Prospect Genius

There are many ways that business owners go wrong with Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Most of them are borne out of very good and responsible goals, but none the less cause problems. These 8 are the ones we find to be most common.

1. Googling Yourself

Curious about how your ad looks? Resist the urge to Google yourself! Here’s why:

• Cost Per Impression: Every time you search for your own ad, you’re driving up the cost per impression.
• Paying for Clicks: If you click your ad, guess what? You just paid for that click!
• Hurting Your CTR: Even if you don’t click, you’re signaling to Google that your ad wasn’t a good result for that search, making it less likely to be shown to the next person. Plus, you’re hurting your click-through rate (CTR) by adding to the impressions but not the clicks.

2. Monkeying with the Campaign Too Often

Constantly tweaking your campaign? You truly need to be patient.

• Spotting Trends: Too many changes mean you can’t spot trends or collect usable data.
• Stable Data: Let your campaign run for a while to gather enough information for meaningful analysis.

3. Ignoring Negative Keywords

Negative keywords might sound like a downer, but they’re essential.

• Avoid Unwanted Traffic: Without negative keywords, you’re paying for traffic you don’t want.
• Pro Tip: Seasoned pros never skip this step, but it’s often overlooked by rookies. Don’t make that mistake!

4. Spending Too Little

We get it, you’re trying to be thrifty. But in PPC, being a penny-pincher can backfire. If you spend so little that you get nothing, 100% of your investment is wasted.

• Traffic Threshold: If you don’t spend enough, you won’t get enough traffic to matter. Spending $10/day when each click costs $8 means you’re getting a maximum of 1 click per day.
• Conversions: As a rough rule of thumb, it takes about 10 clicks to get an action. At this rate, you’re looking at 10 days for a single conversion and maybe 3 per month. Is that really worth it?

5. Not Protecting Your Trademark

Your business name is valuable—protect it!

• Register Your Trademark: Register your business name as a trademark with Google. This will stop others from buying traffic using your name.

6. Accepting Google’s Defaults and AI Suggestions

Google’s default settings and AI suggestions can be tempting, but be cautious.

• Overspending: Google’s recommendations benefit Google first. That often means overspending on traffic for you.
• Optimization Score: You need to carefully consider which of their suggestions to accept. Blindly following the AI can drain your budget fast.

7. Geotargeting Problems

Finding the right balance in geotargeting is crucial.

• Too Small or Too Large: Targeting too small of an area can limit your audience, while too large of an area can waste your budget.
• Proper Targeting: Make sure your campaign’s geotargeting is just right for your goals.

8. Running Two Campaigns at the Same Time

Thinking of running two PPC campaigns for the same website? Think again.

• No A/B Test: Google doesn’t see this as an A/B test. Instead, they see it as abuse.
• Google’s Wrath: If Google sees you doing this, they’ll shut down both campaigns and dream up unpleasant things you’ll need to do in order to get one of them back.

There you have it! By avoiding these common mistakes, you’ll be on your way to a successful PPC campaign. Remember, the key is to be thoughtful and strategic about your approach. Now go out there and make your PPC campaign shine! 🌟

Digital marketing breaks down into three main categories: PPC, SEO, and Social Media. Of course, there are many sub-categories, but these are the main three. Each one interacts with and influences the others, so it’s important to understand how they work together to best target your efforts. This post will focus on PPC and SEO and how they interact.

The TLDR Version

• SEO makes PPC cheaper
• PPC makes SEO faster

Order of Operations

We always suggest that people get their SEO house in order first. This typically means a decent cash outlay upfront to get some groundwork laid. The downside of SEO is that you have to spend money before seeing results. However, once you do, your spend is much less over time than with PPC. SEO takes time to ramp up because many moving parts need to come together and start working in harmony. You can think of SEO like building a house: you need to spend money on the foundation before building the walls, roof, and floors. But once the house is done, your expenditure drops significantly. Over a long timeline, your costs will generally be lower than if you just rented the whole time.

PPC starts working faster and requires less upfront commitment, but it remains an expensive way to get traffic forever. This is the rental model previously mentioned. That means you are in the same situation on day 5 as you are on day 555. Sure, you avoided the upfront costs, but you never get the benefits of ownership over time.

Why Do SEO First?

Several factors determine your CPC (cost per click) for a PPC campaign. One of the most significant is how well the content of the page you’re sending traffic to matches the search that was performed. If a user clicks on your ad for “green chairs” but you send them to a page all about “orange donkeys,” you’re going to pay what I like to call the “stupid tax.” Google will let you do it, but they will charge you heavily for that mismatched click. You want to ensure that you’re showing the user something all about “green chairs” so you don’t spend 3x or 10x the amount on that click due to the “stupid tax.”

How to Avoid the “Stupid Tax”

This is a simple, if not entirely easy, problem to solve. You need to ensure you have a well-optimized landing page for every ad you run in your PPC campaign. That means spending time writing this content, putting it on your site, and ensuring it’s properly linked in the menus, footers, body text, etc. By doing this SEO work, you will save a ton of money on your PPC ad spend. This is the main reason why we say you must do SEO first.

Once you’ve optimized your site for all the search terms you need to rank for, you can start running PPC to drastically speed up the timeline. This is because SEO takes weeks, if not months or years, to ramp up your traffic. PPC can do this in a day. That’s not to say you’re likely to see peak performance in a day, but you will see something on day one, and it will move up quickly from there. Once you dial in your ad rotations, keywords, negative keywords, geographic targeting, etc., you will see your traffic move up quickly.

A Rule of Thumb to Remember

Everyone asks how much to budget for a given campaign. Typically, you can estimate with this rule of thumb: 100 impressions will produce 10 clicks, which will produce 1 contact. That means you need to be prepared to spend 10x the CPC for each contact you want to make. Assuming you will close 25% of your contacts, you need to spend 10 x 4 x CPC to get where you want to be. Let’s assume your CPC is $10, and you need 5 jobs per week. That breaks down into:

• 5 jobs/week x 4 weeks = 20 jobs/month
• 20 jobs x 4 contacts x $10 CPC = $800/month

Of course, all these numbers are pulled from thin air and may be very different from your situation, but you can see how this rough math is done.

Timelines

Again, we’ll use a couple of rules of thumb here, so please realize that your mileage may vary. That said, you shouldn’t bother with an SEO campaign unless you plan to give it at least 90 days. That’s truly the bare minimum to even be worth a try. There are many things that have to happen to kick off one of these, and many of those are outside of what your SEO provider controls. It takes time to build a site, write the content, create graphics, and start building some backlinks. That, however, is the stuff your SEO company controls. From there, those backlinks often require approval from the site owner, and Google needs to crawl/index/discover your site and catalog its contents. That same discovery needs to happen for every one of those profile pages and backlinks that the SEO company created, which also takes time. Then Google will spend time processing and cleaning the data it just scraped and run tests on it to ensure it’s ready for production. Once they do all that, they start to release it out to the world. All of that takes significant time.

PPC is pretty close to instantaneous, but still isn’t. Yes, you can throw together a basic campaign in under an hour, but it won’t be optimized, so the performance will not be great. Great campaigns require the writing of many ads and rotating through them as you discover which ones perform well and which don’t. The same goes for keyword choices. It’s important to remember that you have to give a new campaign at least 30 days to draw even the earliest conclusions. If your campaign has a large budget, you can accelerate the timeline because you’ll have more data to work with. If it’s small, you might have to wait a few months to really see how it’s going. It’s important to make sure you’re making decisions based on data sets that are sufficiently large to capture trends and anomalies. If you bail out of an ad because 3 of 5 people didn’t click, you have made a horribly rash decision with no statistically significant data backing you up. A good bare-minimum number to keep in mind is 100. If you don’t have at least 100 impressions, you know literally nothing about what’s happening. Even at 100 impressions, you know only very slightly more than nothing. Be patient.

By following these guidelines and understanding how PPC and SEO interact, you can better target your digital marketing efforts and achieve more effective results.

To adapt the warm-up process for a weekly newsletter, you need to segment your email list so that each address receives only one email per week while still ramping up your daily send volume. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to manage your lists and create a sending schedule.

Step-by-Step Guide to Weekly Warm-Up with Segmentation

1. Pull Your Total List from the Database
   • Assume you have a list with columns for Email and FirstName. You will add a new column Day to segment the list into seven parts, one for each day of the week.
2. Segment Your Email List
   • To segment the list, add numbers 1 through 7 in the Day column, repeating this pattern for the entire list. This will assign each email to a specific day of the week.
3. Create a Sending Calendar
   • Develop a sending calendar to manage your segments based on the desired volume. Here’s how you can structure it:

Example Segmentation Table

Example Sending Schedule

Assuming you want to send 20,000 emails per week, with half on Tuesday and half on Thursday, your segmentation and sending schedule can look like this:

Week 1

• Monday: Mon-50
• Tuesday: Tue-100
• Wednesday: Wed-200
• Thursday: Thu-500
• Friday: Fri-1000
• Saturday: Sat-1500
• Sunday: Sun-2000

Week 2

• Tuesday: Tue2-3000
• Thursday: Thu2-5000

Week 3

• Tuesday: Tue3-8000
• Thursday: Thur3-10000

Week 4

• Tuesday: Tue4-10000
• Thursday: Thur3-10000

Adjusting the Schedule for Weekly Newsletters

1. Repeat for Each Day
   • Continue this pattern, making sure to adjust the volume based on your warm-up schedule while ensuring each email address only receives one email per week.
2. List Segmentation and Rotation
   • Use the Day column to create segmented lists for each day of the week. Ensure no individual subscriber gets more than one email per week by rotating the segments.

Conclusion

By following this detailed segmentation and sending schedule, you can effectively warm up your email list while maintaining high engagement and preventing subscriber fatigue. This approach helps rebuild your sender reputation in a structured and manageable way. Remember, consistency and high-quality content are crucial for long-term success.

Maintaining a good sender reputation is crucial for ensuring your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes. However, mistakes happen, and sometimes, you may find your domain and IP reputation damaged, leading to your emails being marked as spam, especially by providers like Gmail. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to repair your email reputation effectively.

Understanding the Situation

When your IP and domain reputation suffer, it can feel tempting to switch to a new IP or domain. However, this can often do more harm than good, as switching can appear suspicious to email providers and lead to further issues, a practice known as “snowshoe spamming.” Instead, it’s crucial to focus on rebuilding your reputation with a strategic and gradual approach.

Common Pitfalls Leading to Bad Reputation

Even if you’re not a spammer, you might end up with a bad sender reputation due to innocent mistakes:

1. Uploading the Wrong List of Data
   • Accidentally sending emails to the wrong list can result in high bounce rates and spam complaints.
2. Data Manipulation Errors
   • Correcting typos in your CRM can sometimes invalidate email addresses, leading to massive bounces.
3. Overzealous New Employees
   • New team members might scrape the internet for email addresses or buy inappropriate data, adding it to your lists and causing reputation damage before you realize it.

Step-by-Step Guide to Rebuild Your Reputation

1. 1. Stop All Email Sending
      • The first and most crucial step is to stop all email sending immediately. This allows the negative reputation cycle to reset. You need to wait for a full 30 days without sending any emails. This period helps clear the negative marks from your reputation score.
   2. Prepare for the Warm-Up Process
      • Once the 30-day period is over, you can begin the warm-up process. This involves gradually increasing your email sending volume to rebuild your reputation. Here’s a recommended warm-up schedule:
        • Day 1: Send 50 emails
        • Day 2: Send 100 emails
        • Day 3: Send 100 emails
        • Day 4: Send 500 emails
        • Day 5: Send 1,000 emails
        • Day 6: Send 2,000 emails
        • Day 7: Send 5,000 emails
        • Day 8: Send 8,000 emails
        • Day 9: Send 12,000 emails
        • Day 10: Send 16,000 emails
   3. Focus on Engagement
      • Engagement is a critical factor in rebuilding your reputation. Aim to send emails that encourage positive actions such as:
        • Replies: Ask questions or include call-to-actions that prompt a response.
        • Clicks on Links: Include engaging and relevant links that subscribers will want to click on.
        • Marking as Important: Encourage subscribers to mark your emails as important or star them in their inbox.
      • Craft your email content to be highly engaging and valuable to your subscribers to increase these positive interactions.
   4. Segment Your Email List
      • To avoid overwhelming your subscribers and causing high unsubscribe rates, segment your email list. Each segment should receive emails according to the warm-up schedule without individuals receiving too many emails too frequently. For example, if you were sending weekly newsletters, continue to do so, but rotate different segments of your list to match the warm-up volume.
   5. Monitor Your Progress
      • Use tools like Gmail Postmaster Tools to monitor your email performance and reputation. Keep an eye on metrics such as spam complaints, bounce rates, and engagement rates. Adjust your strategy as needed based on these insights.
   6. Maintain Consistency
      • Consistency is key. Stick to your warm-up schedule and gradually increase your email volume while maintaining high engagement rates. Avoid sudden spikes in email volume, which can trigger spam filters.

Recommended Tools for Rebuilding Reputation

1. • Google’s Sender Guidelines (support.google.com/)
     • While this isn’t a “tool” per se, it’s important to understand the content of this post. If you send 5,000 messages in a single day, you’ll be labeled a “bulk sender” and have additional rules to follow. Read and understand this post before you tackle your reputation repair project (or sooner, ideally.)
   • Google Postmaster Tools (postmaster.google.com)
     • This is essential for getting an accurate view of your reputation with Gmail. Relying solely on the reputation score provided by your email service provider can be misleading. For example, SendGrid might show a high score while Google’s Postmaster Tools indicate a low reputation.
   • Deliverability Testing Tools (Mail-tester)
     • These tools help ensure your email content avoids words and phrases that can trigger spam filters. While we have no affiliation with any specific tool, using them can significantly improve your deliverability.
   • Email Validation Tools
     • Validating your email lists is crucial to (among other things) avoid sending to honeypot traps. Email honeypots are dormant email addresses set up to catch spammers. Sending to these addresses can severely damage your reputation. There are many providers available, so shop around for the best pricing and service.

Adjusting the Warm-Up Period for Weekly Newsletters

If you send weekly newsletters, adjust the warm-up period accordingly. You don’t want to suddenly start sending daily emails to subscribers expecting weekly or monthly updates. Optimize for the daily send volume while ensuring each address only receives one email per week. This can be done with proper list segmentation and rotation. For a detailed example of how you might do this, check out this blog post.

Conclusion

Repairing your email reputation is a manageable process that requires patience and a strategic approach. By stopping all sends for 30 days, gradually increasing your volume, focusing on engagement, and closely monitoring your progress, you can effectively rebuild your reputation and ensure your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Remember, consistency and high-quality content are your best allies in this journey.

Did you know that your competitors can buy PPC ads on YOUR name? That’s right, they can pay for ads to run on searches for YOUR name and then appear ahead of you on the page because of it!

In many cases, you can stop this from happening. Google provides a way for you to report infringing ads and even to prevent them in the future. This article outlines some of the details.

If you have a unique name, getting trademark protection will be easier than if you have something generic. For example, “John Smith’s Plumbing Services” will be much more likely to attain these protections than “Professional Plumbing Service of Houston” because the former uses a unique name while the latter uses a bunch of keywords strung together.

If you’re using an outsourced marketing company to run your Google Ads, this process is something they should be on top of and may have already completed for you. It’s worth reaching out to find out. In the event that they have no idea what you’re talking about, this might be a bright red flag that your vendor isn’t as high-quality as you might have previously thought. That realization might lead you to question what other industry-standard information they are not aware of.

If you find yourself in the position of needing to make a change, we’re always here to help. Feel free to reach out to us for advice or to get going with a campaign. We even give you the option to sign up for a Google Ads campaign online, at your own convenience.