Pay Per Click Advertising: Where To Start
Reader and Twitter buddy Cattaboy asked about PPC advertising the other day. He said he’s rather ask me than go to the untrustworthy world of the internet.
Good choice.
Because I’m an honest and decent fellow, here’s my disclaimer: I’m far from an expert with PPC. Take all of this with caution and don’t blow your whole pay cheque based on my recommendations.
That said, I’ve been doing PPC for a little while now, and here’s what I recommend for jumping in.
Firstly… Get A Product
Some people recommend starting with getting email leads or worse, Facebook page likes.
Don’t do this.
The ultimate formula for buying traffic works out like this:
Ad spend needs to be less than the profit you make.
Now, if you’re paying for leads, then you won’t know for a while whether your campaign is profitable.
You don’t want to do this because you’ll feel sick in your stomach and you won’t know whether what you’re doing is profitable or not.
It’s far better to just start a small ecommerce store or something and throw up some cheap products so you know immediately whether you’re doing something right or wrong.
Be prepared (and have the budget) to have things go wrong. A few hundred dollars will cover it in most cases.
Let’s just talk by example on this…
PPC Is Risk
PPC is risky and a lot of your success in the early days will come from having the mental strength to weather the storm of losing money whilst you’re learning.
I suggest you start with a small budget and small-scale tests to overcome this. I recommend getting a little ecommerce store (with the whole dropshipping thing) and learning the ropes in a relativity low pressure environment.
In other words, let’s sell some $5 items for $10.
Try something like:
- Test 5 products for a campaign of $5 a day.
- Each day, you’ll spend $25
- Run the test for 4 days
- This will cost $100
At the end of the 4 days, hopefully you’ll have had some sales or at least clicks through so you know which of the products is the best offer.
Then you can run variations on the ad for another 4 days and you’ll spend another $100 on that single product.
This will cost $200 and you’ll get the basics of testing a product viability, split-testing ads and hopefully making sales.
(Note: this isn’t a literal example. I’ll come back to this idea for a starter checklist on the email list once my hands are a bit better.)
If You Have a Product/Service/Business Already…
Then start with retargeting people who are already on your list. You have proof they’re interested because they’re on your list already. If you have an ecommerce store, then grab some people that have abandoned carts and retarget those.
This is a cheap way in.
Do that and create a lookalike audience from your customers.
Otherwise, let’s talk about what I do for new stuff.
I don’t do anything sophisticated yet.
Oh, just as a note: I use FB ads.
Don’t start with Adwords. It’s expensive and you’re competing against idiots with huge budgets. So you have to really know what you are doing to make money on the platform.
(At least that’s what I learned from looking at the ridiculous prices. Start with FB ads unless you’re doing specific B2B stuff.)
Lookalike Audiences
If you have a list already, then put them into Facebook’s lookalike audience section.
Create your audience from that.
The Lookalike audience (LLA) is a system whereby Facebook takes the audience you provides them and says, “Hey, with all that data we’re not using to spy on you, we’re going to create a list of people that are exactly like these people you’ve got on this list.”
It’s algorithmic and it gets better over time as the Facebook pixel gives them more data.
You can always supercharge this by splitting the audience on your end into big buyers vs. small buyers, buyers from US vs. buyers from elsewhere and put those as separate custom audiences.
In principle though, if it’s profitable then let FB do its thing.
What If You Don’t Have a Lookalike Audience?
You want to race to the point where you have a lookalike audience. You can do this in a few ways.
James Holt uses Instagram influencers to get his first 50 sales or so.
I’ve never done this.
What I did most recently was pick a niche where there was a competitor/similar business that’s big enough to be an option for “interests” for a custom audience on Facebook and used that.
You could also do this with actual interests and the like.
So you might be starting a little ecommerce store for hippy chicks. If so, go and find a store like Monsoon, a music festival like Glastonbury and whatever else you can think of. Create an interests based audience and when they convert, you add them to an excel file and create the lookalike audience from that.
Once you have a lookalike audience, allow Facebook’s AI to do the magic for you. Separate small buyers from big buyers and start a separate lookalike audience for the big spenders and see if that makes you more money.
At this point, you’re away.
The Two Best Resources
There are two resources I recommend for PPC advertising, and it’s those two that I’ve really used to shape my strategy.
Those two resources are:
This is targeted at affiliate marketers, but the strategies and structuring of a campaign works for everything. It’s a fantastic book. It’s a little expensive at £50 but if you’re looking to start PPC, it’s worth it because it’ll give you a framework for succeeding.
If you can’t afford £50 then you probably can’t afford to risk PPC advertising yet.
The second resource is more expensive, and it’s James Holt’s Start Dropshipping Stuff course.
If you know my blog you probably already know James, so I’ll keep this brief. He basically uses the same system as I do, and goes into detail about how he uses PPC for ecommerce. Read more about his course in this review.
The big difference between what I’ve recommended here and James’ approach is that he uses Instagram shout outs to grab the initial set of subscribers for the LLA. I’ve never done this so can’t comment.
Final Thoughts
The PPC advertising thing is a complex minefield on its surface. But if you break it down, it becomes a lot more manageable.
Find some simple things to sell and put aside a couple of hundred dollars to spend.
Create some ads, and then create some more ads to split test against once you’ve found a profitable product.
Keep it simple, build a list of buyers, use those to target more, and try and stay profitable throughout. Only drop in a small amount of money at a time until you’re comfortable with your returns.
Then once you have that down, you can try testing your campaigns against each other, move on to different platforms or simply carry on making a positive return on ad spend depending on your goals.
More on this in future material.