Google Trends Led Me To Higher Earnings - Part 2

If you haven't yet, you should take a look at part 1 of this series to get a better sense of what I'm doing. In a nutshell I am merely using domain name keyword variations in a PPC campaign to direct traffic to an offer, in this case, an NFL Jersey giveaway. I was supposed to whip this up yesterday but I took advantage of the nice day we had... it's been raining a lot lately. Better late than never

Creating the Ad Group

Really, we only need one ad group with as many domain name variations as we could think of. With this type of offer I don't bother tracking to see which keywords are converting. I don't track anything really. I set it up and keep an eye on it to see if I am getting impressions, if I'm diverting traffic and lastly if I'm getting conversions. If I run through $15.00 of ad spend with no return, I yank it and move on. $15.00 might seem to be a small amount but for me it's enough of a gauge. You can test how you wish, but for me, if I'm not ahead of the game after $15.00 it clearly isn't working. I might tweak the text ads a bit or the landing page but mostly I just close up shop and try something different.

You can manually enter some domain name variations but that could take awhile. There are some free tools out there that will generate them by entering the main keyword or keywords, in this example, "nfl", "nfl draft" and "draft nfl". The good ones will generate a whole whack of keywords...Here are some examples of what you might get..

• www nfl draft.com
• ww.nfldraft.com
• ww nfl com
• http://www.nfl.com
• http:// nfl com
• etc. you get the idea, just be sure to use the ones that showed up in Google Trends at a minimum

I deleted the bookmark to the free tool that I used to use and I can't remember what it was called. I did a quick search and found one here for you to use. I use SpeedPPC myself. I didn't buy SpeedPPC for the URL keyword generation feature but it is one of the nice extras of the program. Another nice thing about it is that it creates files quickly that you can import into the your PPC accounts that will automatically create your ad groups and text ads. It saves a ton of time. For those of you that have SpeedPPC I will go through the steps here to show you how to quickly create the campaign. It only takes a couple of minutes and it's ready to roll for Google AdWords, MSN adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing...as well as several of the other networks. If you don't have Speed PPC, you can try the free tool . Or you might have better luck than me finding another one. The free one doesn't generate as many variations as I would like to use but it's a good start. In the next part I will be giving an example landing page so you can skip the rest of this if you aren't using SpeedPPC.

Using Speed PPC to Quickly Create an Ad Group With Domain Keyword Variations

On this first tab...keyword setup , enter a name for the Campaign. I used "NFL Domain". Choose "Domain" for campaign type. Manually enter the seed keywords in the list, each on a new line. I entered "nfl", "nfl draft", "draft nfl" and for good measure "football". The software will create all of the domain variations using the seed keywords. It will use "nfl draft" with and without the space. Assign a Group Name or Group by Seed if you want. If you group by seed a new adgroup will be created for every seed keyword, so in this case 4 adgroups will be created. I usually just dump everything in 1 and assign a group name. For this one I chose "NFLDomainGroup". The image below shows what I did in the keyword setup tab.

OK, switch to the Pricing & URL tab now. In the URL Template box, enter the landing page address. You can get fancy and pass along the keyword, the seed, etc. but we don't really need that for this campaign but it's up to you. It's handy for keyword tracking and/or dynamically inserting a keyword in the landing page. If you are direct linking to the offer, just enter the direct link URL here. We will be entering the URL again later but this is used if we wanted to use a unique URL for every keyword in our ad groups...that's where you start to see some real power with your Speed PPC application. Stay tuned and I will be walking through campaigns using more of the advanced features some time shortly.

Now you can specify your costs for Google, and MSN for broad, phrase and exact. If you aren't sure what those are right now don't be overly concerned. With this quick and dirty campaign you can put checkmarks next to them all (excluding content) and enter the same amount in all of them. Try $0.04 or $0.05 to start with.

For Yahoo, choose the Optimize Ad Display option so it shows your ad with the better CTR more often. We will probably be creating 2 ads for this offer. Try the Advanced match type for the extra traffic. Specify your Search Network Cost and put a check next to it. Again you can start with a nickel or whatever. The Custom Output Setup is beyond the scope of this post but it's for if you want to run your ads on engines other than the big 3. The image below shows what I did in the pricing and URL tab.

Now onto the Ad Setup tab. Creating 2 simple ads is usually fine but it's up to you. Just fill in the boxes with what you want to say. I sorta suck at ad creation but I generate clicks so I must be doing something right. Keep in mind though that for Google your display URL domain and your actual URL domain must match. If you are going over the character limits in your text ads for what you are able to use on most search engines, SpeedPPC will indicate the number of characters in red. Stay within the limits and you should be OK for all engines. The image below shows the ads I created using SpeedPPC.

Go to the Output tab and click build. Your keyword and text ad files are ready to be exported, then imported into the PPC search engine. For specifics on importing, check the search engine help files. For Google, it's really easy to copy your campaigns over using the free Google AdWords Editor.

You will have a whole heap of keywords at this point. For this example I ended up with 792. The image below shows just a slice of the keywords that were auto-generated using SpeedPPC.

In the next part I will show an example of a landing page, but if you are direct linking you are done. Best of luck!

Posts in this Series:

• Google Trends Led Me To Higher Earnings - Part 1
• Google Trends Led Me To Higher Earnings - Part 2 (ad group)
• Google Trends Led Me To Higher Earnings - Part 3 (landing page)