See how I made $39 in 20 minutes using Adwords

I was not able to get this to work.

 

I'm losing money right now. I'll detail some stats later, but basically haven't been able to recover since late September. I've raised my bid to $15. Helped a little with impressions, but I'm still not getting enough hits to be profitable. Although the conversions do remain about the same. Last week I paused my campaign on google until I have some time to review the data I've collected from my little tracking program.

You're in good company, sad to say. However, if you can get into Lendingtree affiliate program right from the beginning, start a fresh campaign in google, you should make money for 2-3 months. Based on my sister's account, if she were with lendingtree instead of her current affiliate, should would be up about $1000, instead of break even. It seems her account was recently manually reviewed by google (after about 3 months). She is now getting almost no impressions, down from 10-20k per day. Like my account, it happened overnight.

This campaign was easy at first, with little or no work after the initial surge. 4 months of insane proftis, then nothing. However, I still think there is money in this niche. Lendingtree's stats have not waivered, so it must be me. I really haven't had time to work on this properly, but don't let that stop you. I believe many of the techniques in this thread and this forum in general are invaluable to any campaign. I hope that by sharing a real live campaign has given you some real insight and I wish you all success.

 

Thanks for the updates, Rob. Sorry to hear the campaign is not doing well though... just shows how inconsistent affiliate marketing can be and how Google can instantly affect your income stream.

I know you were testing out some site-targeting -- Google has since offered cost-per-click bidding option .... have you tried this instead of paying for impressions?

 

Rob, you seem to be focusing on Google alot.

Have you tried diversifying to MSN and Yahoo? I find they provide cheaper traffic, and equally good quality, if not better.

And then there are 2nd tier PPC engines like Ask, Looksmart, Miva, Searchfeed, Kanoodle. Have you done any testing with them yet?

Since your landing page is proven to convert well, all that matters is getting in targeted traffic. Don't just do Google alone man

 

Thanks, I come to read your great strategies, but for me
I can done only the method to lost 100$ in 20 minutes. ^_^

 

Hi,

You really have to put a PPC campaign in the proper perspective. While Rob has posted an extremely educational thread about PPC, you must still consider that there are other things that may factor into your success or failure. These may include your keyword selection, your ad copy, the demand for your product, etc.

What Rob has done is replicable no doubt, but to expect that every single campaign can turn out to be this easy is quite unrealistic.

Just my 2¢.

 

Guys, anyone that didn't get approved for LendingTree at CJ it is also available ant NeverBlue Ads. The payout is pretty much the same other than a dollar or two less on the first 2 tiers. I know it's kind of a cheap plug since it's in my sig but I know a lot of you were trying to get in on this

Rob, thanks for sharing!

 

I do have campaigns running on yahoo and msn. Yahoo was profitable, but has since gone to the dogs too. I do need to focus on it a bit more, because it is still slightly profitable, but not like it used to be. MSN I'm bidding $4, and get zero traffic and impressions. I may bid higher there later. I've had bad experiences with Miva on other campaigns, I mean just straight out click fraud. But that was about 2 years ago. Haven't heard anything to change my mind about them since. That kinda goes for all the 2nd tier ppc right now.

I'm not ruling them out yet, so I'll post any testing I do there. Maybe in another forum here.

 

HI Rob. What about adcenter ? Did you use them ?
Thanks.

 

Thanks for sharing Rob sad to see you lost your campaigns, sadly when I saw your profits in the first few months and you were asking what to do i was thinking "Sell IT!!!" ( I believe in getting your site running make money, flog it, move on...)

What I was interested in was you profit levels, when I looked at learning tree there EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) on CJ was around $116, so that is $1 per click, however you seemed to be getting nearer $10 per click, hence the reason for your massive profit. Quite why you were doing so well in terms of profit is interesting.

The EPC at CJ is taken directly from CJ stats, so must be right, so it suggest that for this market content networks are a good link, which does seem odd.

 

the reason for your high conversion may have been the particular market you targetted with the keywords. with that same affiliate and different keywords you may not have had the same success.

 

would your techniques work for affiliate products

 

Anyone wishing to do this particular campaign will struggle asmost of the decent providers won't give new affiliates access to their program.

 

Not true. I got approved right away. Then when CJ was having problems I couldn't get any links from that account so I applied on my other account that was working fine and got approved right away as well. This is actually the least of your worries. You'll have more difficulty replicating Rob's success on the Adwords side.

 

I tried at least half a dozen of them there today and was auto declined as newish 1 bar affiliate, that wasnt even the top rated ones, i am talking about the one he sued with his sister and a few others similar.

I was going to try a slightly different marketing approach with them, but couldn't even get approved

 

I think content network would give more efficiency

 

Rob time to get back into the game, lendingtree has a new format and google , im sure you know, also
tested out googles adword placement has cpm and cpc , traget real esate sites look local u can find some real nice sites with adsence on them.

After reading about this guy jeremy palmer made over a million using ppc. Makes you want to keep trying.
GL

 

Thank you, Rob.

Four months ago this thread inspired me to use ppc for affiliate offers. Long story short, I am now in a position to quit my full-time job and live out my dream of living overseas in the tropics.

No, I did not use Rob's offer, but I have relied on the content network, which was the single biggest insight of this post for me after the fact that you really can make money using ppc to promote affiliate offers.

Unfortunately, a lot of people won't be able to replicate my or Rob's success for many reasons. A lot of people just aren't cut out for anything business-related; either they are dreamers rather than doers or they would rather be inventive than profitable. I have seen that over and over again in forums where I have spelled out step by step what someone had to do to get their campaign in order and they always find some way not to follow the directions and sabotage the whole thing.

Meanwhile, you do need lots of experience in trial and error. The best advice is to get started now, keep your losses to a minimum by monitoring your earning and expenditure every few hours and pausing when it gets too bad, but go out there and test, test, test. Expect a large majority of attempts to fail, be happy when you have success, learn from it and replicate it. Pay per lead aka cpa is great since you have an instant feedback loop.

Thanks again, Rob.

 

I'm calling bullshit on this one. The companies that are advertising for words like "refinancing" pay a lot per click, they average cost per click is way more than $3.62. You are claiming to have generated a lead, and made 12 bucks on adsense and only spent $3.62? lol. You're basically saying a vistor came to your landing page, click 2 or so ads by google, and then filled out the form. Come on unless you got lucky and hit a keyword that was not being bidded on by any other company your thread is just a horrible attempt to drive traffic to the links in your sig.

 

I'm gonna give this campaign another good try in the new year. CJ says it's reporting is going to be delayed until Dec 31 anyway, and I'm in no hurry.

I'm glad you were able to jump in and make some money. Great job, and great job summing up 22+ pages of this thread.

It's been said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Now go out and break a sweat!

You're welcome.

I normally don't respond to negative comments, but I get one every now and then very similar to netopix's above. So for all of those folks, I think short of giving out my the passwords to my accounts, I shared everything I have on this campaign. And short of "implying" that I am not a newbie, I never claimed to be an expert. I also never told anyone they can get rich online by duplicating what I do. And using "sigs" is just smart.

And yes, I did get lucky the first few clicks, which was my inspiration to continue the campaign in the first place. But the continued success was not luck, but working smart and a little sweat.

I hope everyone had a great year and a big happy new year to all! It's been a rollercoaster online. Isn't it always though?