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

Send google e-mail and IP address of that person and If you have right you will bee refunded, I am refunded few time in the past

What tracking software you use??

 

Have you actually been refunded for something as small as a few clicks? I'm not saying that it wasn't worth your effort I just didn't know they paid attention to complaints regarding such small amounts.

 

Update.
Ok I have 6 ads running on the campaign that has been averaging $20 / day.
On fri I re-wrote 2 of the ads and they now get 80% of the clicks for the campaign. CTR has not really increased overall. However sales have increased by
400% . I'm not sure yet whether this is just a weekend phenomenom or not. But my sales over the weekend averaged $85USD /day and costs averaged at $1.80 / day. So I'm very happy with a profit of nearly 5000%

 

Great Job jimboot! I wish I could do that! Any hints about the types of products your selling ?

Mark

 

Basically I am sticking with clickbank products. I look for ones with a good conversion page and try to keep my CPC under .10AUD .

Odd thing though just started a new campaign for a new product in the MN area as Sunchy says, and Google is not displaying my ads. There are only about 3 or four other advertisers for the KWs and all of my KWs are active. WHen I do a search on my ads are no where to be seen. Anyone got any ideas?
Thanks

 

And my also when I start, but you need to wait 1-2 days I think
I hope that is help you

 

Jimboot well done man. It's really great news you manage to make that daily profit. It means IT CAN BE DONE! And as i can see you started only few weeks before me so maybe i manage that soon.

I am still using trial and error to find a good product. I managed to find only one product that people seem to be interested in, but NOT buying it! I am going to hold this a bit longer and see how it goes.

I am sorry i dont have anything helpful for you but when i do have profits i will post my experiences.

Keep up the good work everybody and post your updates.

 

Aaaah so do you think this is purely for adult related ads? I can't seem to find anything in their guidelines.

 

Hi, first post - great thread. I'm in - but I am very risk averse - so I'll lurk and re-read this thread a few more times before I spend any money.

OK - here is a summary of the bits I think are great about this thread. Apologies if I have missed anything important.

Thanks to mister tut, jimboot, sunchy, skimmy, cyclops, nextebizguy and all the others who have contributed - a great inspiration.

"I personally limit my daily max on Adwords and limit campaigns to 2 days at a go, then review and renew." #1

"I am using negative keywords as well as putting the price in my ad so I know it is not freebie looker CTs" #6

"I have a $0.20 cent per click upper limit ... I will not let any keyword slip below the #10 position unless it goes over my .20 limit." #11

"How expensive were your KW? I'm trying to stick under .10." #27

"I was only running a single ad in that ad group. I will now add another one to test. Also I am running several ad groups on this campaign and the one that got a sale has only had three clicks so far. ... I used dynamic title and the click was from an [exact match]" #45

"Also I am now Capitalising The First Letter Of Every Word in my ads and it has improved CTR. I also do it when the display URL is several words." #50

"With this product I'll need to convert 1.5% of clicks to be profitable." #60

"I look at conversion rates rather than $ amounts. Not too sure if this is wise or not. If I have no sales withing 150 clicks I tend to move on . Keep in mind I have only ran about 25 campaigns so far " #73

"Don't aim for the top 3 positions, numbers 4 to 6 do just as well if not better, especially if their is a lot of bold in your add, it will really stand out. It's also a lot cheaper. Conversions generally run at 1 per 100 so you don't want to spend $100 to get $10 back. ... Heres a couple of tips, for this experiment try selling something like Broadband connections or Pay TV, they usually give you the total price of the first months fee as commission, any product that pays like that is good. Products like that tend to have massive potential. ... Find a product then if possible sign up as an affiliate under the company with the product rather than through Amazon, Commission Junction etc. You will have a lot less competition in general and particularly with Adwords......and the commission tends to be higher as they aren't paying a huge percentage to Commission Junction etc." " #75

"I'm treating this a bit like share market trading. You need to have a stop loss. I have just paused another program which I have spent $52AUD on for $12USD revenue. The reason it took me so long to pause it is that I had to try a number of tweaks to see if I could get conversions up. 25,000 impressions with a 2% CTR. However I forgot to use negative keywords on this one which probably accounts for the loss." #86

"I could have added the word 'free' as a negative kw for starters! Ouch that cost me. Then anyone searching for a free version of what I was selling would not have seen my ad. ... The other problem was that I needed 3% conversion on the CTs to make a profit. The item only had a $4 commission." #88

"As well as using negative keywords don't forget to target specific countries, no point trying to sell something to a country where their will be no interest in it. ... And I recommend turning off content...when I did that the costs went down significantly. People aren't really searching for something on content sites, they are just browsing and click on adds just to see what it's about. Fraud also enters into the equation here...made for adsense crap pages etc." #90

"Here is what I do not get about adwords.
I do a search on Google.com via a US proxy and there is only one ad for my search term which according to wordtracker has thousands of queries everyday. Google says it wants $6.46 per click! ... And another search phrase which gets thousands of queries same deal. 3 ads but they want 52 cents a click. Anyone understand this phenomena?" #101

"Just put a 10 cent bid in and see how it goes after a couple of days, at least you will get an idea of what position you are in." #102

"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)." #129

"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." #136

"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. ... 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%" #137

"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" #139

"I find it funny how people always try and add keywords to their list. ... I go the other way, start out with a bunch then drop the ones that don't convert. Obscure ones or misspellings I place in a seperate campaign untill they receive 5 clicks, if they don't convert after that they get the boot. All I want is a few high converting terms in a tight campaign." #167

"I just know that I wasted a whole lot of money paying for non-converting terms. I didn't even realise it until I got a tracking system...then I found some terms I had spent hundreds of dollars on that never converted." #169

"My landing pages have more than one way for traffic to get out (all exits benefit me to greater or lesser degrees). I have used AdSense like this and it has been worth it. But testing is key. ... If you do try this, make sure to block your own ads on the landing page domain! (Learned this one the hard way lol)" #194

"I tried many different adjectives and this one beat them all: "Incredible". .. I tried a lot of different texts in the third ad space and what finally won: "Free Shipping!"." #199

"I now have just under $400 USD in sales, with a profit margin of around 75% which I am very happy with. Most of my sales are coming from a single merchant that pays $20 USD commission. I need to work out how to ramp this up now i.e. will I maintain the same conversion rates if I set the daily spend a lot higher? Before I do this I am now trying to isolate my keywords which are selling. To do this without my own landing page I have setup another clickbank account (it is a cb product) and I havge split my adgroups up over the two accounts so I can see where the sales are coming from." #200

"What I have learned so far -
Keep my costs as low as possible - it is rare I will pay more than 13 cents AUD but I will try for around 5.
Make sure your copy stands out from your competitors.
Make sure your merchant has a good landing page.
Don't choose products with less than $20 commission
Write at least 2 ads per adgroup for testing" #211

"I am finding that 1/100 clicks convert. So if the clicks cost me 10 cents ea I need a product that has at least $20 commission. 100 clicks @ 10 cents = $10 so profit is 100% Well.. its working for me anyway. Now I have to try and find a way of ramping things up." #220

"Somewhere there is an option to run your 2 or even 3 ads at even periods so over the course of a few days they all have equal time being shown, This is better than Google deciding which one is best and showing it more than the other. It takes a couple of hundred clicks before you can gage which one is the best." #223

"one of my terms that very rarely gets clicked took a hit today, It was clicked on so many times that my daily budget was used up. ... I have heard of this happening and thought people were exagerating but now...well !!!!! it is the first time this has happened to me. ... I'm glad I set my budget low, for some reason I review the budget weekly and keep it about or just above the previous weeks. Now I know why I do that" #236

"I am now getting 2 - 3% on my best campaigns. If it is lower than that I will rewrite the ad or create another adgroup with less kws" #243

"For every 10 products you pick 2 or 3 will be the really really good ones, so it a matter of working through as many products as you can to find the really good ones." #245

"I use a cheap affilate tracking program I found to track the conversions from each group. I break my terms up into small groups and assign an affiliate code to each group. When I find which group is converting I pull the terms that have been clicked on out and give each one their own afiliate code and ad. This way I can see which individual term is converting best.
I could give each term it's own ad and code right from the start but that is too time consuming." #248

"I've been using a few keywords recently that said they were inactive, but after being left for a day or so I noticed that I had a significant amount of clicks & impressions even thought the keyword still said it was inactive. .. Maybe you could try leaving it inactive with your 10 cent bid for a day or two and see what happens..." #260

"You should also take the words that are getting the clicks and setup new adgroups just for them. This way your ads will be more relevant. When I do this the new adgroup's CTR triples or quadruples." #275

"How well your PPC campaign performs is based on keyword centric ad-copy relevant to your business, short and sweet landing pages that not only load quickly but that give the prospect what they want, and lastly good tracking so you can see what works and what doesn’t by focusing on the numbers, not your opinion. ... First, you will want to create one ad-group for each
keyword. Next, Create around 3-9 ads per keyword. The key here is to test, test, and test until you are running an ad that has both a high Click Through Rate and secondly a high Conversion Rate. Again your objective is lowest possible CPA. When you test, don’t use your opinion on what you think your customers want. Use the ad with the best data representing CTR and
highest conversion even if the ad is not something you feel is very good, always go by the numbers." #276

"Realistic click through rates are 1% - 2% and realistic conversion rates are 1-2%" #276

"So I'm very happy with a profit of nearly 5000%" #283

"Basically I am sticking with clickbank products. I look for ones with a good conversion page and try to keep my CPC under .10AUD" #285


E-book anyone?

[EDIT: forgot mister tut!]

 

Heheheheh Nice one Pete. Although It would be hard I think to buy KWs for less than .10 for it!

 

I inform you that I continue my non-profit successful campaigns

I read somewhere in this threat that is good to point out the price of the product you are selling to filter out the ones that want it for free (or less). I do agree with this and I used it to my campaigns (dont laugh I will make some profit someday ). However, when i enter some product sites myself, they have so encouraging information that i want to buy the product myself (ok i dont buy it, but i actually feel the "testimonials" tricking my brain). So this information may persuade some of the clients that before were not willing to buy this item.
Therefore, maybe, by including the price on the ad, you send away some potential buyers that may change their mind, and like to pay for the product afterall.

Just a thought. What do you think?

 

Yes, you have right point

 

Whilst by no stretch of the imagination am I an expert, I have only used the price in the ad where I thought there would be a lot of tyre kickers. I have heard some people say using the price increases CTR. I think the only way to really find out is to 'suck it and see'.

 

Thanks Sunchy.
I have also just discovered the Google Ad Diagnostic tool which tells you if your ad is appearing in a different country or region. No more using the proxy to check my OWN ads. The only reason I could find it not showing was this

"Is rarely included in search queries. (In this case, your ad will soon begin to show for this keyword. You do not need to do anything.)"

Bit weird as both overture and wordtracker are showing 1k plus hits a day for it.
Wait & See I suppose.

 

Well after 60 hours my ad started to appear - phew

 

Come on! What happend to all of you? Have you all turned pro?

My status is exactly the same as last time. Oh wait. It is a bit different. I spent some more money on adwords with no results.
It's ok. I refuse to surrender. I will reorganize though and take a slightly different approach.

It would be nice to know how you guys did.

Best of luck to everybody here!

 

I still promove a clickbank product every friday with adwords, business is good

 

Well, I took time off to roll out a few sites and correct a major SERPS drop of two sites. I'm still looking for a new product, but it may be a while before I leap back in. I'm starting to feel stretched thin

 

I say that
Any News?

 

Yeah the campaign was a dog. Ok Since I started I have generated around $1500 revenue for $250 in costs.
I need to ramp up more campaigns. Started 3 new ones last night. All my CTRs are around 3% no sales from the new campaigns yet though. One had 100 clicks . I'll let it go another 100 clicks and if there are no sales then dump it.