Thanks Mate... PPC is all about split testing with your landing page and ads, keywords, bids etc... till you make it profitable. If you leave it half the way, there is high possibility that you will lose the money. Lets see how far i go with this. Its not MMO niche, so refunds will not be much... why did you leave that campaign? If you see the large picture, you actually got some nice converting keywords. Try to SEO your site for those keywords and see the magic. Thanks Mate... I am not master in PPC but still learning with this experiment. Reading e-books is different and that will not help unless you try it. I have learnt many new things with this ppc experiment, I will be sharing those tips once this experiment becomes successful. Update Guys: Got 3 more sales Ad Spend: $437.51 Sales: 252.99 Loss: 184.52 --DJ
I was wondering how article writing leads to ClickBank sales? Are you writing relevant articles, getting search engine traffic, and funneling that search engine traffic onto your your site?
Here's some advice from an experienced PPC user. Right now Google is literally shredding CPA offers, and most affiliate sites, reviews sites especially in the adwords network. They haven't seemed to do much in organic search though. After using Adwords and relying on it for years, it's probably the worst thing you can do knowing Google controls your entire business and you are at their mercy. I've since become anti-PPC and focus on CPV traffic and article marketing and media buys. Your quality scores drop because Google doesn't like affiliate sites and review sites, even if you have a killer sites with great content. I had plenty of sites at 10/10 for months and months then one day 1/10 scores. contact, privacy policy, terms isn't good enough anymore. Now you need a site that provides useful content to the user which almost forces us to have the actual affiliate products in the background somewhere. Trust me when I tell you this, your efforts will be better focused elsewhere.
I agree, first time and you spend $100 and make $60 back, thats great! PPC takes time and you've got to be willing to lose money in the beginning. turboplanner: If you increase your CTR your CPC will go down. Also you may find more sales if your ad is in a higher position. Also note that some times position 1 gets a lot of *just lookers* and not buyers. good luck and I look forward to hearing about your success
Yes google is slapping CPA campaigns and i also heard that they are disapproving fake story review pages (in case the landing page goes into manual review). But i don't completely agree with you. Where ever you focus your efforts, you will have to abide by certain rules let it be any kind of online network. I know google has more stringent rules but that's what make it the best system. Thanks Mate... Update: i got 4 more sales Ad Spend So Far:$518.11 Sales: $360.79 Loss: $157.32 Seems like i am going in the right direction. --DJ
Yeah, write unique articles or hire content writers to write em for you. Actually I'd suggest you hire content writers since writing them would mean a lot of work and stress! Usually I'd have primary article (landing page) and several ezine articles point to the landing page.
One thing that I notice about PPC is, if you have $300 budget, its better to spend as much as you can like $300 a day instead of $100 a day. I don't know why, but it seems that if a campaign has 20:1 conversion rate, and made 19 visitors today. The next day your 20th visitor won't convert, as if it starts back to 1. So what im tryna say, you gotta get as many visitors you can get. And of course read as many PPC ebooks as you can!
Guys, Here is the update: Ad Spend: $671.80 Sales: $567.66 Loss: $104.14 If you compare it with earlier updates, getting more sales day by day. I expanded my campaign by adding some more keywords. Also i ran the search query report and found that there were many useless keywords, which were triggered from my broad match keywords. I added those keywords as negative keywords and i am sure that will save some $$$. Guys this is really nice trick to run the search query report from your good adwords account and know which keywords exactly are getting traffic for your campaign and then find out some useless clicks and add those keywords as negative keywords. P.S. If any of you want to know more about Search Query Report, Let me know. I will explain this. I am still waiting for the day when my loss will be turned into Profit. --DJ
Thanks Mate.... I already added these kind of Keywords from the very first day... But yesterday i added some long tail negative keywords which were causing some useless clicks and nowhere related to the product.
You are closing the gap, so keep on tweaking and you will soon be in profit. Again, good luck m8 and thanks for keeping us updated.
I am watching this with interest. Keep it up, you will be profitable soon, I'm confident of that. Then I will email this thread to my affiliates. Another good reason to use PPC is that it is a business expense. So if you haven't been diligently tracking and separating money to pay for taxes on your profits already, then at least any losses can reduce your tax bill. And when you go profitable then you make more money too!
Thanks Mate... Hey Rolf... Thanks... I appreciate it... I will try my best to make it profitable... Update: Ad Spend: 948.62 Sales: 759.92 Loss: 188.7 I have got 26 sales so far ( and 2 back end sales as well). All the sales are from 5 Keywords, that means if i run the campaign only for those 5 keywords, I will get a nice ROI. But i will continue it for next few days to get some more converting keywords. I got a low QS score for some of my keywords during weekend as i added some wrong keywords to my campaign and also tweaked the ad a bit, that resulted in low quality score due to relevancy problem. Anyways i reverted that change and my campaign should be fine now. I will run the same campaign for next 2-3 days and then will use the converting keywords only and expand the campaign for a few more countries. Currently the campaign is active only for US and Canada. I am planning to expand it for Uk, Australia & Ireland as well. Another Action Plan: I am also going to write articles (actually outsource) on the converting keywords. Lets see if that trick gives some extra bucks. Ok Guys, will keep you posted about the progress. --DJ
Yeah that's what I used to do. To track the keywords that convert and outsource articles on those keywords. That a nice little trick you can implement. How's your campaign doing so far?
Ok Guys, Here is an update, I have not touched the campaign in last 3-4 days. Ad Spend: $1352.56 Sales: $957.18 Loss: $395.38 So around $400 as a loss, but i consider it the cost of getting 7 high converting keywords. As i said last time, that i will publish articles on converting keywords, so i scheduled 50 articles on my converting keywords and got 8 sales so far (around $200), that means my overall loss is $200, and still there are 20 articles to be published (already published 30 articles). just FYI, i am using the same landing page at different domain. (just to track the conversions) Action Plan: I am going to pause all the keywords which have not given any conversion so far and use only those keywords (7 converting keywords) and will also start the campaign with these 7 converting on MSN Adcenter. I expect my campaign to be profitable now --DJ
PPC = Yes, Googe = NO. Screw Google. I don't know if you realize that all you are doing is making Google Rich. In the last 12 Month, Adwords cost went up and with all the troubles TOC, risk factors etc. affiliates like yourself will be forced to look somewhere else for traffic. You are wasting your time. Google is #1 Affiliate that has a great niche : sell the Intent of a click to poor guys like us. At the end: They will sell that information (aka service) to large corporations that can afford multimillion dollar ad spending and they will simply squeeze you out of business. Affiliates and webmasters should create coop ad networks and go around google. By kicking big G out of the pipeline you will see you $$ go up. How? The old fashion way: 1 Click at a time by building your own brand. http://fraudeconomy.com/app/report/ Take it from the Guy who made $500,000+ on ClickBank and yes, most of this was NOT from Google
Guys, seems like i have started recovering the loss. Though the budget has become a bit higher than i actually expected but as long as the sales are coming, i think its better to continue this campaign. Update: Ad Spend: $2,108.36 Sales: 1833.05 Loss: $275.31 I have only run it the campaign for US and Canada. I was planning to expand it but now i will first optimize it fully and then will expand it. I am not leaving any stone unturned, this is what required to make any effort profitable. Will keep you updated... --DJ
Awesome, keep it up. So have you dropped the non-converting keywords already, or are you still testing a broad range to find the gems?
I have not dropped all the non-converting keywords but a few are removed. Some of the non-converting keywords, which are still there in the campaign, are because of my gut feeling D) as i think those keywords as good keywords. Will test them for a few more days. One of the best methods which has lowered my adspend is running "Search Query Report" from my adwords account and adding the negative keywords on daily basis, which are useless. I have got a long list of negative keywords and hope to double that list in next few days. Also Search Query Report is helping me to find some nice converting "phrase Searches" so i am adding those searches also, that has also lowered the maximum cpc for some of the keywords. It seems like this campaign has huge potential and i really look forward to it. Lets see... --DJ