Good work, there are no secrets in what you are doing, but as you say, it's hard to duplicate the success using same keywords/affiliates. Sometimes you have to be a little lucky and that's it.
Hey Rob, this is probably one of the best 'real life' posts I've seen on DP. Excellent write-up! Hopefully your sister can enjoy the same success. What kind of performance history benchmark is LendingTree looking for to accept affiliates?
I can't say what they are looking for, but I know what they are. 5 bar merchant with $300+ epc. If you have stats like that with a relevant website, I don't see why they wouldn't approve you. Here's a quote I got from one of the merchants when I applied:
Quality Scores is Fine, and it is been written in plain words, what google thinks is a quality site... But there have been sites with good quality score.. the bid actually decreased as the CTR improved, but then one fine day, the Bid increased to 10$. Quality score is Algorithm based, but some Adwords representatives seem to also give a qualitative/subjective Commercial or Non-commercial website PERSONAL SCORE.. Have u ever noticed that Rob?
Rob are you also adding keyword as Broad match? Do you also add negative keywords beside excluding sites?
It happens to me once in a while. Great QS for a week or two, then suddenly my bids require $10 minimum. I've never been able to recover those campaigns, so I dropped them and started a new one on a different website. Usually I give up on that niche altogether. I try not to use broad match anymore. When I do, I always use negative keywords. For exact match it's not really necessary to use negative, but for phrase it is. So I use negatives whenever possible. It requires some research to find the negatives, so don't take it lightly. For this specific campaign, I do use negatives. I'm not interested in people looking to refinance their car, which is a common refinancing product. So I use -car, -auto, -vechicle, -boat, etc... I could go further and include things like -honda, -ford, -gmac, etc... to exclude even more. As you can see, negative research can require as much research as finding the initial seed keyword and demonstrates a whole other level of tweaking. And unlike keywords, negative keywords don't have any trademark restrictions. However, for my campaign, people looking for gmac refinancing will probably not click on my ad anyway since it doesn't have "GMAC" in it. Still, I might ad a few more negatives to plug a few leaks.
hey rob, I just opened a new account and im running 1 new campaign i got a little over 2k kws in 3 adgroups, its been active for 24 hours and 0 impressions in content and search, do you know how long it takes for adwords to start showing the ads on new accounts, the budget is high i got phrase and exact kws with high bids but no trigger
I tried your method rob.. but it didnt worked for me .. anyway, there is no problem as I have free google adwords credit ....
2k keywords? Wow, that's a lot. Very different approach than what I'm doing. Anyway, my sister started from scratch and got about 5k impressions on content network the first day. She bid $3 and budget $100/day, using about 8 keywords. She's now getting about 30k impressions, compare that to my 200k+ impressions for a virtually identical campaign. Here keywords also show as "great" or "good".
I'm sorry to hear that. I know how hard it is. Like I said, I'm having trouble duplicating the success for my sister who is brand new to internet marketing. All I can figure is that having a long history with adwords and commission junction must be giving me some kind of edge.
No, she is not licensed to use my PLR content, so I pulled an article about mortgage refinancing from ezines articles. It's only a few pages plus the landing page right now.
yeah 2k but it is a different niche, actually the reason why i didnt continue with adwords last year is because i wasnt getting any impressions like right now even though everything was fine, i let it run for 4 days no dissaproved ads keywords were fine the bids were high but nothing, i guess i just got bad luck hehe
Rob, This thread on PPC and adwords is much appreciated. I have learned a lot and you showing us your progress is just valuable. Thank you. Violet
Rob i understand that you only started off with a few keywords phrases and added your own plural and verbs. how do you pick your keywords ? by the number of high searches?