In this final module amit goes into detail on the advanced bid optimization techniques that tells you exactly when and how to adjust your bids, and by how much.

At the end of the day, this is not rocket science but after years of experience, amit has perfected the exact time when you should either raise your price or lower your price which is particularly good and gave me one of those “a ha” moments.

Each keyword should be looked at as being either – high converting, mid converting and low converting – amit explains what this means and then you need to either raise or lower your bids based on this information (after having statistically significant results)

A lot of the science involved in bid optimiztion relies on one thing – not being emotional. Amit explains below:

All the bid optimizations I’ve discussed in this module are very easy to implement. What’s shocking is that even when presented with such a simple cookie-cutter approach to campaign optimization, most affiliates will still fail.
Why is that? Their emotions get in the way. Seriously. Let’s say you just launched a campaign, and it’s going well. It’s been breaking even for a week. You decide to wait another three weeks before you start optimizing your bids.
Now let’s say you get hit with a bad day. You have the same level of traffic, but it results in zero or very few sales. How should you react?
Here are a few possibilities:

- A. Pause your campaign, and wait two days before you restart.
- B. Lower your bids by 50%. You can’t keep losing money, can you?
- C. Shut down your campaign. Obviously this offer doesn’t convert any more!
- D. Realize that on any given day, your conversation rate can fluctuate drastically. You make no changes to your campaign and continue to patiently collect conversion data.

Now if you chose D, then you’re right. However, would you really choose D? I mean, you just lost $300 that day. Out of the blue, your campaign conversion rate dropped! Shouldn’t you do something? The fact is, affiliates who choose options A, B, or C have let fear grip them. This type of fear will keep them from properly bid optimizing their campaign. In many cases, their campaign will never achieve profitability.

If you would like to know more about bid optimization and ppc classroom 2.0, head on over to their main page where you can sign up for their free content when they reopen starting with the relaunch on February 9th.

When you launch your adwords campaign, you can have one of 4 scenarios as discussed in my review of module 7. Let’s assume you have scenario 1 or 2, i.e. you have traffic and are making sales, it is now time to properly split test which is what amit goes into in this module.

Amit goes into a lot of detail with google ads, landing pages and focuses on the 4 critical elements on your landing page that you need to split test as well as the importance of understanding what statistically significant means as explained below:

As mentioned, a new PPC campaign should be set up to contain at least two ads per ad group. You need to know which ad will convert the best, etc.
Essential to this process is the ability to be able to collect statistically relevant data. In order to collect the data correctly you need to the set the “Ad Serving” option to Rotate.
This campaign setting ensures that both of the ads will be displayed equally, and will give you the chance to check which of the ads has the highest CTR.
You see, Google sees your ad as more relevant if more people are clicking on it. Since Google wants to give their visitors the most relevant results, they reward ads that generate high CTR (versus competing ads).
Taking this a step further, you can also split test your landing page for improved conversions. Don’t underestimate how powerful this can be. You can potentially double or triple your conversion rate by just changing the headline on your landing page!

Split testing and statistically significant results

Let’s start by talking about split testing your Google ads. Say you’re split testing two ads with the following stats:

Ad 1: Clicks: 7, CTR: 2.0
Ad 2: Clicks: 4, CTR: 1.5

Now, clearly Ad 1 is the winner, right? After all, it has significantly higher CTR.
Well, let’s let the above ads run longer to see if Ad 1 is really the winner. Here’s what we end up with:

Ad 1: Clicks 32, CTR: 1.54
Ad 2: Clicks 54, CTR: 2.22

WOW! What happened? Ad 1 was supposed to be the winner, but after letting the ads run longer, Ad 1 turned out to be a total loser. Making decisions based on poor statistics is a big reason many affiliates fail to successfully optimize their campaigns. Do not fall into this trap

This certainly makes you think and you can use the tool at http://www.splittester.com to check on your google ads. In order to test different landing pages, amit also shows you how to use a tool to assist which automatically can divert your traffic to different landing pages. Note: you can see this tool in action when you sign up to his free email content as he uses it there!

If you would like to know more about split testing and ppc classroom 2.0, head on over to their main page where you can sign up for their free content when they reopen starting with the ppc classroom 2.0 relaunch on February 9th.

You have built your adwords campaign and you set it to active – this is the point where you can have a success or a failure. What do you do next!

When you launch your campaign, amit works through the 4 different scenarios for every launch and how do you decide whether the adwords campaign is a success or not. The 4 scenarios are pretty well clear to everyone:

1. Lots of traffic and lots of sales – BINGO
2. Some traffic and some sales
3. Some traffic and no sales
4. Almost no traffic

Amit explains that regardless of the scenario, there is work to do – even if you are making sales. Looking at one of the scenarios – scenario 2 below, amit gives an example of what you should do

In this scenario, you’re getting a good amount of traffic; however, your conversion rate is woefully bad. You’re spending $200 per day but making only $50-$100 per day in sales, WAY below break even.
If this is the case, then here’s what may be the problem:

Are all your ads in position 1 or 2? If so then you’re bidding too high. You’re getting a ton of click-happy visitors and paying through the nose for it. Drop your bids by 30% (or more) across the board and reassess your campaign.
How targeted are your keywords? Check to see what keywords you are bidding on, and how targeted they are to your offer. If you have a lot of junk keywords in your list, they could be killing your conversion rate, especially if you’re getting a ton of traffic from these keywords.
Do Your Google ads make sense? Poorly written Google ads can also kill your conversions. Check to see if you’re following all the guidelines for writing Google ads I talked about in Module 4. Also, imagine you’re a visitor seeing your ad for the first time. Does it make sense? How does it compare to your competitor ads?
Your landing page may be poor. If you’re having doubts about your landing page, upload a set of ads that directly link to your merchant site and that are identical to your original ads (expect for the display URL, of course). This way, you can quickly test if your landing page is the problem by comparing your landing page conversion rate to the conversion rates you’re getting with direct linking.

All very good advice and I particulalry appreciate his advice as to when to suspend your campaign as he gives you clear advice atwhat point you need to move on

For now, you cannot buy ppc classroom 2.0yet but you can sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch on Febuary 9th. You will be given lots of additional content on pay per click in this launch so be ready.

Google quality score

The google quality score is probably the most misunderstood part of google adwords and is the reason most affiliates give up on Google due to the impact quality score can have on your adwords campiagns.

The quality score was introduced by google to make sure that when a user clicks on paid ads, i.e. the ads on the top and right hand side of the search engine that they go to a page that shows relevant pages and products. The message from ami is that if you don’t get this right, forget adwords right now.

In pcc classroom 2.0 module 6, amit goes into a lot of detail and best practices focusing on a detailed breakdown of the four critical factors that make up the google quality score and in particular, the information that amit has worked out over the years which help your quality score. Reviewing amit’s tips and tricks, you can see that amit has been doing this for a long time and some of his ideas are now being incorporated into other products such as Get Money From Google which also deals with landing pages.

Explaining this in more detail, the reason the quality score is so important is explained by amit mehta below:

Quality score is the difference between a campaign with a poor quality score and a great quality score is often the difference between a campaign that’s losing money versus one that’s making money.
A poor quality score will force you to pay more per click, cutting directly into your ROI; that is, if you’re profitable at all.
What’s worse is that your minimum bids will be MUCH higher as well! High minimum bids will disable a lot of your keywords and reduce the amount of traffic you can buy.
If you have a “low quality” landing page in Google’s eyes, then your minimum bids will go up to $5-$10 and you will get ZERO traffic. On the other hand, if you have a great landing page quality score, then you can expect to get discounted clicks and have 90% or more of your keywords active and getting traffic.

Competitive Advantage

Having a great quality score (compared to your competition) gives you a HUGE competitive advantage. You’re not just paying LESS per click for the same keywords; you’re getting a lot more traffic since you’re also showing up for keywords your competitors are not.
Here are the three areas you need to focus on in order to get the best possible quality score:
1. Properly setting up your campaign (as I discussed in Module 4)
2. Split testing your ads for high CTR
3. Building an affiliate site that will get a good landing page QS

For now, head on over to ppc classroom to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from what is now February 9th. You will be given lots of additional content on pay per click in this launch so be ready.

Landing pages are now crucial for pay per click programs and the old way of direct linking to offer pages is becoming more and more dead which is why a good landing page is crucial to your success.
To understand why you need a landing page, I will leave it to amit mehta to explain:

Believe it or not, most new affiliates really don’t understand what a landing page is, which is why their first “landing page” often has a terrible conversion rate.

The Goal of a Landing Page

The purpose of an affiliate landing page is to presell your visitor to click on your affiliate link and make a conversion. A “conversion” in this case can be filling out a form, signing up for a service, making a product purchase, downloading a software program, etc. Depending on the affiliate offer you’re promoting, you are paid a commission when your visitor takes one of these actions.
Your entire landing page should be focused on the ONE goal of persuading your visitor to click through to the merchant site and take action. ANYTHING that distracts the visitor from this ONE goal will hurt your conversion rate.
Here’s how I like to break it down. The two MOST important qualities of a high-converting landing page are:

Relevance: All content on the page MUST be directly relevant and highly focused on the one goal of converting the visitor. What’s more, the more relevant your landing page is to your Google ad and keywords (the visitor typed in) the higher your conversion rate will be.

Clarity: The very second the visitor hits your landing page, it should be immediately clear to that visitor what the page is about. If the visitor has to think, for even a moment, about what your landing page is about, they will hit the back button faster than you can say “pay per
click!” That’s not a joke; I’m being dead serious.

Keep this in mind: Relevancy and clarity are MORE important than having a landing page that looks professional.

Landing page types

In ppc classroom 2.0, you are provided a range of different landing pages styles as one of the ppc classroom 2.0 bonuses which gives you different templates. You are provided all the types of templates that you will need for different pay per click offers such as pay per lead, squeeze, product pages, review style landing pages and straight forward sales pages. All of these landing page templates are excellent quality and I have personally used these in my pay per click programs.
In module 5, amit works through these types of landing pages and looks at examples explaining what works well and most importantly the key things that you need to do to make a successful landing page, e.g. what font size should you use, where to out the key content and what type of images to use – very specific advice which must be used by you.

Landing page copywriting tips

it is very important that you look at your landing page as though it is a true sales page and use copywriting as if it was your own product you are selling, amit works thorugh all the major items that need to be on your landing page and provided 10 key copywriting tips that will really optimise your success.

Thorughout ppc classroom 2.0 module 5, there are a large number of case studies giving you advice and knowledge as to what works best and what you should avoid which really shows the power of this product

Anyway, onto the next module now, ppc classroom 2.0 will be reopening on February 24th so sign on up now for the pre-launch ready for the re-opening.

How to upload Your adwords campaign

This is an invaluable section showing you the tools to build your campaign. Amit works through examples using a step-by-step approach using excel and including video tutorials to show you exactly what you need to do for an example being muscle building. It is very good and Amit provides you with an invaluable add on for excel to assist with the process – this is a key utility and the manipulation that you do with this utility provides a feed for the program to upload your adwords campaign into adwords rather than keying everything in manually.

If you want to be successful with pay per click then the tool that Amit promotes which is a freely available tool actually is mandatory – the step-by-step approach for using this tool is excellent and really shows you exactly what you need to do to get your campaign uploaded and ready to activate. This tool really saves you lots of time as what ppc classroom 2.0 really focuses on is the one keyword per adgroup and you couldn’t do this without using a tool and excel.

Setting the price and how much to spend

OK, you have successfully uploaded your adwords campaign and want to start to promote your offer. Well, now you have to decide how much to spend per click and how do you know if you are going to be successful or not.
Amit gives you here a very good model to work out what you should pay per click, focusing on your conversion and working out how you are going to promote it. This is very helpful and again helps you save money on adwords but even more importantly a method on how to know if you have been successful or not – in otherwords how to track whether your spend is worth it or not.

All in all, module 4 is a very important module and the stepped approach to set-up your adwords campaign and all your pay per click data is critical to be successful.

For now, head on over to ppc classroom to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from February 1st. You will be given lots of additional content on pay per click in this launch so be ready.

This is where the meat of ppc classroom 2.0 begins and I like it. It is an extensive module covering all the steps on how to set-up your adwords campaign. I have split this post into two as there is a lot of material to cover.

Filtering keywords and negative keywords

Module 4 starts off discussing filtering your keywords and negative keywords which eliminates a lot of wasted adwords spend and helps your click through rate which in turn helps your quality. Negative keywords is critical and you should spend as much time on this as your main keyword list.

Segmenting keywords

The module then moves onto segmenting your keyword list which helps you with your upcoming creation of your ad groups. What I like about this is really how important going broad rather than deep is first. you are given advice in how to do your segmentation with examples and the use of one particular tool to do the segmentation

Structuring your adwords campaign

This is the key to successful pay per click and is where you set-up your campaigns with the whole method aiming to be one keyword per one ad group per segment. The reason is as follows:

The key to success with PPC is to be as granular and as relevant as possible. The more tightly you can target your keywords to your ad and landing page the better.
Here’s how being super relevant and granular with your AdWords campaign will benefit you:
Your CTR will be higher. Going back to the Inhabitliving.com example, if someone types in “modern feather pillows” and sees an ad about “modern feather pillows,” then they’re more likely to click on it then a generic ad about bedroom accessories.
Your conversion rate will be higher. Think about it. If you’re searching for “modern pillows,” you see an ad for “modern pillows,” and you’re then taken to a page about “modern pillows,” will you be more likely to buy than if you were just taken to the home page of inhabitliving.com from a completely generic ad that didn’t even mention modern pillows??
Your Quality Score will be higher. If your ad is tightly related to your keywords (keyword in the headline), and your landing page theme is related to your keywords, then you’ll get an excellent Google Quality Score right off the bat.

Now you may be thinking: “Amit, this sounds great. BUT it also sounds like an impossible amount of work to setup one keyword per ad group and two unique ads per ad group. What gives?”
That’s a great point; if you did this manually through the AdWords GUI, then it would take you a good few weeks to set up even a modest campaign.

However, later I’m going to show you an automated way in which you can set up a highly targeted, one-keyword-per-ad-group campaign in a matter of 20-30 minutes, whether your campaign has 200 keywords or 20,000 keywords…

Google Adwords Ad Creation

Continuing this module you go into detail about writing ads and learning the key tips to writing successful ads – what phrases to use, what you should not do and some very good examples of effective ads. In fact one of the bonuses you get is 101 successful ads which is excellent to give you ideas.
Would love to hear your comments on pcc classroom 2.0 if you already have bought it or please ask me any questions you have and I will be happy to answer them. For now, head on over to ppc classroom to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from February 1st.

This is a very short chapter and addresses the pros and cons of direct linking versus landing pages predominantly and there really is no option – to be successful, you need to use landing pages however there is still a case for direct linking as is explained in the course.

But where are landing pages going, this excerpt shows exactly where and is covered in a lot of detail:

From the direction I see this industry headed, I believe building valueadded affiliate sites, and not just one-page landing pages or direct linking, is the KEY to sustained profitability. Why? PPC search engines, especially Google, are moving increasingly towards a convergence between paid search (PPC) and natural search.

This means that if you want to rank well and have a good quality score on the PPC side of the equation, you need to have a site that will also do well on the free search engine side of the equation.
What does that mean? In so many words, you need a niche authority site that has substantial
compelling content that will bring people back to the site over and over and will want to link to it. “But Amit, it will take years to build something like that!” Well, you better get started then! Your first step is to find a profitable niche in which you’re making at
least $500-$1,000 per day in profit through PPC, for a quality product or service that will be around for a long time.

Would love to hear your comments on pcc classroom 2.0 if you already have bought it or please ask me any questions you have and I will be happy to answer them. For now, head on over to ppc classroom to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from Febuary 1st.

Straight from the beginning, there is an important concept to grasp regarding keyword research which is the number one reason most people fail with adwords and that is deep keyword lists vs broad keyword lists. This is explained below in an excerpt from ppc classroom module 2.0:

To illustrate this critical mistake, let me walk you through a simple example.
Back when I was a newbie I decided to promote a spyware remover offer from ClickBank. I cracked open my Wordtracker.com account and typed “spyware” in the search box.
I downloaded a total of around 500 keywords, which I believed would get the most traffic based on Wordtracker’s search volume estimates.Now, I thought to myself: “Okay, I’m going to create a super-targeted AdWords campaign. That way I’ll have an advantage over most other affiliates so I can make big profits in this market.”

I then proceeded to spend several hours painstakingly creating targeted ad groups for this spyware campaign. I separated all the “spyware remover,” “spyware download,” “spyware cleaner,” and other search terms into separate ad groups with tightly targeted Google ad copy.
Lo and behold, my ad was on the bottom of page 2. I barely got any traffic, at $0.50 a click!
So I increased my bid and started receiving more traffic. However, based on my conversion rate and the amount I was paying per click, I was losing money like crazy, so I paused my campaign.
At the time I concluded that the spyware market was “saturated” and I moved on. Does this sound familiar?
So here’s my question to you: Was “market saturation” the real reason my campaign failed? No. The reason my campaign failed is because I made that ONE mistake I talked about earlier.

The mistake was with how I did my keyword research. The spyware keyword list that I dug with Wordtracker was a Deep Keyword List. Every single keyword in my list had the same root keyword, “spyware,” in it. Finding longer phrase variations of one root keyword (in this case,
spyware) is what I call going deep. When you go deep, you dig down to find all the different ways people are searching with the word “spyware” in their search phrase.
But there’s a fatal problem with these deep keyword lists…

When someone is looking to remove spyware from their computer, they may type in a search term that doesn’t have the word “spyware” in it at all.

Think about this for a minute. What other terms might they type in besides “spyware”?
For starters, there are different types/names of spyware: trojan, dialer, keylogger, malware, adware, browser hijacker, worm, backdoor, etc. There are also, literally, thousands of different spyware agents and rogue programs, such as w32.

Given that, someone looking to remove spyware from their computer may be typing these terms into Google:

Remove trojan
Delete worm
Destroy keylogger
Erase w32

As you can see, someone who searches for spyware removal in this case may not necessarily use the keyword “spyware.”
If I were to launch an affiliate campaign in the spyware market again, I would start out with a keyword list that looks more like this:

delete adware
delete backdoor
delete browser hijacker
destroy dialer
destroy keylogger
destroy malware
destroy spyware
destroy toolbar
find adware
find backdoor
ETC.

This is what I call a BROAD keyword list. Putting together a broad keyword list like the one above is what I call “going wide.”

A broad keyword list contains a diverse array of related, more specific, and lateral keywords. These keywords may include:

- Synonymous keywords (malware, adware)
- More specific terms and names (Trojan, browser hijacker, etc)
- Specific lists of terms (names of all the different spyware agents and rogue
programs out there, such as w32 etc.).

And this is just the beginning of ppc classroom 2.0 module 2. It then goes into talking about the keywrod tools you should use and believe it or not the main one to use is free and the other one is a must have so you can spy on your competitors keywords which gives you a great advantage in building a keyword list without all the heartache and testing.

I am very impressed with module 2’s content as it really shows where most people including myself beforehand were going wrong with keyword research. Broad keyword lists are the key and start using your lateal thoughts to generate keywords rather than going deep straight away – oh and by the way, the free ppc keyword tool that is recommended to use is made by none other than the owner of AdWords if you know what I mean!!!!!
Would love to hear your comments on pcc classroom 2.0 if you already have bought it or please ask me any questions you have and I will be happy to answer them. For now, head on over to ppc classroom 2.0 to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from Febuary 1st.

This module goes into depth looking firstly at Clickbank, then at Commission Junction and tells you what you need to look for from each of these networks such as gravity, earnings per click etc. This is important for you in that you can remove any dead wood products before you start so you don’t waste any money on adwords as it can go quickly if you are not careful.
These two networks are the most important but not the only ones and advice is given on different networks plus advice on whether it is a good offer for the search network or the content network which is very useful and something I hadn’t really considered before.

Here is an exceprt from pcc classroom 2.0 module 1:

Is EPC an important metric to look at when deciding what offer to promote? Yes, but it’s NOT the only factor you should consider. EPC is really meaningful only within a given niche and whether the offer pays per lead or per sale.
Here’s what I mean. If you’re looking at mortgage offers that pay you every time someone fills out a form (called pay per lead), then you can expect a very high EPC, since the conversion rate on filling out a form will be HIGH. On top of that, mortgage offers have a high payout.

However, the average you can expect to pay per click in the mortgage market is MUCH higher than you can expect to pay if you’re trying to sell business supplies through vistaprint.com.

Why is this important? Because of this formula…

Profit per Click = EPC – CPC
(where CPC = Cost per Click)

What’s important is that the difference between your EPC and your CPC is your profit.

Disclaimer: Be sure to pay attention to the particular terminology used by the affiliate network. If you are promoting another affiliate program, then please look closely at the terminology used. For example, Azoogle, a popular CPA (cost per acquisition) network uses ECPC which is earnings per 100 clicks. So be sure to pay attention!

As you can see, pretty detailed content and that is just one paragraph in module 1. Where this module also got interesting to me is with your mindset and the fact that you have power – think about it, if you are promoting a product as an affiliate you are spending your money to drive sales for them. Why don’t you contact the affiliate manager of the product and ask them to help you by asking questions such as does this product promote well through paid search, how much do their top affiliates make per month and so on. Makes you think.

Anyway, my opinion of this module which gives you the initial groundwork and metrics to know what to look for is that it is good and sets you up nicely for the meat of pcc classroom 2.0 which is in the the following modules, starting with module 2.

Would love to hear your comments on pcc classroom 2.0 if you already have bought it or please ask me any questions you have and I will be happy to answer them. For now, head on over to ppc classroom to sign up to be notified when they reopen starting with the relaunch from Febuary 1st.