Hey everybody, I’ve decided to start a new topic about media buying because I haven’t found many topics about this on Digital Point forum. I used to promote affiliate products on Google AdWords. When I started getting some success with it Google just shut me down and suspended my account. Please be very careful everybody who uses Google AdWords to affiliate offers! They have extremely strict and unclear rules. And if you make a mistake they kick you out and you have no chance to get back! Now I’m experimenting with other traffic sources. I’ve tried Facebook PPC a bit without any success. I’m not giving up, I’ll find a profitable way. I’ve read some e-books by Carlos and Lupe Garcia about media buying so I thought I play a bit with it. Here’s my experiment no 1.: • I chose a CPA offer with a simple e-mail submit. This offer pays $1.00 per conversion. And unlike many other offers it’s for all countries not just the USA! So I thought it could convert good. Offer I chose was www.paidgameplayer.com. • I bought a banner on a highly relevant site. This site is a blog about a new games, movies and music releases with every day updates. PageRank is 5, Compete.com statistics shows that this site has more than 50,000 unique visitors per month. • I paid $50 for the banner on the top of every page! A webmaster of the site said they have about 1.5 million impressions every day. • I did just 24-hours test. And results are following: • 1.5 million impressions • 422 clicks, that’s 0.028% CTR! • 4 conversions, that’s 0.95% conversion rate! • 50 – 4x1 = -46, that’s $46 lost! Things I’ve learnt from this experiment: • You can get an extremely cheap targeted traffic. In my case CPM was $0.03! When I used Google AdWords my CPM were in the range $2.00 to $40.00! • Unlike Google AdWords CTR and conversion rate is very low even if I wasn’t promoting any paid product but free offer with simple e-mail submit. • Unlike Google AdWords it’s not possible to do split testing or easily modify campaign if it’s not going well. Unanswered questions and problems: • Why is CTR so low? I didn’t expect that CTR would be so high as with AdWords but 0.028% is too low. People usually don’t click on banners but I thought CTR 0.1% or 0.2% could be achieved. • Why are only got 4 conversions? I wasn’t promoting any expensive ClickBank product or something similar. I promoted a CPA offer with a simple e-mail submit. I don’t understand why more than 400 people clicked on my banner but only 4 entered their e-mail. If someone clicks on a banner then they are interested, aren’t they? • Is it worth promoting some country specific CPA offer? A lot of offers are just for the USA. But in that case my results would be even worse because I would pay for all traffic but got conversions only from USA traffic, am I right? • How to track impressions? CPA doesn’t show impression statistic. Is there any way how to verify a website impressions? Is there any good software or service that can measure it? • What did I do wrong? What can I do to improve my results next time? If you’re a newbie with media buying and have any experience with it, post your results and thoughts. If you’re more experienced than me, please give me any advice and kick me into the right direction. Merry Christmas to everyone on Digital Point! Take a break little bit and get ready for a great year 2011!
Sounds like an awesome test... thanks for sharing your plan. Looking forward to seeing the results. And Merry Xmas to you too
There's a lot of things that could have gone wrong for you to get 400 clicks and only 4 conversions. What kind of offer were you trying to promote? If it was a generic (not related to the site you're advertising on) submit like "Enter your email to get an iPhone" or "Enter your email to see if you won a $5000 Walmart Gift Card", your conversions are going to be low. I'd actually suggest trying something like trying to advertise with a major online poker affiliate (If it's allowed) or by advertising a CB Poker Guide with a high Popularity Rating on a Gaming Site, for example. Just tossing a few ideas out there, though. Thanks for the informative post, and I hope your next media buy goes better mate!
>> If someone clicks on a banner then they are interested, aren’t they? Usually yes but there are various "sunday surfers" that clicks those ads because they are bored. Clicks might have came through bots as well. The reason i mentioned bots is, i have experience from proxies and used to host recently one for testing purposes, people was abusing all CPM etc. by proxies via scripts. The proxy i hosted was totally abused for that purpose.. It´s kinda hard to answer to your questions why only 4 conversions. If I have 400 visitors/day, it could be that only 1-3 register an account but not necessarely purchase anything, low percentage.
Thanks for sharing... Have you tried another gaming aff program yet? I think that you just need to find some better niche ($1 per conversion is really not good).