people are targeting.

Without using Pay Per Click Marketing and Google Adwords, I would have missed out a on a very important keyword that was totally different from our primary keyword – and yet it has the almost the same meaning. We wouldn’t have discovered the important converting keyword without PPC.

We also created new content with new web pages based on the keywords that were converting from the Google AdWords reports. Creating more new relevant content for our targeted customers became very fruitful in our SEO efforts.

Summary

I must say that this business has made me realised that the beginning of new businesses will be tough and may not even make any money on the first month. I was lucky to have make at least a hundred dollars in profits. It was our consistency and our persistence in this new business that gave us the reward that can be seen now.

I will not stop using PPC as the main tool to find out the real demand of the market, and using SEO to get to that market free of charge.

This should be your goal too. If you have a different way to market your new business, do share below in general. I will be happy to hear from you.

Your Adwords ads are the one that will lead to an interest to what you are offering on the search engine result. In order to find out what your target audience is looking for, you have to spit test your PPC ad.

Here is how you can do spit testing to find out the best ad that will convert the highest click:

First you start by writing two different ads for your ad group. A slight variation will do, even if its only one word difference, it can do wonders. So go ahead and write your two ads now.

Secondly, usually when you start a new ad group, Adwords will always tell you to write an ad for the ad group. What you need to do now is to add in a new ad in your ad group. Go to the ad group you want to add new ad, then click on ‘Ads’ tap, click ‘New ad’ and select ‘Text ad’.

After which should be easy for you to do. Now place the new ad which you have written and replace the one that is in the space. Sometimes the only difference is a word only, so you may just change a word only. After you are done click save.

It will take 15 minutes for the ad to show. I have a rule of thumb for testing and I think that it is quite a good gauge as well. Always set your testing time to 2 weeks at least. This way you will be able to see the result more clearly.

One time to note as well, is to set your ads to rotate evenly. Adwords will show this message : Your ads may not perform as well with standard rotation. Optimized ad rotation is recommended for most advertisers. If you want to find out the best ad that will attract clicks, you got to choose ‘Rotate: Show Ads more evenly’.

Wait for 2 weeks to see the result. Do not amend anything during these two weeks, when you make a small little change to the ad, with only a full stop, everything will be reset to zero for that ad, you will have to wait for another 2 weeks to study the result. By the way, when you start this split testing for your ads, you need to reset the old ad too, as it contains the previous result. So it will not be fair for the new ad, and most importantly you will not be able to find out the real winner, because the old ad will most properly win.

After two weeks, you can clearly see a ad winner between the two ads. How you can find out which is the winner, is by looking at the the percentage of the Click Through Rate (CTR) of each ads, and the number of clicks. Do this every two weeks, and you will find that your quality score for the whole campaign will improve. I would recommend you use Split Tester to find out which is the winning ad.Take Home Tip

In everything that you do for PPC, you must always test the PPC ads to find out which is the best converting ads. You will never know if you do not test. This way you will be able to give to what the market want and not to what you think they want. Do you have anything that I have miss out? I like to hear from you.