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
1/10th 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!
