Search Marketing Costs

Campaign Costs

How to slash your PPC advertising costs

By Markus Allen, Publisher of Marketing-Ideas.Org

hen it comes to making money matching pay per click leads with affiliate sites offering solutions, there are a few factors to consider to figure out an affordable cost per lead.

Quite frankly, worrying about the cost per click shouldn't be your top priority...

... Instead, I'd recommend first determining the average value per visitor -- commonly known as the Lifetime Value of each new customer. The Lifetime Value of a new customer is the average number of dollars you can expect to bank from your typical new customer over its lifetime. For example, if you're an affiliate sending traffic to a site and each buyer puts $25 in your pocket, then the LTV is $25.

Who knows -- maybe you can easily pay $5.00 for each pay per click and generate a sizable return on investment. Now before you call me crazy, I'd bet you'd gladly pay $5 per click if you knew these were leads of super red-hot buyers... just seconds away from ordering.

At the same time, you could drive thousands of cheap, one-cent leads without generating a single sale -- I've seen this with some of my pay per click clients.

The big advantage of pay per click advertising is Google Adwords' conversion tracking option gives you the stats to determine the profitable clicks... right down to the actual keyword phrase responsible for the click to your URL.

When you're sending traffic to an affiliate program, you want them to install Google's conversion tracking code... this way, when your pay per click leads make a purchase, the code (embedded in the thank you page) alerts Google, and Google tracks this data and displays the "conversion rate" right next to each keyword trigger phrase within your Adwords' reports.

Obviously, you need to have the site owner (the website you're referring leads) to install Google Adwords' conversion tracking code on the thank you page. This way, when your pay per click lead makes a purchase and ultimately lands on the thank you page, the tracking code instantly reports this "conversion" back to Google for calculating your conversion percentages.

If you're unable to convince your affiliate program site owner to install this conversion tracking code for you, a less accurate (but equally important) option is to create your own landing page. This webpage presells the solution (my favorite way is to offer an unbiased review) and employs a remote tracking service to monitor the clicks from your review site to the affiliate URL.

In order to know which keyword trigger phrase is worth bidding as high as $5.00 a click, you need to find closely related keyword alternatives.

For example, Stefano said he's only using keywords related to the term, "Profitlance"...

... But I know there are literally hundreds -- even thousands of similar keyword phrase options able to trigger his pay per click ad and attract high-quality leads.

One fast and easy strategy to find more high-quality leads (and at very affordable prices) is to prepend (insert before) and append (insert after) "transaction words" to your main keyword phrases...

... For example, I'd bet Stefano's clicks would convert a higher number of searchers into visitors with the following keyword phrases:

buy ProfitLance
ProfitLance order page
review of ProfitLance

Adding simple transactional words before and/or after your main keyword trigger phrases is a very profitable and very powerful strategy to attract high quality leads. And the best part is these longer-sized keyword phrases typically costs 50% less, too.