The Unofficial DP Winter '06 Affiliate Noob's Challenge thread

I think that is the reason

 

I've experimented a bit with AdWords in November/December and I first used wire transfer, it didn't take 10 days but only 3 days in my case

One of the things that seriously sucks about AdWords is that you can't change your payment method. If you choose for wire transfer then you're stuck, it's impossible to add a credit card without closing your account (and loosing all data)

 

Hmm that sucks, but I think I will manage... once I've got funds in my account I just have to make sure I add more funds before I really need them...

 

I tried clickbank instead, and this is the result:

21 clicks, 2 conversions
$46.65 comission
$6.44 used on ads.
$40.21 in profit

I think I'll declare that a success

 

What kind of product are you promoting on clickbank? Ive found its best to go with some small lesser known items that nobody else is targeting, or might not even have good gravity iteself in clickbank.

What type of strategy are you going for? If you can give away any details that is

 

AS I said before Amazon doesnt pay out enough % wise to use pay per click......you need to find something that pays 25% or better.

Amazon doesn't usually update over the weekend either.

 

This is something with a really high gravity, the clicks are kind of expensive, but apparently it converts well.

I think I'll try and persue your strategy too though and see if I can find something without that many advertisers.

 

so you are currently compeating with other CB advertisers? I find that anything in the money and emloyement category has got tons of advertisers.

 

I tried the amazon affiliate program promoting the madagascar dvd (the disney movie), sold for $19.00 . Had set up a campaign with the following keywords

average 0.15 - 0.20 per click, spent $4.00 (totalling so an approx 20 clicks) and had 0 sales

since 1 sale would bring me a 5%, that means $0.95 per sale, in order to have a revenue I should have earned at least $4.00 , that means more than 5 sales. More than 5 sales on 20 clicks means a 20% CTR too much optimistic for me.

Lessons from this experiment:
1) the sale price or the commission must be adequate to grant you a net positive earning for a 1-2% CTR imho (higher CTRs are way too optimist for adwords I think). My bottom line was 20%, and didn't work as we have seen

2) a wise person should see when something work or it doesn't for him. AdWords is not working for me, so I am giving up my experiment for now this doesn't mean that adwords cannot be used to generate revenue. Simply means I am no good at it, or that I was not prepared enough to face it.

3) choosing a random product and setting random CPCs will bring you to lose money (well I have spent $4 but an unresponsible one would have spent $100 or more for instance)

In the following days I will set up some mathematical expressions to formalize what I have said above, and will share here looking forward for the next experiment (better prepared)

 

For that I think that CJ work well

 

Congrats to blinxdk !

Anyway, perfectly agree with Cyclops. Amazon isn't suitable for adwords.

Online selling products only such the ones clickbank sells seem to be the most profitable, for their high commission share and for the fact they can be purchased online only (while products on amazon can be purchased in physical stores too). The side effect of clickbank is the way too liberal money back guarantee.. you may have lots of chargebacks thus drastical diminution of your profit

 

Thanks, I'm hoping it isn't just beginners luck, but we'll see

 

Yes, think so too

Hopes G get's my payment tomorrow

 

Any News Guys ?

 

No sales yesterday for me, despite 35 clicks.

I've limited the campaign to $7/day and will let if run for a week and evalutate.

Signed up for overture too, hoping to see how that performs.

 

One point I should have mentioned eariler about using Adwords.....don't trust Adwords to tell you what your position really is......I know they tell you your average position but I have found your actual position can be considerably different to what it tells you. Look first before you pay more money to aquire a higher position.

Their traffic and cost estimator is just as bad too.

 

Ok - here are my results so far
Let me start by saying at the outset I have had only had success with Clickbank products. I've tried CJ, Shareasale, MaxBounty, Amazon and a few others.

My most successful campaign has grossed me $160USD sales with costs of around $68USD So I am very happy with those results. My CTR for this campaign is 2.5% with an avg position of 3.5.
The campaign has about 8 different adgroups running at any one time with a minimum of two ads in each. The most successful ads seem to be those with dynamic titles. I have been using Wordtracker for my keyword research but I have been reading about Keyword Analyzer which sounds promising as well.

This campaign has been running since 13th Jan. It would have about 5000 KWs across the adgroups. I am not using a landing page but I am starting to consider it to see if I can get my sales conversions up from 0.64%

The campaign that seemed so promising but made a loss had $16 in sales but $39 in costs. I learned from that, that the commission was too small. $4 does not leave much room for error which is another good reason to stay away from Amazon in my book (kaboom tish) .

So in summary I am staying away from small commissions paying no more than 0.13 and considering building some landing pages that help the sales process.

Questions? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone at all?

Jim

 

I'm starting to play around a bit.

Question: What is the optimum product price? Obviously if your trying to sell some thing for $1000 your going to get less conversions than for a $10 item. But of course you can bid higher.

Any thoughts on this?

 

Appologies people.. Ive been on holidays and completely forgot about this experiment..

Ok i have been running my experiment for the last month now and have just switched it off (disabled my google adwords campaigns) ill share every piece of information with everyone seeing as i probably won't continue the campaigns (i have over 600 live that im barely able to manage)!


AFFILIATE PRODUCTS: Sell Amazon DVD's
1) Laguna Beach
2) Arrested Development Sitcom
3) Futurama DVD's
4) Simpson DVD's
5) Scrubs DVD's


ADWORDS SETUP:
campaign 1 : Laguna Beach Reality Series
campaign 2 : Arrested Development Sitcom
campaign 3 : Futurama Series
campaign 4 : Simpson Series
campaign 5 : Scrubs Series



PART 1: Finding my keywords

I set the budget to $100/day for each campaign (don't be afraid to set this high, check out my strategy later for why i do this)
I started with over 30 keywords per campaign (not targeted at all).
eg. Arrested Develpment, Arrested Dev, Arrested Development DVDs etc etc


For each keyword i needed to find the minimum CPC:
1) I set the Max CPC very low at the begining eg. 0.06cents
2) Each hour i would check if i was getting clicks/impressions if not i would slowly increase it by a couple of cents eg. 6c --> 11c--> 14c
3) When i got to a point where i was getting good clicks and a nice ranking i would stop there. It would take me between 1 -4 days to get to that point.
[earlier i set my budget to $100/day- i always knew it would never get this high because my strategy is to always bid for keywords at a rediculously low price then slowly work up, this way you always get the cheapest price]

"Lagunga Beach" : max CPC 41cents (took me 3 days to get to this) - some advertisers were paying upwards of 1.40CPC whilst i was getting great clicks for my 0.41cpc.(start low work up )
"Arrested Development" : max CPC 54cents (took me 1week to get here)
"scrubs" : max CPC 25cents (took me 2 days to get here)
etc etc.

Whilst working out my CPC's i would work out which keywords were working and ones that wern't. In the end i had campaings with about 3-5 keywords each. Don't be afraid to remove keywords!!!!

My most profitable campaign was Laguna Beach and it had only 1 keyword in the end "Laguna Beach"


PART 2: Adverts

I started with a very big list of keywords and dwindled them down to specific working keywords. My adverts on the other hand were all very generic extremly targeted ones based on this template

Get XXXXXX on DVD
If your a fan of the series you
need to get the extended DVD
http://xxxx.xxxx.xxx/xxxxxxxx


PART 3: Landing pages for the adverts

I made a special fan site for the dvds and made special landing pages for each campaign. They were very targeted pages!

This is the landing page for laguna beach the best selling of the products


PART 4: Endurance

This is definetely the hardest part of the whole process. Lasting the distance. Basically you have to watch as your money runs out, as you get the clicks and don't know if your making the sales.

All up i endured 2weeks of solid advertising (totalling about AUS$1500 of advertising)

campaign 1 : Laguna Beach Reality Series : $465 in advertising
campaign 2 : Arrested Development Sitcom : $165 in advertising
campaign 3 : Futurama Series : $233 in advertising
campaign 4 : Simpson Series : $344 in advertising
campaign 5 : Scrubs Series :$245 in advertising


PART 5: AMAZON SALES

Laguna Beach Season 1 : 54
Simpsons Season 1 : 4
Simpsons Season 2 : 1
Simpsons Season 3 : 6
Simpsons Season 4 : 2
Simpsons Season 5 : 7
Simpsons Season 6 : 12
Simpsons Season 7 : 28
Scrubs Season 1 : 4
Scrubs Season 2 : 19
Arrested Development : 21
Futurama : NONE !!! <- HOW !#@#

With amazon we only get a 5-10% commission structure which is really @@#$
After i work out how much that translates to ill update people with the profits/losses.

In a nut shell i believe i made a nice profit but untill i actually calculate it i have no idea! Give me a weeke to get back into the groove of things!

Amazon technically performed badly, it took ages to load and sometimes the product wouldnt load at all (showing the standard amazon advert in place of the actual product).

Similary when i wanted to check my stats in the associates area the site was extremely slow to load up and sometimes died on me.

Similarly the reports are pretty crap. I dont think ill use amazon again!


From what people say CJ sounds pretty good. I might try them out next (maybe next week)!

 

New piece of advice: don't show your girlfriend your ad on google. She will immediately click it saying "oh, cool". Then, she will wonder why you have the sour look on your face. You'll then say "um, honey, that just cost me 13 cents for nothing..."

Thanks for the detailed info Liquid. I'm interested if whether you made a profit. I'd like to run your numbers through my adwords calculator to see if I would have even tried it.