Four Easy Steps To Eliminating PPC Losses 

RESULT:  Highly optimized keyword list, with profits improving each week. If you repeat the process for 12 weeks, most (if not all) loss-making keywords should have been eliminated, leaving only profitable keywords.
Total effort required: just 9 minutes!

Note that this timeframe is based on using a low-cost PPC campaign, to keep costs down while we are exploring the profitability of the market. This is the strategy adopted by most successful PPC marketers when targeting a competitive market.

But if you want fast results and are prepared to pay more for your traffic - or if you've found a really good niche with lots of visitors available at low cost - you can potentially slash this whole process down to a just few days if you want.

When advertising using Google, your "quality score" determines how much you pay for clicks.

In simple terms, if your quality score is lower than someone else's, you'll pay more than them for the same keyword.

There are several factors in determining quality score - but the biggest factor is the number of times your ads get shown without getting clicked on.

This is not surprising really, since every time this happens, Google loses money.

PPC Oracle can help to improve your quality score automatically.

Four weeks into your campaign, PPC Oracle automatically discards your entire original keyword list and builds a completely new laser-targeted keyword list, only containing exact keywords that are attracting clicks.

This means that four weeks into your cycle, your ads are no longer shown for search terms that never attract clicks.

Over a period of time this will improve your quality score, automatically reducing your click costs.

  Precisely Target Click Costs For Increased Profits

PPC Oracle has one more amazing trick up its sleeve, which works with Google and any other PPC service that uses a compatible keyword list format.

Google allows you to include a separate maximum PPC cost for each individual keyword.

You can include this information in the keyword list that you paste into your PPC account.

This means you can bid more for keywords that are very profitable and less for keywords that are not so profitable.

PPC Oracle will automatically calculate how much you can afford to pay for each keyword and then include this information in your keyword list, optimizing your profits on a keyword by keyword basis.

Just paste the resulting keyword list into your PPC account and watch your profits increase automatically.

The example is for a PPC campaign to promote an ebook on "aquarium care" sold through the popular Clickbank affiliate system.

The minimum PPC cost (i.e. the lowest we are allowed to bid) is 5 cents. The ebook pays $8.72 commission on a $19.95 sale, so we're going to set the maximum sale cost as 700 cents ($7), since we want to make some profit.

For this example, we're going to use an initial keyword list with just a single keyword: aquarium care

This is a "broad match keyword" (i.e. it is not inside brackets or quotes), so it should match any search term that includes both the words "aquarium" and "care". For example, it should match "aquarium care goldfish" and "aquarium fish care".

In practice, on many PPC services, ads do not actually get shown for all terms that match a "broad match keyword". That's why most people use a keyword suggestion tool (such as the one built into Adwords accounts) to build a full list of related terms.

When setting up your own PPC campaigns, you'll probably want to use a more comprehensive list of keywords to start with. You can enter as many keywords as you want into your initial keyword list on PPC Oracle. However to keep this example simple, we'll just use the single keyword "aquarium care" as our initial keyword list.

Each week, we would visit the script admin page and paste in the details of any new sales (so the script knows what sales have been generated). This is simply a matter of visiting our Clickbank account and viewing a report for the past week, then using Clickbank's built-in CSV feature to download this report as a .csv file. We would then paste the data into a box on the script. In this case, we're only promoting one PPC campaign, but the sales data could include multiple campaigns promoting different Clickbank products - as well as sales not generated through PPC. We can still just paste the whole sales report into a box on PPC Oracle and it will analyze all the data and record each sale against the appropriate campaign and keyword automatically.

This example is for Clickbank, but the script can be used with any affiliate program that offers sales tracking. There is built-in support for affiliate programs operated by Commission Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale, MaxBounty, Clickbooth and CPA Empire. It's also easy to use it with any other service or affiliate program that allows affiliate sales tracking.

The script can also be used with product sales of your own products. In this case, it's not necessary to paste the sales information into the script each week. The script can get the sales information directly in real-time. You simply need to use the special Thank You Page Tool to update your thank you page - and then everything is fully automated.

Once the script has the sales information, we can click a single button on the script and PPC Oracle will instantly create a brand new keyword list to be pasted into our account on the PPC service. We repeat this process each week and our results should get better and better each time.

Detailed Analysis Of Campaign Performance

You can skip this bit if you want - but it will help you to understand how PPC Oracle performs its "magic".

The script automatically generates new keyword lists for us - without us needing to know how they were generated.

However the script does have features to show us all the information, so we can understand what is going on.

So to see what is going on, let's look at the PPC Oracle keyword statistics for our campaign after it has been running for 28 days. This is a list of the actual search terms entered by visitors who have clicked on our PPC ad. PPC Oracle determines all this information automatically. You can click a single button at any time to see a report like this for any campaign:

Keyword	Clicks	Sales
anubia aquarium care	46	0
aquarium acrylic care kit	198	5
aquarium care	861	18
aquarium care brown algae	37	0
aquarium care fish freshwater	147	2
aquarium care forum	148	0
aquarium care freshwater	77	2
aquarium care goldfish	345	12
aquarium care guide	124	3
aquarium care jackfish	99	3
aquarium care salt water	124	3
aquarium coral reef care	239	9
aquarium fish care	231	4
aquarium plant care	415	7
aquarium pump care	351	1
care for aquarium live plants	147	1
care freshwater aquarium	180	3
care of aquarium corals	22	0
care of fresh water aquarium fish	46	0
catfish care aquarium	57	0
coldwater aquarium care	344	3
discuss care of aquarium	183	0
easy to take care of aquarium fish	30	0
fish aquarium care	64	1
fish care aquarium	28	0
freshwater aquarium care	220	3
guppy care fresh water aquarium	116	1
home aquarium care	186	4
how to care for aquarium catfish	300	8
how to care for aquarium fish	169	5
how to care for aquarium plants	252	4
how to take care of an aquarium	17	0
marine aquarium care	122	2
salt water aquarium care and supplies	146	4
salt water aquarium care tips	118	3
saltwater aquarium care	269	8
saltwater aquarium care for beginners	70	2
sand shark care aquarium	199	2
take care of coral aquarium	283	5
tropical aquarium care	52	0
Totals	7062	128

You can see that in addition to just "aquarium care", there are lots of other terms that include the words "aquarium" and "care". We've paid for 7062 clicks and made 128 sales - but while some of the search terms have done really well, others have been a complete waste of money.

Now let's view a PPC Oracle analysis of our keywords: Again you can click a single button at any time to see a report like this for any campaign:

The script has split the search terms used by our visitors into three groups - profitable, undecided and unprofitable.

All the profitable keywords have a PPC price next to them. This is the maximum PPC price that we can pay for that keyword without exceeding $7 per sale. For our top performing search term "aquarium coral reef care", we can pay up to 26 cents, while for our weakest (but still profitable) terms, we can only pay up to 6 cents.

The undecided keywords have not yet received enough clicks for the script to determine whether they are profitable.

The unprofitable keywords are generating few if any sales with lots of clicks - and are losing us money.

The New Keyword List

Now let's see our new keyword list, generated automatically by the script: 

You can see that the script has removed our original generic keyword aquarium care (which matched any term containing the words "aquarium" and "care").

Instead we have a long list of exact match keywords (inside square brackets). This means that the PPC service will only show our ad when a visitor types one of the exact keywords into the search engine.

All our profitable search terms have a PPC cost next to them in the standard format used for Adwords. The PPC service (Google) will pick these costs up from the list and apply the relevant cost to each keyword. For each keyword, we may end up paying less than the maximum (depending on what other people have bid for the same keyword) - but we will never pay more than our maximum. This means that for our really good terms like "aquarium coral reef care", our ad should get a good position (so more sales), while our weaker terms have lower bids and may appear lower down the search results.

In addition to the profitable keywords, the list also includes the "undecided" keywords. These appear without a cost, so they will continue to use the default cost we set at the start of the campaign (until the script has sufficient data to determine the optimum cost). 

All our unprofitable keywords have been removed from our list and our ad will no longer be shown for those keywords, saving us money.

We can just paste this new keyword list straight into our account on the PPC service in place of the original keyword list.

Summary

Don't worry if you didn't understand any of this. I've only explained it in details so that you can see how the script works.

All you actually need to do is click the button to generate a new keyword list and then paste the new list into your Adwords account.