I have been dabbling with Adwords PPC for a while now. Promoting mostly Click Bank products, but have tried a few CPA offers as well. My question for you is when do you cut bait on a campaign? I have some campaigns that have a 3%+ CTR but don't convert. Basically every product I have tried doesnt convert well enough to make much money (if any at all). I have done ALOT of Adwords research and feel my campaigns are fairly solid, but I am still not making any money to speak of. Typically when I launch a campaign I would throw the same amount of commission as advertising, and determine if profitable from there. Meaning if commission is $50, I will advertise for $50, if no sale I drop the campaign. Lately I have tried to improve a few of my better performing campaigns, when I would typically drop them, I have continuously tweaked to try and improve. AdWords CTR goes up, conversions don't follow. Is one day enough to prove a product? If you get 200 hops and no sales would you drop it. I am beginning to get irritated, any input or advice (don't tell me to just give up) is appreciated. Thanks [edit] I typically utilize the vendors landing page. I typically do an iframe stealth subdomain. like www. SuperConversion . mydomain . com will load vendors landing page in a iframe, but appearto be my site. (prevents the direct linking issue and fighting over position for same address.)
Well, there could be several answers to this one. If a PPC campaign breaks even, you can tweak it to make a profit. You can even do this even it you are making a small loss. But if you have high CTR and low or no conversions, that means that something is wrong with either the copywrite page or the way your campaign is designed. What are you telling the people in the ads? I mean, if you are telling people to get rid of acne, but redirect them to an acai-offer, you will have no conversions. There has to be a flow between what your ad is promising, and what the product is delivering. Put yourself in the seat of the searcher. If you are searching for a keyword, what are you looking for? What is the demographic? Are you targeting the right people? Use sales psychology, pre-sell them with a review or testimonial site, make them excited and then redirect to your offer. Hope this helps.
I agree. It's hard to tell why your campaigns are not working without the specifics. It sound like you have done a lot of research too. IMO, $50 is not enough to test a $50 payout offer. $50 payout is quite high and is most likely very competitive. Meaning - lots of experienced affiliates with deep pockets are competing with you. I recommend getting started with smaller payouts and working your way up to those higher offers. This is because it is a lot easier to learn with the smaller payout offers (email/zip submits at $1.20 each for example). There are many ways to promote these smaller offers and thus learn the intricacies of PPC without breaking the bank. Certainly, don't give up. =) If you are serious about making a living from affiliate marketing, then I suggest a paid forum membership like AffiliIT.com, PPC Coach, or Wealthy Affiliate where for less than $50, they teach you step by step methods to help you be successful online. It helped me to have structure and proven methods to learn from. Good luck to you!
thanks for the input. My ad are always related to the landing page, and I have promoted items with commissions from $10 - $50 with similar results. I have decided I am going to try out a few pre-sell pages and see what happens. What are you guys using besides Google? Adwords seems to be extremely competitive, and the cost per click seems to go up weekly. Is there another option with the same (or close) amount of targeted traffic, and better cost per click? I have played with Yahoo and Miva a bit with varying results.
keep in mind that adwords is highly competitive and it's hard to make a living out there. Think what is your competitive edge, over other affiliates You need to give time for each offer before you drop it (although usually 200-300 click without conversion is enough) Try msn or yahoo, while still trying adwords
Your not going to get a straight answer on this one, it's all personal preference. Some people set a budget of $20, some $50, some $1000 or more. Everyone has a different strategy. Sometimes you need to spend money to get proper data to optimize.
I am in the same situation as you. Playing around with PPC but haven't really found a method yet. Just using long tail keywords realted to a product that people would buy, and definitly mentioning that you have to spend money to buy the product in the ad (this helps alot against clicks from people just viewing and not buying). Last week I deposited $100 into adwords, I've still got $15 left and I've made $87 (2 sales) so it'll probably end in breakeven or a small loss. Strange, because withing 5 minutes of the deposit I made a sale of my first click with a new campaign, then i got another 10 clicks that didn't convert. As long as I don't lose a massive amount, I'm going to keep tweaking. One thought I had is to set up a landing page with a small presell and an optin list, so that even if the visitor did not convert, he is a targeted visitor and the cost of the click resulted in an email adress and name, so I can follow up with auto responder. That is going to be my next strategy.
One thing that I can suggest is to have some kind of analytics tracking on your landing page. I set up a campaign two days ago and achieved an avge. CTR of 7%. 88 clicks later I had no sales. This cost me £22. My landing page was very targeted and I was bidding on model name keywords for example 'samsung 32" LED tv'. I used broad matching to go for higher impressions. What I found the following day via analytics was that 80% of my clicks were for 32" LCD visitors....Google was pulling in 'closely related' keywords. So people looking for L C D tvs instead of L E D tvs.... I added in several campaign negative keywords the following day (lcd, sharp, lg, sony etc.) to cut out as much as I could. I wanted people looking for samsung led tvs only. The following day my avge CTR went up to 11% but still no sales....I'm guessing for me this campaign is no goer and Ive cut everything today. You can have a look at the landing page I was using here: http://www.ledtvoffers.co.uk/samsung-32-led-tv.php if you're interested. If anyone has any additional comments about it I wouldn't mind hearing them either. Anyway, the point is, my PPC campaign wasn't targeted enough even though my CTR was high so always check your analytics and see exactly which keywords users are using to find you and then cut the wasted ones.
In my opinion, they all are. PPC is was simply invented as a quick revenue for search engines to attract those individuals/companies that fail at SEO to yield very small rewards for the listed website. If you can write a good description and have enough money in the kitty, you too can "show" great results from PPC, as to the revenue they yield, I think that they are really whats known as a "loss leader".
My two cents is: 1. You need to run campaigns for AT LEAST 7 days before determining success or failure and how to tweak. 2. It sounds like you have the Adwords campaign piece fairly dialed in. NOW you need to learn landing page optimization. Separate beasts.