GunsAmerica
Pay Per Click Advertising

Introduction

Throughout most of the World Wide Web (otherwise known as the internet to most of us), you’ve seen ads hanging in the margins of the page for things related to what is in the main content of the page. These are mostly “served” by a company whose name starts with a G, rhymes with bugle, and is violently anti-gun.  They are so anti-gun that if you link your ad to a website selling guns, or sometimes even to one that promotes guns, the company will completely shut off your account.

GunsAmerica may not have the traffic of the company whose name rhymes with bugle, but we do have millions of gun owners and enthusiasts click through our website every month. Over the years they’ve grown to trust GunsAmerica as a champion of our industry and just like our Honor System revolutionized gun advertisements ten years ago, GunsAmerica Pay Per Click Advertising will revolutionize advertising, and the way advertising dollars are spent in the gun industry, today.

How it Works

We have structured the way you advertise in the common usage on the internet as a “campaign”. You can and probably will have many campaigns in your advertising portfolio.

Think of a campaign as a basket. Inside the basket are four things. An ad or ads, a list of places for your ad to appear, a price you are willing to pay per click (as opposed to view, which is not something you pay for), and a total budget for the campaign, tracked weekly, monthly or as a total cap.

The first thing in the basket is your advertisement(s), consisting of a text sales title and an optional sub-title, and linked to a page that you want people to read. Here is an example:

Custom Cowboy Holsters

Use this 24 hour discount code for free shipping!

That would be linked to either a page on your website, or a page you make that sits on GunsAmerica that has the relevant information.  This is the ad people will see on the page, the one that you hope they will click on.

That’s the first ad we’ll create for this campaign, the first thing in this basket. A campaign can contain as many advertisements as you like (which rotate equally across your views), and because the advertisements are managed separately from your campaigns, you can re-use advertisements for as many campaigns as you like, and the individual ads can be tracked across different campaigns for their success.

An advertisement will have its own name, which you will know it as but which will not be shown to the public. To follow this example, assuming our company always sells cowboy holsters, we’ll call this advertisement “24hr holster ship code”.

To begin this campaign, first we’ll select this ad for our basket (for now we won’t ad other ads to this campaign), and move to the next thing.

Next we will select where we think our ad should appear.

If you are on GunsAmerica you probably know that our “for sale” ads are split into a list of categories. Otherwise you’d have to scroll through 50,000 guns to find that Ruger Vaquero that didn’t turn up in your search because the seller misspelled it, Vaquearo.

So when you do a search on GunsAmerica, you have the option to just browse through the most likely categories the gun should show up, so you don’t miss one that may have been misspelled or mislabeled.

Likewise, with GunsAmerica Pay Per Click Advertising, you can put your ads in those same categories, and only in those categories.

And to make it easier, so you don’t have to crawl through going on 400 categories to find that ones that fit your product or service, GunsAmerica has pre-selected groups of categories that we call “families”.

In this case, we would filter using the Cowboy Action family, which brings up all the categories where you might see someone list a Vaquero, misspelled or not. One these categories are pre-selected, you can check and uncheck the ones that are for-sure hits, and that are marginal hits, where you might want to use up a view or not.

You are not limited to a family, nor are you required to even use one. Families are a tool to save you time and make your ads more efficient. For example, if I sold scope rings, I would probably select Hunting – Deer, as my first family to select from, then maybe ad Hunting – African to my list of selections to see if there are any categories I missed.

I could also forgo families altogether and filter my categories by the world Rifle in this case, and instantly be able to look through all the rifle categories to see where I think my ad can work.

For this example though, let’s stick with our cowboy holsters.

Now we’ve got two things in our basket, what we call here our campaign. We’ve got an ad (or a list of ads), and a list of GunsAmerica categories in which we want our ad to appear.

Next we need to decide what this advertising is worth to us, per click, and per week, month or as a total cap.

So say we assume that one out of ten people who click on our ad will go and buy a holster (that “conversion ratio” will greatly depend on your ability to write an effective ad, and how good a value your holsters actually are).  And say that we have figured that our profit on a holster is roughly $100, plus the marketing value of having our holster on one more Cowboy Action shooter.

We could pay up to ten bucks a click in this scenario and break even on advertising.  Breaking even though isn’t what advertising is for, or what we are in business for. We would like to spend no more than 20% of our profit on advertising for this example. That works out to $2 a click, or $20 bucks per holster.

We also have overall limitations to our business. Cash flow being what it is, generally you have to pay out for advertising, materials and labor before the money comes in the door to pay for them.  Too much success can be as much trouble as too little.  We need limits on our campaign.

So we will ad the final thing into our basket of stuff, our campaign. We will say that we only want to spend a total of $200 per week, or change that, for now, lets just try out GunsAmerica Pay Per Click Advertising and say we only want to spend $200 total to get started.

I know that with that $200, at $2 a click, I will get 100 clicks for that (there is no charge per view of my ad, only per click). In my own estimation, I’ll probably get orders for 10 holsters at that rate, and if I have to I could handle that as an addition to my normal load in a week, which is a great delivery time for a new custom made holster, with free shipping no less!

That basket of stuff, my ad, or ads, my list of places to put my ad(s), my rate per click, my spending limit per week, per month or as a cap (your account can have these totals across campaigns as well that will override the individual campaign selections) is now complete. I will be able to review these selections before approving and sending my campaign out to work for me. Then later I’ll get to track it (which we’ll get to in a while).

I could now do another campaign using this ad for instance:

The Best Value in a $1,000 Holster

Want to get noticed? You will be!

And for this ad, I’d maybe pick much fewer categories, where only very expensive cowboy guns show up, and maybe for that I’d pay $10 a click, because my profit is five times what I make on a normal holster, and maybe I’d say that my weekly or total spend on that is $20, because if I get an order for a $1,000 holster I have to put a full time person on it for a week and I can’t handle a lot of them.

Now that you understand a campaign, go try one. It will be much easier to understand the tracking system once you go through the Campaign Creation Wizard.  You can start and stop the campaign whenever you like, and to start you will fund your account with only $50 and have complete control over re-supplying the account as you use up your balance with clicks.

Finding Your Ad on GunsAmerica

An obvious question in all this is “why should I pay $2 a click for my ad? If I’m picking the price, why shouldn’t I just say I’ll pay a penny a click and get a really great buy on advertising?”

The reason is that you are not alone in trying to advertise on GunsAmerica. There are only a limited number of ad spaces on a given page and if it is a popular page the advertising space will be worth more to more people than an unpopular page. Not a lot of people are looking for an Iver Johnson top break revolvers.

Using our holster example from above, you could make a holster specifically for guns for the pocket pistol side shoots and create a campaign just in Iver Johnson, and offer to pay a penny a click, and it might very well work out that you get a ton of exposure and a bunch of new customers because you were creative and flexible, and learned the power of the system.

When you launch a campaign, that price per click that you chose will compete with others for that space and appear as a percentage of the time, relative to the price you offer per click compared to the price that others will pay per click. So if you offer $1 per click, your ad will appear 1/10^th as many times as someone who offers $10 per click.  If you offer one penny per click, your ad will appear once for every 1,000 times of the $10 per click.

Predicting where your ad will show up (unless you only picked one category) and when it will show up is impossible. But that it will show up is a guarantee, based on the thousands of times each page on GunsAmerica loads and is read every day.

Tracking Your Success

Once you are in the system and you understand how ads and campaigns work, you will understand that you have to primary measurement tools, one is your conversion ratio on an ad, and the other is your pay per click rate and how many sales you are generating per day, factoring in your conversion ratio.

A conversion ratio is a relationship between how many times your ad is viewed and how many times it is clicked. There is another conversion ratio on your end, how many clicks (visitors to your page) actually buy something, but that is a ratio apart from our system.

A title like “Great Cowboy Holsters” isn’t going to convert as effectively as “Free Shipping on Cowboy Holsters for 30 minutes with  Code XTR543!”

The second has an immediacy. It uses the word “free”, which tends to grab the eye, and it has a “call to action,” the time limit, which could make someone jump out if they are so inclined.

Our system will give you those conversion numbers, views and clicks, for all the ads you design, even across campaigns. It will tell you where the ad was clicked from as well, so you can locate your hot categories and design campaigns just for them.

It will also show you how the price of the campaign effects how many times you are viewed. If it is a very popular category, it may be that you are getting one view per a thousand in a category at $2, and if you raise it to $3 you will more than double your views.

All of this data is in close to real time, about a minute old, so it is very effective and powerful.

You will maximize every dollar you spend with GunsAmerica Pay Per Click Advertising, and an effective, quantifiable dollar spent on advertising is a good dollar spent on advertising.  In this way, eventually, it will become every dollar you spend on advertising.

We don’t believe in luck here at GunsAmerica. May G-d bless you with success in your new campaign with GunsAmerica Pay Per Click Advertising!