Now that my domain www.buydietcookiesnow.com has been slapped by google, I don't mind sharing some info. I have no desire to turn it into a full site at this time. The current landing page was redesigned today, as I wanted to test it out after having the campaign paused for several months. My landing page sig link has a screenshot of my earnings for around March of this year. Now you may ask why I only have one month's worth of earning. I did make some sales before March, but they were mainly tests (direct linking). Break even at that point. Mar 2-8 cookie diet Campaign Paused $0.65 139 18,218 0.76% $0.81 $113.02 2.4 Mar 9-15 cookie diet Campaign Paused $0.65 126 3,253 3.87% $0.66 $82.53 5.7 Mar 16-22 cookie diet Campaign Paused $0.65 140 6,974 2.01% $0.36 $50.76 6.1 Mar 23-29 cookie diet Campaign Paused $0.65 134 6,880 1.95% $0.47 $62.31 6.4 Google stats from Mar 1 - 31 cookie diet Campaign Paused $0.65 558 36,393 1.53% $0.57 $318.83 4.3 (weird, can't get google to give me from the first, as it defaults to the second, making the numbers not add up.) 2.18% CTR Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet™ As Seen On ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN & Fox News Order Now! buydietcookiesnow.com 1.67% CTR (two version, one with & and one with and) & did better Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet™ Control your hunger & lose weight Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet™ Order Now buydietcookiesnow.com 4 others deleted but only averaged 1.49% CTR I watched as some of my competition used some of the same language I used in my ads. Something I learned. Pay attention to the news. Do a search on google trends for "cookie diet", there you will see a spike in traffic. This is due to an advertising blitz that the cookie diet people decided to do. They never sent anything to their affiliates telling them that this was taking place. I ended up paying dearly for a bunch of "looky loo's". Some time at the end of June, cookie diet guys did in fact warn about another advertising blitz happening in July, which you can see from trends. I tested different keywords and pretty much settled on "cookie diet", there were others, but they didn't make money (break even) like this one keyword did. It turned a profit every week for a month straight. I first started out with $1 bid and slowly settled at $.65 per bid. I went from spending $20-$40 per day in one week to sending $5-$15 for the remaining. Sundays, Mondays and sometimes Fridays were the good days, all others were iffy. Check spyfoo, http://www.spyfu.com/Term.aspx?t=1762516 their figures aren't that far off from what I was seeing. If you want to direct link advertise, be prepared to bid $5+ to be on top. During this time I was usually in the top 4-5 spots. With one affiliate breaking the rules left and right (mainly redirecting with mismatching display/url). Funny thing is, I don't see their ad anymore. Today I wanted to dust off the campaign and try the new landing page, but no sooner did I resume it, it got slapped with $10 minimums. I know why, as it's pretty obvious, so I'll move on to something else. The current landing page was inspired by a thread I saw here. So I fired up frontpage and did my thing, I'm starting to like using FP as hand writing this stuff is getting a bit old.
Very, very informative. Thanks for breaking it down. Google Trends is a must have for any SEM/SEO's arsenal.
It's tough. You'll need to pay more to get a good ctr at first $1+, just as long as you can afford to spend 20 - 50 bucks a day, and that's just one keyword. If you do that on some others, you'll spend $20+ easy. Also, some keywords you think would convert, really don't or don't get the traffic you think you'd get. Short of owning a diet based site, there is too much competition on adwords.