As a long-time PPC affiliate marketer, I am always looking for tools and methods to help me maintain a competitive edge. I recently found out about SpeedPPC, a software program and system that claims to ‘revolutionize’ pay per click affiliate marketing. I hear similar claims on a daily basis, but decided to take a look.
Let me say up front, I am a skeptic. Having been in this business for over 5 years, I have developed my own ‘hype detector’. I have also learned that there are no “magic bullets”. Successful affiliate marketing requires understanding and smart application of effective tactics.
Let me also say that SpeedPPC is clearly NOT a tool for “beginners”. However, SpeedPPC is an incredibly powerful affiliate marketing tool in the right hands. When I first saw the sales material, I wasn’t too excited. The site has a cleverly produced video, which usually turns me off. Too often, “softness” is a means of shoring up a mediocre product.
In fact, it took me reading the entire site to ‘get’ what the program actually did and was intended for. At first glance, it seemed to be a program to ‘automate’ the process of launching thousands of PPC campaigns. I bet most people who saw the video and took a look at the site were left with the same impression. That misses the point entirely, and I think the company would be better served by clearly stating the basic “purpose” of the program.
One thing that stood out to me was the ‘disclaimers’ sprinkled throughout the site – the reality is that SpeedPPC is for those just getting started with PPC. Using the program and taking advantage of its capabilities requires at least a basic understanding of the mechanics of Adwords: ad groups, Quality Score and “destination URL”.
A hypothetical scenario will illustrate the dilemma every PPC marketer faces and how software like SpeedPPC could address the problem:
I sign up as a CheapAudioBooks.com affiliate and decide to create an ad to promote one of their audiobooks. I create a single ad with the name of the book I want to promote in the ad title. For that ad, I bid on a single keyword, the same book title. The destination URL of that ad goes to a custom landing page that has the title of the book in the meta tags for page title, description, and keyword. The text on the home page begins with the title of the book and mentions it throughout.
The result is a “dream campaign”, an advertising campaign with the highest possible Quality Score, the lowest possible cost per click (CPC), and the highest possible sales conversion.
The problem is that it took me a long time, too long, to even consider expanding it or doing it on a more profitable basis. While this level of tight coupling between ad group, ad, keyword, and landing page allows a marketer to create the most targeted ad and receive the lowest CPC from Google, customizing an ad campaign at that level it takes so much time that it is not practical in any worthwhile case. scale.
Now I switch to SpeedPPC: I create two ad templates, perhaps one with the title of the book in the title and the author in the body of the ad, and one the other way around, with the author’s name in the title and the title of the book in the body. Next, I get the data feed from CheapAudioBook.com. I decide that I am going to promote 1,000 audiobooks, the top 200 best sellers from each of the last 5 years.
In about 20 minutes, SpeedPPC has created 2,000 individual ad groups, 1,000 ad groups containing the ad by title/author, and 1,000 by author/title. Each ad group contains a keyword, the bestselling headline for that ad. The ad itself has the headline in the display URL and a unique destination URL.
The destination URL opens a dynamically created custom landing page with that ad’s bestselling headline embedded in the page’s meta tags and text, which then links to the specific product page within CheapAudioBooks.com.
Now you start to see the customization that a program like SpeedPPC [http://www.improveyourinternetmarketing.com/speedppc.htm] I can give you. When that level of campaign customization becomes possible, you naturally start to consider where else you can apply it. Among the things that came to mind almost immediately:
- Matching US city names with a dating offer “San Diego Dating”;
- Match the make and model of the printer with a printer supplies offer “HP 100C Toner for Sale”;
- Matching the 1000 most popular bands with a “Britney Spears New CD” music subscription offer
These possibilities are endless.
The video on the SpeedPPC website is worth watching [http://www.improveyourinternetmarketing.com/sppcvideo.htm], but to fully understand the program, you should read the case study examples on their site. If you’re serious about doing PPC on a more than casual level, SpeedPPC is definitely worth a look.