Hi DP members, In the last month I decided to hire an AdWords Company to promote one product. That product wasn't mine, but I chose it from the Clickbank marketplace. Pratically, that company should have made a campaign on my adwords account promoting a clickbank product as an affiliate. My idea was: I'm making just 3 - 5 sales every week with PPC campaign and for improving it, I need to see how a pro works. Surfing in the forum, I sow a signature of DP' member which said "adwords managment service". Well, I follow the link and it opened a website called quality clicks ( qualityclicks.co.uk ). I came back to DP and checked out the reputation of that user, although he had 0 itrader, his suggestions in forums were helpful (or at least this is what I thought). So I simply hired that company and in few days I got one campaign running. After 15 days that campaign costed me $132 of adwords cost and made me just 1 comission ($26). I contacted him and he said that the problem wasn't with the adwords campaign, but with the cb product I chose that had a poor conversion rate (well, that product had a gravity of over 200 - so I don't think it converted so poor). So I told him to chose himself a product of the CB markeplace and to promote it. Want to know the results? After 10 days, I spent $130 on AdWords and I earned earned $65 with clickbank. Today I finally decided to pause all the campaigns he made me and to disconnect his MCC from my adwords account. Well, I hired an AdWords company to see how pro make successful PPC campaigns and I ended up wasting $200 of adwords cost + the cost of the menagment. I contacted him and he said he did his job. "I'm very sorry that it hasn't worked out for you but we have done our job but we cannot physically make the potential clients buy the product that you are promoting." I'm feeling like a person who paid someone to waste his money. Well, I post that thread just to let you know my experience with qualityclicks.co.uk and I hope that could help you to decide if that company is worth hire or not. I would be glad if you could report your personal experience with other companies that provide an adwords managment service for helping me and other to decide which one hire the next time.
That's unfortunate but just because they're "experts" doesn't mean they'll make money with every campaign or every product. Your best bet is to learn Adwords yourself.
I just don't understand why anyone would want someone else to manage their Adwords campaigns for them... What's the point when you can do it yourself and you know exactly what you want and need. It doesn't take a genius to do a little bit of research and sort decent keywords out. After that all that is required is that you do a bit of tweaking to find the results in which suit you.
I already tried myself, but I'm not able to make big profit from PPC campaign - as I said previously, I'm making between 3 to 5 sales \ week. I'm not an "expert" and this is why I asked them to manage my campaigns. I wanted to see how a pro works, but probabily I hired the wrong person.
Anyone who is worth their salt in adwords don't lend out their services unless it's for a truck load of money or a partnership.
Some clickbank products just don't convert well, even when they are "meant" to, I am leaning in other directions now. I agree the best way to learn adwords is experiment yourself, if one product isn't working, try another. Try to keep keywords very specific to the product, otherwise you are just wasteing money on untargeted clicks that won't convert. Remember, with traffic its quality not quantity that matters.
If he actually is an "expert" as he says, then let him continue his work. Affiliate Marketing via PPC requires A LOT of experimenting. $200 is nowhere near close enough to experiment with. Up your budget with this project to $500; and you'll see better results at the end of it.
He made some adgroups on my adwords campaign with more than 40 keywords - this is just not relevant enought. I don't think he is an "expert".
Hi guys, I'll just clear this up once and then will leave it alone as I wouldn't like it to drag on. Primarily, I thank you all for the support and suggestions; especially Vesparich, Webwowster and Mariya. I was initially contacted with the problem being that no traffic was being recieved even though he was targetting the main first language English speaking countries. Anyone using Adwords can solve this problem by using any assortment of irrelevant keywords but will therefore damage both their account and chance to make any conversions. So I obviously resorted to only using relevant keywords and more appealing ads (to both potential clients and Google) and therefore generated the needed traffic after a few days. This traffic however was still not converting so I went to the extent of changing the ad variations to the point of including the product and price which should eliminate 90% of people looking for free advice, products or services. We were still generating enough traffic despite having such direct ads yet without any conversions. I then decided to help him out with his actual landing page (in terms of grammatical structure and wording) which is beyond the services of a PPC company as you all know while even offering my opinions on the actual layout and appearance of the page. Over time I managed to reduce the bids by up to 50% in some cases while still retaining similar positions and levels of traffic without gaining any success in terms of conversions which led me to question whether the actual product was the problem... I was then given 2-3 days to sell a new product in which I made 3 quick conversions within the first day. The sales then slowed the next two days as traffic trends do fluctuate throughout the week as you will all know. I was then given an email saying that he is going to ruin my reputation on DP unless I give him a refund. I personally could not see how to justify a refund with the amount of hours of work put into the account and also the additional help in other areas; not to mention that an initial discount of 20% was already given as the budget did not meet our criteria. I have basically worked on the account for less than $4 an hour to try to make it convert. So I won't carry on but thought I would give you the full story so as to protect myself and Quality Clicks. Everything Androide has said is true to an extent, but how do you make a product convert if no-one wants it...? Again, I thank you all for your support and I have now learnt the lesson not to take on any affiliate accounts. *We also by company policy do not use any 3rd party applications unless recommended or supplied by Adwords, hence why we did not choose to use Prosper202
I don't think that Adgroups with more than 40 keywords are relevant. Yes, is true.. He started the campaign with a max bid of $1.00 and after 15 days the average CPC was about 0.60%. Everyone here knows that if I earn $25 every comission I simply can't bid more than $0.20 to make at least $5 of net profit every sale. This was simply a wasting of money. That campaign runs for more than a week with a total spending of $130 and just $65 made as sales and this is why I stopped. I told him "I'll make a thread on digital point where I write a real review of your service" and as you see from my first post, I just said how things were really gone. If he is satisfied of his work, he should be happy that I decided to publish the results. Well guys, think that the product has been chosen by him from the cb marketplace! Thank you for working at such a low price, but if you can't make a campaign profitable, simply don't offer that service, because firstly you work for free (or quite), but then you will waste the money of the one who hired you for managing his ppc campaign. I also learned my lesson, but learning that lesson costed me $250, while you have been paid by me to learn yours. Anyway, I hope that this threads help anyone who will be in the same situation as me. If you are an affiliate, never paid others to manage your ppc campaigns, because if they are good with PPC, they will make profitable campaign for themself, not for you.
I can't see that he scammed you at all - you had unrealistic expectations and not enough knowledge of how affiliate sales work. He cut your cpc neraly in half in a very short space of time, but results from these things are rarely instant, and take investment in time and money before you see results.
My initial CPC was about $0.35, but I was not getting traffic. He decided to raise my bid up to $1.00 and then gradually slow until $0.50, but it's simply impossible to profit with that bid, promoting a $25 ebook. Well, I stopped the campaigns after losing 250 dollars in 4 weeks...and I don't think that I would have see any results. Anyway, starting from now, I will do myself the ppc campaigns...at least I will lose my money, not others.
there will be failures as always but letting someone else be in charge of your adwords is a BIG mistake. as said before if they are worth a damn with adwords they will probably be promoting their own campaigns and making way more money than they ever would "managing" adwords.
It's unlucky man, I think the best way is to do it yourself (unless you have a trusted friend who you KNOW is making money). I reckon 95% of these SEO and Adword companies who claim to be 'experts' don't know THAT much information like they claim otherwise surely they wouldn't have those companies because they'd be mega rich themselves!! Think about it...
And also think about why somebody with a product is so keen to recruit affiliate marketers and give them a percentage of every sale they generate instead of doing all the advertising themselves and keeping all the profit... It's because they are very happy for people to spend their own money on adwords and other advertising in ways they wouldn't dream of doing themselves. For every one person that makes money from affiliate marketing, there are hundreds who lose money. The fault lies with the blogs and forums and Get-Rich-Quick-One-Page sales letters that convince people who can't afford to make a longterm investment to learn what they're doing, that it's a quick and easy way to make money. It isn't.
Think about it, why would he need your business he know how to make a profit doing what you are doing. But you did gave me an good idea to start my new company.
You all are very right. I'm just unhappy because I understood this after losing $250, but well it happens sometimes. I posted this thread to help others not making my same mistakes. I think I will not be your first client