Because I need to keep notes for myself. Chances are no one is really going to stumble across this blog so if you do here is a cookie.

Anyway some notes for me:

Media Buying – High CTR Ads = More Conversions in long run even if CR is lower (Give them a chance to decide… GET THEM TO THE SITE)

PPV is Engagement… Foot in the Door Strategy

Books – Perfect Phrases

Headline : Main Point – Attention Grabber (money, time, safety, vannity)

Sub Head : Second Main Point – Why Should I Care?

Intro : Third point – transition to body

Calls to Action: Limit, Time, Exclusive

Here is a list of everything I am thankful for in no particular oder:

My Family  – I have a solid relationship with my folks and my sister. Althought I live 3,000 miles away, thanks to modern technology I feel like I can keep in touch with ease. Both my parents are healthy, employed, and happy. My sister just returned from a study abroad program and Italy and is about to go into her senior year of college. Exciting stuff.

My Girlfriend - It isn’t often in life that you meet someone who you are so compatible with. I am lucky to have found my girlfriend so early in life. Almost 3 years later we are still going strong and we continue to grow closer with every passing day.

My Dog – Boomer is one of the coolest dogs you can have. He’s a little guy but acts like a tough guy. He can just as easily tear apart a stuffed toy as lie down next to you to watch tv.

My Friends - Old friends and new friends, it is great to have relationships with people who always keep you on your toes. Everyone I know adds something to my life either by challenging me to be better, or by giving me a good laugh.

My Freedom -  I was finally able to get out of wage slavery. Even today as I am writing this, I realize how lucky I am to take the day off without having to answer to anyone but myself. For once I feel like I am ahead and don’t have to stress over paycheck to paycheck living.

My Hobbies - After years of sacrifices I am finally at a place in my life where I can get back into my hobbies. In particular, I learned how to ride a motorcycle and got myself a scooter to scoot around the rolling streets of San Fran. I am even getting back into dancing, this time house instead of breakdancing. Hopefully I will be able to combine popping, breaking, and house and create my own style.

Life is good

PPC is like the GRE !!!

Let me explain exactly what I mean, and then I will show you how to use this fact to your advantage. First let me explain what the GRE is, for those of you who do not know it is the Graduate Record Examination . It is a placement test for people looking to go to Grad school. I was flipping through one of those “Beat the GRE” books when I noticed one of the biggest pieces of advice across the board was that the very first question is the most important.

The GRE test is taken on the computer and unlike other tests where questions get progressively harder, the GRE adjusts in difficulty based on weather you got the previous question right or wrong. Below I put together a chart explaining this. Both of the patterns are the same the only difference between the green and red is that the greet dots assume you got the first question right.

Please note that if you get the first question wrong it will be much tougher to climb back towards the top. Now you might say what does this have to do with PPC… the answer is EVERYTHING.

All you have to do is replace Question Difficulty with Quality Score and Question Number with Number of Clicks (QS x #Clicks). Just like the first question when you first launch the campaign the PPC engines assign an average score for you. Depending on how you do initially they adjust accordingly just like the GRE. If you have a bad start it will be very hard to climb back out of your whole, on the flip side if you do well to start to you can make a mistake and still rebound quite quickly.

This might not be anything new to some of you, but for the rest of you here are three ways to take this knowledge to SUPER CHARGE your PPC campaigns and give you the best fighting chance.

1.) Prime the Pump – Simply put click on your own ads, better yet get people to click on your ads. It sucks that you will burn some of your money, but it will put you in a good place when you are getting started and make things easier moving forward.

2.) Day Parting -  Launch the campaign during peak CTR hours not necessarily peak Conversion Hours. Lets face it CTR is still one of the most important elements in determining how your PPC campaign does.

3.) Outlier Method – This strategy is a little more advanced and was initially discovered on Facebook Social Ads. While creating a bunch of ads I messed up and instead of having an ad for each age, I created 100 of the same ad. They were all approved and launched at the same time. Something very interesting happened, some of the ads had INSANE CTR while others not even one click all with the same impressions. I thought how can this be? Then I remembered my Econ classes from college. Here is a graph illustrating Normal Distribution.

What had happened is out of those 100 same ads there were a few outliers in that 2.2% section. These outliers performed amazing, but slowly started to die down over time with more and more impressions they got closer to where they really belonged. By then I got a ton of cheap clicks making the campaign a success.

This can also be used on PPC engines like Google. When you launch 100 ads, even if they are the same one, some of them will perform very well. Quickly ax the ones that don’t then you can start the traditional split testing.

Anyway, hope this helps someone think bout PPC and GREs in a new light. Leave a comment if you like this post.